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.
I suppose it couldn’t have happened in the normal run of hockey life or it would have done so already by the fall of ‘96. Wayne had been a pro since 1978 and owned at least a dozen pages of the NHL record book at that point.
No, the catalyst was a goofy story—a local weekly in the Gretzky family’s hometown of Brantford had published a story that suggested locals opposed the re-naming of a thoroughfare in honour of No. 99. Yeah, taking the story on faith, folks in town didn’t have time for Wayne—he had been Edmonton’s, Los Angeles’s and St Louis’s (briefly) and now was New York’s. Yeah, and the whole country would claim him as theirs too. In the beginning he had been Brantford’s but that was a long time ago.
I didn't believe it, so I made a trip to Brantford to take the temperature with a few street interviews—a small sample to be sure, nothing like a polling—and a couple of interviews with media types in town. No big deal. The outcome was about what I expected: The town-falling-out-of-love-with-99 angle was bullshit.
The piece I wound up writing landed in the paper on Saturday and it was given far bigger play than I’d have ever imagined—the trial of Alan Eagleson was going on and in no way should this silly fact-checking have landed more prominently on the page than the takedown of the Eagle. Really, I thought my Brantford story was a novelty.
This is what the story looked like on the page—again, I don’t see it as bigger than the Eagleson trial or Yankees-Orioles in the post-season, but that wasn’t my call. At the bottom of this SubStack you can find the whole story as it ran in the Globe.
Flash forward to the Monday after. I was expecting my daughters home for lunch any minute when the phone rang—the home phone. Remember this was 1996, back when people still had home phones.
When I picked up, an unfamiliar voice came on the line and asked for Gare Joyce. I confirmed that, yeah, that is me. I’ll try my best to reconstruct the conversation faithfully. It wasn’t that long, wasn’t that involved.
“My name is Phyllis. I’m Wayne Gretzky’s mother.”
I thought that this was a prank, but I let it play out.
“I don’t ever talk to reporters and if you write about this [conversation], I’ll deny ever talking to you,” she said.
Believe me I wouldn’t if I couldn’t verify that it was indeed Phyllis.
What made it seem legit: This pre-emptive splash of cold water in case I had a mind to spin a column out of our conversation or had an idea that this was anything more than a one-time call. This wasn’t opportunity cold-calling me. Message taken: Don’t call back. That was a complete fit with what I knew about her.
“I just want to thank you for writing the story,” Phyllis said.
Again, this was two days after the story appeared in the weekend edition of the Globe and Mail. I don’t know if Walter and Phyllis were Globe subscribers for home delivery and I doubt the business department at the newspaper would share info like that, but someone in her circle would have told her about the piece.
“I never bought the original story,” I told her. “It seemed suspect from the get-go. If anywhere people would support something like that, it would be Brantford. I just figured that this was a little paper that wanted to make some noise and generate some interest. For sure they got more out of that one story than anything they’ve ever done.”
“Wayne always came home and he always tried to do things for Brantford,” she said. “I know some people don’t like him—that goes back to when he was a boy and we’d be at the arena. But I know most people here like him.”
“Well, I have no dog in the hunt,” I said. “I didn’t believe the story [in the Brant News} but if people told me they didn’t like naming the road after Wayne I would have written that. That wasn’t how it played out. But I appreciate you calling.”
There really wasn’t much more to the conversation than that—I thought for a second that I could have mentioned that I had seen him hiding out in the Garden’s ticket office before his first game against the Leafs, but I held off.
(Loyal readers here will recall the story of that game in 1979, but if you’re new or missed it or just want to enjoy my frustrations once more, here’s a link to the story: No. 210: WAYNE GRETZKY, BRETT CALLIGHEN, BUGSY WATSON & STAN OBODIAC / I had it made when I got into the Oilers' practice on their first-ever trip to the Gardens. Or so I thought.)
After we bade each other farewell, I wondered, Did that really happen? Was it a prank? I had a number in the phone book—again, days of yore—but I was listed by initials and there were others listed as JOYCE, G. I dialled *69 and a number came up with Brantford’s area code. I later put it together how it came to together—when I called Mike Barnett that afternoon, he confirmed that Phyllis Gretzky had asked him for my number, yeah, the same number he dialled back in February when Wayne was traded to the Blues.
I kept my promise not to write about my conversation with Phyllis, but I’m good to share it now. The call was brief but memorable—it’s a shame she was so ill at ease, so out of her comfort zone, talking even casually to some lowly scribe. It seemed like she couldn’t even set aside her suspicions about the media when it was her calling me.
What lingers, though, is her mention of what were hard feelings towards Wayne “when he was a boy and we’d be at the arena.” While Wayne slackened spectators’ jaws with his skills when he was still in grade school, he also heard boos from adults who should have known better. A few lines in my piece touch on this and Phyllis didn’t push back on it.
Yeah, pity the kid who shines too brightly. The child star who tears it up is the source of a lot of envy, not of peers but rather their parents. I recall digging up stories in the Halifax newspaper archive and finding shots at Troy Crosby in write-ups of Sidney’s games in peewee—references to Troy having “a reputation” without further detail, a nice smear if there ever was one.
Gretzky pere et mere signed off on Wayne leaving Brantford for Toronto when he was just starting high school, so he could play Junior B for the Young Cats. Moves like that are commonplace stuff these days, but it crossed the line with provincial and national amateur hockey authorities—you played where you lived at that age and that’s that. Walter, Phyllis and the brood were holding fast in Brantford, while Wayne billeted with folks in Toronto.
Instead of getting booed at 10 or 12, he was suspended and declared ineligible by a bunch of suits when he was 15—I don’t know if that’s an improvement. The Gretzkys prevailed in court. Yeah, Wayne had a chance to play with and against better players than he would have in Brantford and, yeah, he would have heard boos in Toronto too, but it wouldn’t have stung the same way.
I bet some and probably most who had booed in Brantford would be over it and those who became fans far outnumber those who hold on to ancient grievances. That said, it just takes one to mess things up. Your honour, I’d like to enter into evidence, Exhibit One, a story from CBC News from 2013.
Without further ado, the story that prompted Phyllis, mom to the legend, to call me at home.
SLIGHTING A STAR / Rejection by anonymous naysayers cannot dim the hometown's affection for its favourite son.
Gretzky still welcome in Brantford
Saturday, October 12, 1996
BRANTFORD, ONT.
LONG AFTER he had gone to Metropolis, Smallville was turning its back on Superman.
That was gist of a story that hit the sports pages in Brantford last week and soon was making front pages across the country and beyond. The town wasn't spurning the Krypton-born orphan found by Ma and Pa Kent. No, the townies were thumbing their noses and bidding good riddance to the first-born son of Walter Gretzky and Phyllis Hockin. Or, at least, that's how the story went.
Each week the Brant News, a weekly regional newspaper, poses a question for a talk-back line. The week before last the topic was a proposal to rename the Brantford Southern Access Road in honour of Wayne Gretzky, the leading scorer in National Hockey League history, the favourite and most famous son of Walter, Phyllis and the city of Brantford.
The proposal originated not from Wayne, Walter or Phyllis, but rather from the city of Brantford, namely city councillor Richard Carpenter. It is currently being considered by the street-name committee. The access road, or the BSAR as it's known, would become the Wayne Gretzky Parkway if the committee and council give it the green light.
Ray Kowalsky, managing editor of The Brant News, did not imagine that this would be subject for much disagreement or controversy on the talk-back line. "I thought it would be like polling kids to see if they like chocolate ice cream," he said.
According to Kowalsky, the volume on the talk-back line was "three or four times the normal." He said that the message service was jammed, that he had to count responses and erase calls to make room for more incoming responses. The result: No less surprising than children declining chocolate ice cream or Smallvillagers rooting for Lex Luthor.
"We had about 60 calls and they ran eight to one or nine to one against renaming the parkway for Wayne Gretzky," Kowalsky said.
This sampling of public opinion might well have stayed within Brant County, in most circumstances. It certainly would have if calls had run eight to one in favour of honouring Gretzky.
However, a sharp-eyed reporter at the Canadian Press spotted the Brant News story. In short order this became not a small item in a free weekly with a circulation of 32,000, but a story prominently featured in most major Canadian newspapers. Soon Kowalsky was fielding calls from, on the low-end, sports phone-in shows of every description to, on the high end, Time magazine.
If Brantford's disdain for Gretzky wasn't the talk of the sports world, it had become common knowledge. There was a question that had to be asked: Was it truth, justice and the Canadian way?
This is not to imply that the Brant News has perpetrated a hoax or that Kowalsky, in search of some journalistic juice, has made a victim out of truth. But even he concedes that the talkback line isn't a "scientific" survey and that, despite the ratio of votes pro and con, the results might not reflect public opinion in Brantford.
"This isn't a Gallup poll," he said. "It's a small sampling. And there's no anti-Gretzky vendetta that our paper has with any of the Gretzkys. Even in the issue of the paper which reported the results of the talkback line, we ran an editorial supporting the idea of honouring Gretzky and naming the parkway after him."
Yet Kowalsky wouldn't entertain any suggestion that The Brant News itself might have been the victim of a hoax, that prank callers might have repeatedly called the talk-back line and stuffed the phone-in ballot.
"I listened to the calls myself," he said. "I had to erase some to make room for all the callers, but I think I would have recognized people's voices if they called in more than once. And I don't know why they would want to do that anyway."
Other equally unscientific readings of popular opinion all point in the other direction. "I've spoken to gatherings three or four times since this story has come out," Brantford Mayor Chris Friel said. "And on each occasion support for this proposal and for Wayne Gretzky and his family has been virtually unanimous and very enthusiastic. He is our best ambassador and has done so much for the community that no one really begrudges him the honour and all his good fortune."
On Thursday, letters to the editorial page of the Expositor, Brantford's daily newspaper, were testimonials to the power of the Gretzky name and the decency of the Gretzky character: Brantford folk trotting out his contributions to local charities that he never advertises; a retired teacher recalling Gretzky's attendance at his school's athletic banquet; a mother recalling her son teaching an 11-year-old named Wayne power-skating.
All letters advocated renaming the BSAR in honour of Gretzky. According to Expositor editors, the letters were selected for content but not opinion. All, they said, were pro-Gretzky.
A Globe and Mail survey of 10 passers-by on Dalhousie Street in downtown Brantford on Thursday confirmed the mayor's viewpoint and snapshot provided by the letters page of the Expositor.
Not one out of 10 residents said that they would vote against the proposal before the street-name committee. None even would offer a negative opinion about Gretzky, even with the assurance of anonymity. The overwhelming majority expressed best wishes for Gretzky and believe that he richly deserves recognition for his outstanding hockey career and for his contributions to his home town.
"Most people I talked to were delighted with the idea of renaming the BSAR," said Mark MacKenzie, owner of a small business in Brantford.
"He has moved on in his career, from Edmonton, to Los Angeles, St. Louis and now New York, and he has always come home and kept ties to Brantford. He has never bad-mouthed Brantford or anywhere or anybody else.
"If anyone here doesn't support [the proposal], it's just a small bunch of people who are jealous or envious of all the things he has accomplished and the adulation he has received."
These sentiments were echoed by patrons at the Wayne Gretzky Sports Centre in the city's north end, about a mile from Gretzky's boyhood home and the residence of Walter and Phyllis. Eight people were asked for their position on the proposed name. All eight supported the Gretzky handle for the parkway.
Norman Crowe, a manager of a private health-care business, came to the multisport centre to watch his son Adam play a pickup hockey game with his classmates from Assumption College high school.
"You should see the faces of the kids light up when Wayne comes to the rink when he's visiting or when Walter comes to coach the atom team here," Crowe said.
"You can see that Wayne is really comfortable talking with the kids. Walter prepared him and he always knew the world would be watching him. Nobody else handles it with the style and decorum the way he does. He doesn't call attention to himself, but he's comfortable when the attention comes to him."
It might be fairly asked whether a fellow who lends his name to a public sports centre in his home town is in fact calling attention to himself. The fair answer is: Not as much as he could. Beyond the signs on the roadside coming into town and the sports centre, one is hard-pressed to find the Gretzky name around town.
In the sports centre's hall paying tribute to local athletes, No. 99 takes his place in the town's sporting pantheon. There are a few requisite pieces of Gretzkyana, a game sweater from his days in Los Angeles, mounted pages from the Expositor on the occasion of career goal No. 803, which broke Gordie Howe's NHL record.
There is even that famous shot of a little blond boy posing with Howe at a banquet, Howe playfully giving him the hook of a stick around the neck. There are these pieces and a few others, but if there were any less you might think he had been slighted.
Room instead is given to the Brantford Warriors (winners of box lacrosse's Mann Cup in 1971), the Mott's Clamatos (victors of Canadian senior hockey's Allan Cup in 1985) and Winter Transport (Ontario Junior A softball champs in '41).
Individual athletes and sports people are also honoured. Some of the names from the rink are familiar to casual sports fans: John Muckler, Syl Apps, Doug Risebrough, Tommy Ivan and Doug Jarvis. Some from other sports are not so familiar: Gaylord Powless (nonpareil lacrosse player); Tom Longboat (the star-crossed marathon runner from the turn of turn of the century); and Sara Barber-Jenkins (eight-time Canadian champion in the backstroke). One familar face went by a different name (a lacrosse player named Harry Smith, a.k.a. Jay Silverheels, Tonto of the silver screen) and another who sought anonymity and never bragged about his Brantford roots (Joe Kayiokie, who wrestled as the Masked Marvel and claimed to be "from parts unknown").
So it is that Wayne Gretzky, a towering hero in the world of sport, takes an appropriately modest place among the local heroes. Any greater tribute or attention to him would not only be unnecessary and untoward, but also unkind to fellow athletes who knew different, lesser glories, but who for a race, a game, a season or a fight were Brantford's, too.
Ted Beare covered many of the recent vintage of Brantford athletes, recent being anybody since 1951, which sadly disqualifies Winter Transport. Beare has written for the sports section of The Expositor for the past 45 years. Remarkably, if you include the early chapters of the Gretzky story, the days of the age-group sensation, more than half of Beare's estimable career has been on the Gretzky beat, though his ties to the family predate Wayne's career.
"Thirty years ago, when Walter worked for Bell, he would come in and service The Expositor's phones and teletype machines," Beare said.
The story in the Brant News disappointed but didn't surprise Beare. "It's a shame that people here would react that way," Beare said. "People say he's not a Brantford guy anymore, that he left here at 14 to play hockey in Toronto and then so on through junior and the pros. Well that's ridiculous. He couldn't be expected to stay in Brantford and play.
"Some people will take the opportunity to bad-mouth Wayne even though he has done nothing but good for this town.
"He has worked for and made donations for the institute for the blind in town. Whenever there was a school function, a charity fund raiser, he donated stuff for auctioning. He'd attend functions here as his time would permit. Some people are disappointed that he cut back somewhat in recent years, but I'm sure that has something to with Walter's [brain] aneurysm."
The Brant News story wouldn't have been the first time that Walter and Phyllis had to listen to the townsfolk speak out in anger. When Wayne was playing atom and peewee hockey his teammates' parents used to say hurtful things about the young phenom's icetime and play, pointedly within earshot of his parents.
Walter and Phyllis silently accepted the sniping then, as they are now through the hubbub about the Parkway. When contacted this week, they declined to speak on the record, proving probably that their instincts for dealing with attention are as sharp as those of their eldest son.
If they were to complain about the story on the news wire, the Gretzkys might seem like complainers -- whiners, to borrow the pejorative hurled Wayne's way several times during his career.
If they said the honour was unimportant to them, local politicians might not be inclined to pursue the proposed name change. They don't want to be dragged into a public-relations nightmare not of theirs or their son's making.
Why did we care about this story? Why did so many delight in it? Plainly because Wayne Gretzky has achieved a unique level of celebrity. It is only fitting that the Brant News story should have appeared the same week that the Campbell's people announced that Gretzky will appear on the labels of their soups. This punched the celebrity button: Gretzky, the cross-over star, and the soup of choice of celebrity sychophant Andy Warhol.
Gretzky is still a player, a 100-point scorer no less, but he is also in the public's eye the sporting spokesman, a fellow who exists not in a town or a city but in the ephemeral place where the famous live: on screens and pages, under lights and scrutiny. The idea of his home town spurning him has a lot of juice.
It seems the political will is still there to change the name of the thoroughfare, so said the mayor. So some day when folks are driving down the former BSAR, they will pull up toward overhanging signs, point up, skyward and say, "Look, it's Wayne Gretzky." That is, if the people of Brantford aren't put off by a few phone-line villians who, when it comes to honouring a local hero, live in their own private Smallville.