Walter Gretzky

The Gretzky family were landowners in the Russian Empire, and supporters of Tsar Nicholas II[2] originally from Grodno/Hrodna (now in the Republic of Belarus).[3] Prior to the outbreak of the Russian Revolution, Gretzky's father Anton ("Tony") Gretzky (Polish: Antoni Grecki, Belarusian: Антон Грэцкі; pronounced Hretski), a white émigré, immigrated along with his family to Canada via the United States.[2] Following World War I, Anton, who served in the Canadian Expeditionary Force,[2] would marry his wife, Mary, who immigrated from Podhajce, interwar Poland (now Ukraine).[4]

Gretzky's ancestry is typically described as either Belarusian, Ukrainian, or Polish.[5] In interviews, Walter Gretzky has stated that his parents were "White Russians from Belarus",[6] and whenever anyone asked his father if they were Russian, he would reply, "Nyet. Belarus."[2][7] On other occasions he has mentioned his family's Polish ancestry.[8] In his autobiography, however, Gretzky states his first language is Ukrainian.[2]

Tony and Mary owned a 25-acre (10 ha) cucumber farm in Canning, Ontario[9] where Walter Gretzky was born and raised. This is where he met his future wife, Phyllis Hockin[10] at a wiener roast when she was 15 and he was 18. She was a descendant of British General Sir Isaac Brock, a hero of the War of 1812. They married in 1960, and moved to Brantford, Ontario, where Gretzky worked for Bell Telephone Canada.[4] The family moved into a house on Varadi Avenue in Brantford seven months after the birth of their son, Wayne Gretzky, chosen partly because the yard was flat enough to be able to make an ice rink every winter.[11] The couple would later have a daughter, Kim (b. 1963), and three more sons, Keith, Glen (b. 1969), and Brent. Unlike Walter, who did Sharp ViewCam commercials with Wayne and Wayne's son, Ty, Phyllis Gretzky mostly refused to embrace the celebrity that sprang from their son's exploits, although she did a commercial with Wayne for ProStars Cereal in the 1980s and appeared in the video Wayne Gretzky: Above and Beyond (1990).

Walter was an excellent athlete in high school. He excelled in track, setting school records in running, pole vault, and long jump. However, he was even better at hockey, and in his teens was a prolific goal-scorer during five years of play with the Junior B-level Woodstock Warriors. He set his sights on the National Hockey League (NHL), and some thought he was destined to make it there. A local car salesman, in order to encourage the rising hockey star, bestowed a new car on him for a nominal charge, so that he could more easily drive to hockey games in and around Woodstock, but his size and weight, at 5-foot-9 inches and 140 lbs, was a problem. He tried out for a major team at the Junior A level, but unfortunately, just a few weeks beforehand, came down with chicken pox, losing considerable weight. Although he scored just as many goals in the tryout game as any of his fellow hopefuls, he was judged to be too small for the higher league. He returned to play with the Woodstock team.[12]

Walter was an installer and repairman for Bell Canada for 34 years, retiring in 1991. A work-related injury he suffered in 1961 left him in a coma and resulted in deafness in his right ear. Five days after his 53rd birthday, in 1991, he suffered a near-fatal brain aneurysm which destroyed his short-term memory. His physical therapist, Ian Kohler, married his daughter Kim in 1995. His ordeal is the basis of the CBC movie Waking Up Wally: The Walter Gretzky Story. He spends his time helping charities and fundraisers and coaching at his summer youth hockey camp in California.

Some said that his son Wayne, lauded by most sportswriters and the NHL itself as the greatest hockey player who ever lived, had God-given abilities, but Wayne gave a great deal of credit to his father's brilliant coaching.

The elder Gretzky devised numerous creative ways to develop hockey skills. Walter's drills were his own invention, but were ahead of their time in Canada. Gretzky would later remark that the Soviet National Team's practice drills, which impressed Canada in 1972, had nothing to offer him: "I'd been doing those drills since I was three. My Dad was very smart."[13]

Some say I have a 'sixth sense' . . . Baloney, I've just learned to guess what's going to happen next. It's anticipation. It's not God-given, it's Wally-given. He used to stand on the blue line and say to me, 'Watch, this is how everybody else does it.' Then he'd shoot a puck along the boards and into the corner and then go chasing after it. Then he'd come back and say, 'Now, this is how the smart player does it.' He'd shoot it into the corner again, only this time he cut across to the other side and picked it up over there. Who says anticipation can't be taught?[14]

In his autobiography, Wayne describes how his Dad would teach him the fundamentals of smart hockey, quiz style:

Him: "Where do you skate?"
Me: "To where the puck is going, not where it's been."
Him: "Where's the last place a guy looks before he passes it?"
Me: "The guy he's passing to."
Him: "Which means..."
Me: "Get over there and intercept it."
Him: "If you get cut off, what are you gonna do?"
Me: "Peel."
Him: "Which way?"
Me: "Away from the guy, not towards him."[15]

From September 2004 to April 2005, Walter was an assistant coach for the University of Pittsburgh inline hockey team. A long time friend of head coach Bob Coyne, Walter was hired by team president Ryan Gaus as an assistant coach, along with Bob Bradley and Tim Fryer.[16] Pitt participated in the Eastern Collegiate Roller Hockey Association (ECRHA) at the Division I level.[17]

Fans come to his house to see his basement, stuffed with mementos from Wayne's amateur career, and his backyard, which, every winter, was turned into a "rink" on which Walter taught his sons and their friends to play hockey. The "rink" was replaced by a swimming pool on the day Wayne was traded to the Los Angeles Kings. His other children – Kim, Keith, Glen, and Brent – were also athletic. Brent, drafted by the Tampa Bay Lightning, played 13 NHL games. Keith, drafted by the Buffalo Sabres in 1985, never made it to the NHL but has coached in the minors (he was Brent's coach when both were with the UHL Asheville Smoke). Kim was an exceptional track and field star, but broke her foot at the age of 15 and never ran again.

Walter Gretzky has written two books: On Family, Hockey and Healing (2003), and Gretzky: From Backyard Rink to the Stanley Cup (1985), in which he recounted how he recognized Wayne's prodigious skills and shaped him into the most prolific scorer in hockey history. In an unusually frank 1990 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Wayne recounted how Walter would build him up one minute and tear him down the next, reminding him constantly that he could never have an "average" game.

Phyllis died of lung cancer at Brantford General Hospital on December 19, 2005. Her mother, Betty Hockin, died in Brantford on January 7, 2006 from complications from a heart attack.

Walter Gretzky was named to the Order of Canada on 28 December 2007, "for his contributions to minor hockey in Canada and for his dedication to helping a myriad of local, provincial, and national charities."[18]

On February 12, 2010, Walter had the chance to carry the Olympic Torch during the Olympic Relay on the last day of the relay, hours before the Opening Ceremonies in Vancouver, British Columbia, where his son would light the Olympic Flame.

On April 12, 2012, in his home town of Brantford, Ontario, the Grand Erie District School Board opened Walter Gretzky Elementary School. It is part of a dual-track Catholic-Public Green School with the Brant Haldimand-Norfolk Catholic District School Board's St. Basil's School.

• Wayne Gretzky
• Challenge Cup

• Waking Up Wally: The Walter Gretzky Story at IMDb