Through the years, many different characters have gone by the nickname, “The Great One.” The first, at least in recent years, was probably the actor and performer Jackie Gleason. He was given the nickname by the legendary director Orson Welles; supposedly, it had more to do with Gleason’s prodigious talent for drinking than his performing, but it still stuck.
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Sometime in the late 1960s, Pittsburgh baseball fans began to call Roberto Clemente, “The Great One.” It was more than a nickname, it was a title of royalty for a player who was so impossibly graceful and wonderful that people simply reached for the highest honorific they could find. It is a bit like the way Alaska locals called the highest mountain peak in North America, “Denali,” which (by some translations) means “The High One” or “The Great One.”
(The mountain peak has actually had many names, most famously “Mount McKinley” after then-candidate and future U.S. President William McKinley. The naming dispute between Alaskans and others has actually been quite intense, a political quagmire I did not mean to get into in a hockey story.)
Point is: Others have been called The Great One.
Realistically, though, Wayne Gretzky is The Great One. And every discussion about the greatest hockey player goes through him.
To begin with, it’s important to say what this is and what this is not.
This is NOT an attempt to name the greatest hockey player.
This is instead the second part in our series attempting to streamline the conversation. What we’re trying to do here is to figure out who are the real nominees for the best ever. First, we put up a poll, asking people to vote only for the players they believe deserve to be in the conversation for greatest ever.
We began last week with basketball and came to the conclusion that, based on the voting, there are really two viable conversations for greatest ever. You could have a simple one-on-one argument about LeBron James vs. Michael Jordan; most people tend to keep it limited to those two players. Or, if you wanted to, open it up to five by including Wilt Chamberlain, Bill Russell and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
Hockey is tougher because one player is so far ahead of the rest.
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In our poll, 94.3 percent of the voters selected Wayne Gretzky. No other player got even 20 percent of the vote. This figures: He was nicknamed Great One and was routinely called the greatest hockey player just seven or eight years into his career, even before he left Edmonton.
It’s hard to pick just one thing that captures the sheer brilliance of Gretzky’s career. You can point out that he won the Hart Trophy as the league MVP in each of his first eight seasons. Before that, only one player had won even three consecutive Hart Trophies – we’ll get to him in a minute.
OK, the stats. Gretzky scored the most goals (93 more than Gordie Howe). He had the most assists (an absurd 714 more than No. 2 on the list Ron Francis – you could combine Francis and Jean Beliveau and still not get to Gretzky’s total). His point total is 900-plus more than Jaromir Jagr. Gretzky has more hat tricks and more short-handed goals than any player ever. He has the top two goal-scoring seasons, the top eight assist seasons and the top four point-scoring seasons.
It doesn’t seem like there’s anywhere to go from there.
He also won a lot – four Stanley Cups with the Oilers and dragged the Los Angeles Kings to a Stanley Cup Final. What’s more, he will likely hold his records forever, or at least until the NHL fundamentally changes. With bigger goaltending pads and more active defenses, the league is just fundamentally different now. Nobody scored 50 goals in the NHL this year. Gretzky, rather famously, scored 50 goals in 39 games.
All of which leads to the idea that Gretzky is not only the greatest player ever but will also be in perpetuity because his numbers will tower over the game for decades and decades to come.
So does the conversation end with Gretzky? Maybe. But voters offered up three other nominees who might merit a place in the discussion.
Photo by Bruce Bennett Studios/Getty ImagesGordie Howe (19.7 percent): Howe was widely viewed as the greatest until Gretzky came along; Gretzky himself has often insisted that Howe remains the best. Howe was a very different kind of player from Gretzky; he was tough, he was relentless, he was a fighter, he was bigger than life. The story goes that his mother, Katherine, was outside chopping wood when she felt labor pains. She went inside, boiled water, climbed into bed, and delivered her sixth child, Gordie, cutting the umbilical cord herself and then waited for Albert, her husband, to get home.
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Howe was forged by that sort of prairie toughness. One of his strongest childhood memories was of seeing his father knock a wise guy out in a pool hall with one punch. Howe did such things himself. The Gordie Howe hat trick is a goal, an assist and a fight. Howe himself only had two Gordie Howe hat tricks in his career, but they were so memorable that everyone named the feat after him anyway.
He won six Hart Trophies, played until he was 51, and is second all-time in goals even though he played in a very different time and never scored 50 in a season. Gretzky, like more or less every young Canadian hockey player, idolized Howe to the point where he insisted as a child on getting a Gordie Howe haircut. “He’s the greatest ever,” Gretzky says.
Bobby Orr (19.6 percent): I love how much hockey fans esteem Orr, how much baseball fans esteem Sandy Koufax, how much football fans esteem Gale Sayers. There is something about those breathtaking players who retired young after injuries stole their brilliance.
It doesn’t matter that Orr only played nine full seasons in the NHL (he won the Norris Trophy as league’s best defenseman in eight of them). He thoroughly reshaped the game. He was, like Sayers, as much of an artist as a player. No one who saw his end-to-end rushes, the magnetic way the puck stayed on his stick, the sheer blurring speed as he weaved through opponents, the pinpoint precision on his shot as he scored goals in ways defensemen never had, could forget any of it.
Orr’s genius is not missed by the numbers – he led the league in assists five times, in points twice, in plus-minus six times in seven years and his 124 in the 1970-71 season remains the highest plus-minus ever recorded in the NHL – but fans prefer to talk about the sheer aesthetics of Bobby Orr. He was the single player whose game was set to music, even when no music played.
Photo by Bruce Bennett Studios/Getty ImagesMario Lemieux (17.5 percent): There were those during the Gretzky era who insisted that Lemieux was the better overall player because of his great size and athleticism. This is a typical quote, coming from former Minnesota North Stars coach Pierre Pagé: “Lemieux is tougher to stop because of his size. He can bowl you over. Gretzky beats you with finesse. But this guy can beat you with finesse – and still give the one straight-arm shot.”
Lemieux was incredible. He has numbers too: He led the league in goals three times, in assists three times, and in points six times. He is second all-time in goals per game, ahead of Gretzky (behind only Mike Bossy). At 6-foot-4, 230 pounds, he was a physical marvel who blended power and finesse like few others.
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So, if you wanted to make it a four-player conversation … you could legitimately do that. Sidney Crosby got some support (7 percent), as well, if you would like to put a current player in the mix.
If you want to say the whole argument is pointless because it’s obviously Gretzky, well, you have a pretty good case to do that, too.
Editor’s note: This is the second in a series of “The Greatest Ever” columns, which will appear each Tuesday. Here’s the first, on the NBA.
(Top photo: Focus On Sport/Getty Images)
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