No. 231: PHYLLIS HOCKIN (a.k.a. 99's mom & Walter's missus) / The matriarch stayed in the background by choice, but I did have some time with her.

Wayne is Canada's sports icon & Walter its most loveable dad, so why Phyllis avoid attention? She didn't tell me outright, but she might have dropped a clue in our off-the-record conversation.

The Gretzky family at their trophy-swamped home back in the 80s: from the left, Wayne’s mom Phyllis Hockin, his sister Kim, father Walter and brother Keith

---

WAYNE Gretzky has always been admired and respected, but I’m not sure that he was ever universally beloved in a way like his father Walter was.

I encountered Walter on my first road trip when I signed on with the Globe and Mail back in ‘94—during the NHL lockout his boy was putting together a collection of players for a European tour, supposedly a good-of-the-game proposition, something to promote the game (if not the league) that they loved. The invitees convened for a skate and an exhibition game in Michigan and Walter was something like a greeter, making the rounds, just soaking it all in, hobnobbing with Mark Messier’s pops.

Our paths crossed frequently thereafter. Walter surfaced at Wayne’s games at the Gardens of course and was a safe bet to pop up at hockey events of every description. Not that he craved attention and not that he felt like he had to be involved, he just liked being around. You never, never, never got a remotely negative vibe from him.

(An aside: This should always be the case but too often isn’t. Longtime readers know that over-involved parents is a sore point for me, but thankfully they are usually punished for their vanities and everyone’s annoyance. Check out these two stories in the archive linked here: No. 24: JEFF WARE, BILL WATTERS et al: How *not* to parent your NHL son. Daddy's Little First-Round Draft Pick and No. 25: NAME WITHHELD / "The Mother of All Hockey Mothers" You’ll need at least a trial paid subscription to access the archive going back to year one.)

You rarely heard about the rest of the Gretzkys, even though little brother Keith made it to the NHL as a scout and executive. You never heard about the other sibs, Glen, Brent and Kim. And you never, never, never heard about the matriarch, 99’s mom.

Do you even know her name? A: Phyllis. Phyllis Hockin, 1941-2005

From time to time, her name has come up at roundtable sessions with a bunch of scribes—it always commenced with one after another regaling the rest with a story of Walter at this game or Walter at that event or Walter rubbing elbows with the boys in the Oilers’ dressing room or whatever.

Good Ol’ Walter, you gotta love him.

The scribes always loved him more than most, simply because he filled up their notebooks and made good copy. When Walter died, he got a full blow out, which included my friend Roy’s tribute in the New York Times (linked here.

Good Ol’ Walter seemed to fly solo, though, which is to say Phyllis joined her hub on trips to the arena. In these bull sessions—she was like a character mentioned in passing a couple of times in a novel, but never heard from, never seen even in the background, never revisited nor revealed. Phyllis had to be fundamental—even foundational—to Wayne’s development, yet we know next to nothing about her.

Phyllis had left it to us to imagine her role in her famous son’s upbringing.

When her name pops up at gatherings of media types, I tentatively raise my hand and volunteer that I had a conversation with her back in the fall of ‘96. The scribes usually express their collective doubts—she had been known to be media-averse, but sans hostility, which would have reflected poorly on her son and her husband.

“Why would she talk to you?” the chorus goes up.

In turn I explain the circumstances.

“I didn’t call her,” I say. “She called me.”

This is greeted with skepticism. “We’d remember if you ever wrote about her, some big Phyllis Gretzky profile, but you never did,” they said. “Not even a quote in a story. Any fool would run with anything they got from her.”

“I couldn’t,” I tell them. “She said everything was off the record. It would have been pretty lousy if I ran with what she said in confidence.”

They know better than anybody that the breaching of confidence in any and all matters Gretzky would be lousy and self-destructive—nothing could kill a career more quickly than landing in Wayne’s bad books. If I became persona non grata with Wayne, I’d be likewise with Mike Barnett, No. 99’s agent, IMG’s go-to guy who repped more than a dozen of the biggest names in the game.

What’s more, Mike had done right by me not so long before I spoke to Phyllis. When it seemed sure that the Los Angeles Kings were going to trade Wayne back in February of ‘96, I asked Mike—begged him is more like it—for time with No. 99 when the deal was done. Mike made good on it—on the night of the industry-shaking trade to St Louis, while in the back of an airport-bound limo, Mike punched in my home number and handed the cell to Wayne. We talked for five, maybe ten minutes. Ideally it would be more time than that but he had a plane to catch and I had about an hour before deadline to cobble together 800 words.

This wasn’t quite an exclusive—Bob McKenzie in the Star got Wayne the night of the trade, but Al Strachan of the Sun, who fancied himself 99’s Boswell-slash-press agent, was for once stiffed. Yeah, Mike Barnett had done me a mitzvah.

When I explain to the scribes how my conversation came to pass, most can see how it played out. So with the statute of limitations long passed, almost two decades after Phyllis Hockin’s death, I offer up the untold backstory here.