It was the final chapter in a drinking history that began in Grade 8
when my friend Bodo and I sat in my parents’ basement during Christmas
break, chugging from a $1.05 bottle of Calona Double Jack. (It went equally
well with meat or fish.) One moment I was sitting on the floor guzzling,
the next I had somehow ended up flat on my back, knocking over a set of
chess pieces, laughing like a hyena. A pivotal moment, like a future pope
trying on his first toque, or Curly getting his first finger-in-the-eye
from Moe.

What followed over the next 11 years was, at times, a lot of fun — for me, if
not for my parents. (We’re only young and thoughtless once.) I traced that
familiar curve from party animal admired for his tremendous capacity, to
party animal inspiring a growing level of concern among friends, to guy
drinking himself out of a job or two, to guy living alone in a strange city
and hauling home 42 beers in a backpack, enough for two solitary trips to
Blottotown.

That lonely drinking phase is not what you could call fun, but it is oddly
comforting, in a way that probably only a lush can recognize. Other people
may be confused about their lives and their goals, but not you. You, the
addict, have a clear plan, and the very straightforward means to put it
into action.

Every drunk has stories. Actor John Larroquette tells of emerging from a
blackout to find he was on an airplane, and trying to figure out through
casual small talk just where it was he was going. I’m not really the best
source for some of my own ugly tales; you’d have to ask a participant whose
personal think tank was not flooded at the time.

One little story, while not the worst by any means, stands out for its neat
combination of so many of dipsomania’s drawbacks: danger to self and
others, pain and anxiety for loved ones, loss of dignity, amazing lack of judgment and elementary common sense. It involved a bicycle ride home from an all-night party. I remember only little snapshots from it, but they are enough to confirm that I made the entire cross-town trip while looking straight down at the ground. Stop signs ambled by the corner of my eye as I trundled on blindly, spared from death or injury by dumb luck and the fact that I lived in a city small enough for the streets to be deserted very early on a Sunday morning.

A witness supplied the end of the story; I wasn’t really there. The sun was
already up and kids were playing on the street when my mother saw me pedal into the driveway and stop. Not stop and dismount, but simply stop
pedaling, pausing upright for a wondrous moment before toppling over, bike
and all, like a tipped cow. With a crowd of kids pointing and laughing, Mom
had to walk out to the driveway and drag me into the house. She noted that,
in fitting punctuation to a perfect experience of pain for her and
humiliation for me, I had pissed myself.

I still had many miles to ride before I would decide to look up and start
watching the road. But when I did quit, at the age of 24, it was on my own.
It’s been a lovely decade and a half, minus a few dentist appointments and
a Vanilla Ice weekend on MTV. There’s just one problem. AA’s philosophy
suggests that I am living a lie.

I went to my first and, until recently, last AA meeting a week after taking
my final inebriated swallow. It was a thoroughly depressing experience.
Speaker after speaker pounded home the idea that I, the hopeless drunkard,
was weak. I needed to take step one: Admit I was powerless over alcohol.
Then steps two and three: Believe that a Higher Power could help me, and
decide to turn my will and my life over to God, as I understood Him. I
don’t, of course. Never have.

My own experience notwithstanding, Alcoholics Anonymous is still the best-established, most often copied and arguably most successful alcohol-addiction treatment program ever created. Founded in the 1930s by William
Wilson, a.k.a. Bill W., AA is a nonprofit, nonprofessional group that
seeks to unite problem drinkers in support groups based on mutual
acceptance of the 12 steps that, AA believes, can lead to recovery from
addiction. In addition to inspiring the creation of many other unrelated 12-step organizations such as Gamblers, Smokers, Overeaters, Sexaholics and
Twizzlers Anonymous (I’m starting that last one myself), AA has become an
integral part of government- and industry-sponsored recovery programs.

For some, the biggest stumbling block to AA membership is the spiritual
aspect, the insistence that recovery depends upon surrender to a Higher
Power. AA members recognize this, and usually soft-pedal the spiritual
side. But as anyone who reads the Alcoholics Anonymous text (referred to as
the “Big Book”) can see, there’s no getting around it. In fact, in a 1996
case, the New York Court of Appeals ruled that a prison inmate was not
required to participate in mandatory 12-step meetings, as this violated his
right to religious freedom.

On a clear, cold January night, I visited an AA meeting for the first time
in 15 years. Attendance at the central Vancouver Lutheran church basement
was about 30. Some speakers were shaky, afraid — others witty, well-spoken, calm. Strikingly pretty, Germaine stood at the podium and shook her head. “Fuck! Some of the things I go through,” she laughed. One of those things is a separation. “I know one person in the relationship. He knows two.”

One woman said that she was grateful that week simply for the feeling of
being sick; that is, sick in an ordinary way, instead of the sickness she
used to feel after drinking, with all the attendant guilt and self-hatred.
It struck a chord. There’s no telling what you’ll end up feeling grateful
for after you sober up.

My luckiest break may have been losing control of my bladder. After
drinking myself senseless, I would often wake up soaked in my own urine. It wasn’t pleasant. My penchant was to view myself as a complex,
self-destructive philosopher/romantic. The romantic part was hard to
maintain when I was busy wetting myself like an untrained mongrel.

My method of dealing with it may provide a perverse glimpse into the
problem-solving techniques of an addict. Consider my options: A) Quit
drinking, or B) Prepare for each solitary drinking bout by stripping to my
undies and then covering the entire apartment floor with newspapers, since
there was no telling where I might eventually fall senseless and stain the
hardwood. I could have sold tickets and made it into a lottery, like
cow-patty bingo. Ah, missed opportunities. (And no, I had never heard of
Depends. Kids have it easier these days.) I’m not sure that I ever would
have gotten sober had it not been for that repeated humiliation. Certainly,
it hastened the day. So, in retrospect, a lucky break.

But was my do-it-yourself experience so unusual? Jack Trimpey thinks not.
In 1982, Trimpey and his wife, Lois, founded an organization called Rational
Recovery. Trimpey had been a heavy drinker who wanted to quit but found AA totally unsatisfying. Reading AA’s “Big Book,” Trimpey says he was “insulted by its sophomoric fundamentalism.” They rejected the so-called disease model of addiction, which says that dependency is an illness, and addicts are sick and powerless. This, they believe, sets the stage for failure, as does the “one day at a time” approach, which allows the addict to hang onto the possibility of a future drink or fix. Rational Recovery suggests that the addict must learn to recognize the “addictive voice,” which originates from the primitive part of the brain called the limbic system. Recognize that voice and you can first isolate, and then defeat it.

While AA is based on a profoundly pessimistic view of human nature — or at least human drinking nature — Rational Recovery takes an optimistic position. So optimistic, in fact, that RR is not a support group. You come to a few meetings, read the literature, learn the method and you’re on your own. So long, have a great sober life.

Much of the RR model fits my own quitting experience perfectly. Trimpey’s
ideas, laid out in the book “Rational Recovery: The New Cure for Substance
Addiction,” also include vehement opposition to any kind of forced
treatment. Aside from pointing out that it doesn’t work, he also believes
that addicts have the absolute right to drink themselves spongy if they
choose.

Constructive though the program is, Rational Recovery literature has a
disturbing tendency to spit venom at Alcoholics Anonymous. A parody of the
12 steps is sometimes handed out at RR meetings: We “admitted that we
were complete failures and decided to blame it all on alcohol … Made a
list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to annoy them with our guilt and remorse … Visited each of those people and proved to them that
we had now become spiritually superior to them.”

Like Trimpey says, Rational Recovery is not a support group.

As in almost any sectarian clash, the hostilities are really about control.
Opponents of the AA model resent the perceived 12-step stranglehold on
mandatory treatment programs — what Trimpey calls the “addiction treatment gulag.”

I met George at the Rational Recovery meeting. An inmate in a rehab clinic,
George was there on the sly. He claims his innkeepers wouldn’t approve,
since in their eyes, “AA is the way. Any upstarts are viewed as negative.
I’m reading Rational Recovery to get better, but I have to go through the
motions at AA just to keep them happy. I don’t show anybody my Rational
Recovery literature.”

Stanton Peele, author of “The Diseasing of America: Addiction Treatment Out
of Control” (Lexington Books), agrees that AA has helped many problem
drinkers beat the habit. But Peele believes that AA’s refusal to accept the
validity of other treatment methods means “their role in alcoholism
treatment is repressive and totalitarian.” Peele also decries American
courts that force people into 12-stepping.

Trimpey sometimes portrays AA as a cult full of brainwashed 12-step
zombies. But on my return visit I found many people who simply want what I had wanted 15 years ago — to join a sober community of former drinkers.

Germaine came to AA out of a detox program, a young woman who had
completely alienated her family, despite the usual attempts to keep things
under wraps. “I used to drink vodka and mouthwash. It took away the smell. Problem solving!” she says brightly. “That’s a transferable skill!”

She landed in the hospital with a dangerously enlarged liver after coming to
one night, slouched over the wheel of her idling car. A passerby informed
her where she was. “Vancouver?” she asked incredulously. She had started the day in the town of Quesnel, B.C., hundreds of miles away. Now she’s in AA. But Germaine does not much care about the 12 steps. “The Big Book,” she believes, is outdated and written from a resolutely male point of view. For her, AA is people: “I need that support.”

I had to find it on my own. At midnight on Apr. 3, 1983, I was parked in
my favorite armchair in a basement suite, drinking tequila. Although an
incorrigible heathen, as a minister’s son I can’t help but appreciate the
fact that in 1983, Apr. 3 happened to be Easter Sunday: resurrection day.

My mind wandered around to a familiar theme: the possibility of quitting. I
had never made a serious attempt, afraid that in failure I might come to
resemble those buffoons who sit in the bar every afternoon, loudly
proclaiming that they are currently consuming their final beer.

Sobriety looked to me like a green pasture on the far side of an
electrified prison fence. Still, I had long imagined that, one day, a
magical state of readiness would arrive, and I would free myself. That
morning, I held that belief up to scrutiny and saw it for the piece of
horseshit it was. The day of readiness was in fact like the horizon, which
recedes as you approach. I had become one of those donkeys with a stick
protruding from its halter, from which a carrot dangles — the donkey goes
forward, but that clever carrot always escapes.

So I asked myself: Are you ready to quit? The answer: No. And will you ever
be ready? Again: No. But that realization had a flip side. It told me I
would never be more ready than I was on that day. I decided to quit drinking.

Drunks have a reflex, developed after countless embarrassments, that causes
a wave of revulsion to strike immediately at the point of regaining
consciousness. “Oh my God,” says the sodden brain, “what did I do last
night?” It’s as regular as the chimes of Big Ben, even on those occasions
when it turns out you actually stayed home and watched Godzilla flicks
until you keeled over.

That Easter day, I woke up and reflexively repudiated the nonsense of the
night before. But, standing in the shower, I wondered: Suppose I really
meant it? The idea began to take hold. A sense of joy grew along with it. I
experienced a few shaky days, but the momentum was irresistible. It was
over. I was free.

My story is similar to those told by Rational Recovery. But having been to
a few meetings in that Lutheran church basement, I believe Trimpey’s
anti-AA venom is misplaced. I didn’t see people possessed by a smug sense
of moral superiority, or people wallowing in their troubled past. I saw
people standing up and helping others stand with them; people who’ve had a
lot of the piss and arrogance knocked out of them. That hard-won modesty,
some say, is what the “Higher Power” aspect of AA is all about — acquiring
not religion, but humility.

Hey — whatever works.

Now pile on the sleaze factor. Rampant corruption and the welter of
rival organizations like the WBO, WBC and IBF have led many to compare
boxing to pro wrestling, which is unfair. In light of the
appalling draw in the Evander Holyfield-Lennox Lewis heavyweight title fight last year, it’s clearly more like figure skating. But
wonky scorecards are only the icing on the giant turd cake that is
boxing’s public image. The fact that Mike Tyson is the only boxer most
people on the street could name goes a long way to explaining why the
sport is such a tough sell. In polite society, pugilism is now about a
half step up from cockfighting. Enthusiasts must keep their predilection
to themselves until they’re in sympathetic company — which makes that
company all the sweeter when the opportunity arises.

Last March the opportunity arrived. In a windowless back room somewhere
on Vancouver’s Commercial Drive, fight fans prepared to watch Lennox
Lewis and Evander Holyfield battle for the belt at New York’s Madison
Square Garden, a continent away. The gathering had an appropriately
furtive air, seeing as how it wasn’t just unfashionable, but illegal.
Luckily, little rooms like this one were under the radar of the cable
police. No one was charging money here, which is exactly the problem if
you’re vertically coifed boxing impresario Don King (just thank God
you’re not).

Despite the taint of blood lust attaching to any boxing fan who emerges
from the closet, there are still celebrities who show up when the
heavyweight championship is on the line. Still, even the famous fans
only tend to confirm boxing’s outlaw status — two of the more notable
ringside faces at MSG belonged to Keith Richards and Jack Nicholson
(inspiring visions of a truly interesting 12-round bout). Some celebs
are probably just past caring, as evidenced when Bo Derek appeared on-screen. “She’s, like, 80 now, right?” asked a woman staring up at the
TV. A solid rabbit punch and the fight hadn’t even begun.

Heavyweight is the glamour class, but these days serious fight fans pay
more attention to the lower weight divisions. Undisputed light
heavyweight champ Roy Jones Jr. is often called the best fighter
currently active. But the hottest division at the moment is definitely
welterweight, and it’s the home of boxing’s hottest star, Oscar de la
Hoya, the subject of Tim Kawakami’s recent biography, “Golden Boy.” The
gulf that separates boxing fans from the rest of humanity is best
measured by his magic name. Among the faithful, the man is bigger than
anyone in the business — bigger than Tyson, Lewis, Holyfield — anyone.
You can hear the special savor when his name rolls off the tongue of
famed ring announcer Michael “Let’s get ready to rumble” Buffer: “Here
he is … from East L.A. … the UN-defeated, WBC WEL-terweight champion of the
WIIIIRLD … The GOALLL-den boy … OSSS-car de la HOOOOOO-yaaaaaaa …”

And outside the boxing bubble, there are still many who have never
heard of him. In May, when de la Hoya knocked out Oba Carr for his
31st professional victory, I searched the paper the next day for news of the
bout. Under the heading “Boxing,” there was one story: Mike Tyson was
about to get out of jail. Even when boxing has a legitimate superstar to
sell, sleaze trumps quality in media reporting every time. This despite
the 26-year-old de la Hoya’s status as the glamour act of the boxing
world, an undefeated warrior who actually gives good interview.

It’s the latter quality that often creates boxing superstars. Like Sugar
Ray Leonard before him, de la Hoya makes boxing fans feel less guilty
about their favorite sport by convincing them that they are watching not
homicidal thugs whose career choice is an indictment of the system that
made them what they are, but bright, talented young men who know exactly
what they’re doing and why. De la Hoya’s failure to transcend the narrow
boxing world may simply reflect the historic difficulty of marketing
welterweights. Or it may be a symptom of boxing’s current bad odor — the
wider world is accepting no celebrity applications from sluggers just
now, unless they’re belting horsehide over a ballpark fence. One more
reason for boxing fans to hunker down and draw the drapes.

Not surprisingly, charisma like de la Hoya’s is rare in the fight game.
More common is the type of dull prattle spooled out by fading legend Pernell “Sweet Pea” Whitaker before his February
bout against IBF welterweight champ Felix Trinidad. His disconnected
ramble is not worth quoting here and, in any case, it was the least of
his difficulties.

As it turned out, Whitaker, 35, had big problems with Trinidad, 26, a mighty
Puerto Rican puncher with a 35-0 record who easily dominated the former
champ. Trinidad’s victory set up a long-awaited battle Sept. 18
against the somewhat more polished de la Hoya. That’s the kind of matchup
that might even give boxing a good name someday. The fascination with
seeing which fighter’s contrasting strengths will win out easily rises
above mere blood lust. Larger meanings come naturally when the game is
as elemental as this: Use your feet to survive and your fists to destroy.

It’s a reminder that once upon a time boxing was central to public life,
celebrated by romantic scribes as the Sweet Science, the purest of all
sporting contests. For all its perceived brutality, there is no other
sport that speaks so clearly about basic human strengths, both in
victory and defeat. Thirty-seven “Rocky” movies can’t be wrong.

ESPN2 viewers can still tap in to that bygone enthusiasm courtesy of
Max Kellerman, co-host of “Friday Night Fights.” “I’m bouncing off the
walls tonight,” Kellerman pointed out helpfully during a recent
broadcast. Accompanied by straight man Brian Kenny, Kellerman is the
Quentin Tarantino of the boxing world, a young guy who seems to have been
working at the boxing store all his life and consequently has an
arm-waving opinion about everything. Most boxing telecasts are like
telethons to fight sickle-cell anemia — you know that any celebrity who
shows up probably has a sister with the disease. Likewise, anybody on a
boxing show has probably taken a few shots to the head, or at least sat
in a corner barking like Burgess Meredith: “Come on, Rock!
He’s killin’ ya!”

But Kellerman, 24, simply appears to be a young guy who loves boxing and
wants to talk about it. In fact, never mind Tarantino — Kellerman is
pugilism’s Little Stevie Wonder. He’s had his own show on Manhattan
cable since he was 16, and he’s done Letterman. Not only is his
enthusiasm infectious, his voluminous knowledge about current contenders
and past greats is a reminder that boxing is bigger than Don King and
the scandal du jour.

For a wider audience, it’s still only the heavyweights who can put
boxing back on center stage. Holyfield-Lewis caught the world’s
attention, and it would be just boxing’s luck. By the time the two
battlers left their dressing rooms, the smoky little Vancouver back room
was full of fans, even a few women. (They enjoy the advantage
of needing no apology, not to mention the balm of considerable male
gratitude for their legitimizing presence.) Viewers had been treated to
a few lopsided preliminary bouts and a bizarre spiel by King himself,
evidently positioning himself for a run at messiah-hood. “This is the
resurrection of boxing,” he proclaimed to the camera. “I humbly submit
that I love each and every one of you.”

“Everybody loves you, Don,” gushed the announcer hired by Don King
Productions, to the man whose image on the Madison Square Garden screen
had inspired torrents of jeers moments before.

Unfortunately, the fight itself was another shit sandwich for the sport.
The much larger Lewis clearly dominated throughout, but in uninspiring
fashion. It appeared he would accomplish the astounding feat of winning
the undisputed heavyweight championship without gaining much respect in
the process. As it turned out, he would not be granted even that. The
contest was scored a draw, thanks in large part to Eugenia Williams’
impression of a Russian skating judge. Williams, a veteran boxing jurist
from New Jersey, somehow decided that Holyfield won more rounds than
Lewis, including even the lopsided fifth round, in which Holyfield ate
dozens of shots and delivered very few. In the Vancouver back room there
was disgust but an alarming lack of surprise. By some odd coincidence,
low-down weaseling often transpires when Don King’s around, and there he
was at the post-fight press conference, talking up the rematch and doing
his best demonic-puppet-master cackle. Nobody does it better.

However, that rematch, tentatively set for Nov. 6 in Vegas, has hit a
stumbling block, one that neatly skewers King’s “What, me sleazy?” act.
The New York Times reported Saturday that King is haggling with
Time Warner, parent company of HBO and boxing channel TVKO, over a
clause in the rematch contract. It stipulates King will be removed as
lead promoter should he be indicted for any illegalities stemming from
the first fight. King wants that particular provision dropped.
Considering that King’s Deerfield Beach, Fla., offices were searched by
the FBI last Friday, his negotiating stance is understandable. If O.J. Simpson
had possessed enough foresight to ask for a double-murder clause, he’d
still be doing Hertz ads today.

The FBI raid related to an investigation of the IBF (International
Boxing Federation) by the U.S. Attorney’s office in Newark, N.J., over
allegations of illegal payments and kickbacks in exchange for rankings.
(Francois Botha, Mike Tyson’s last opponent, was ranked the No. 9
heavyweight in the world by the IBF before he ever fought a heavyweight
bout.) Coincidentally, judge Eugenia Williams was on the Lewis-Holyfield
panel as the representative of the IBF.

Maybe the fix will be in with De La Hoya, too — surely no one in the boxing
hierarchy wants to kill the golden-goose boy. But for all its ugly
flaws, boxing is not pro wrestling. The better fighter generally
prevails on merit, and even when he’s robbed there is at least a
good-sized firestorm afterward. Yes, there will be more sad Tyson
fights and more apparently engineered rip-offs. But when Oscar de la Hoya and Felix Trinidad climb into the ring in September, I know
which dumpy little room my ass will be parked in. I’m already dreaming
up an alibi to tell my friends.

When hockey fans dubbed Gretzky the Great One, the intended salute was to his on-ice accomplishments. They are many and unsurpassed — most career goals, most career points (goals plus assists), most goals and points in a single season, in the playoffs, in all-star games, bounced in off the goalie’s ass, etc., etc., etc. But references to his play explain only part of Gretzky’s impact. “Although virtually every age of the game has had its preeminent players,” said writer/broadcaster Peter Gzowski, “no one has ever transcended it as he has.” That there are now three National Hockey League teams in California and one and a half in Florida (Tampa Bay barely qualifies) is almost universally attributed to the impact of No. 99′s 1988 move to Los Angeles. Until Gretzky arrived to provide the necessary class, charisma and sheer jaw-dropping achievement, hockey was merely a backwater sideshow in the hierarchy of professional sports.

In the United States, at least. In Canada, hockey is today exactly what it has always been: everything. There is really no American equivalent (although in some areas college football might exert the same power, and religion is big in Utah). Consider: The huge, government-owned Canadian Broadcasting Corporation features prime-time playoff hockey from late April until late June on every single occasion a game can be scrounged up. That’s every night, generally. Twice in the early rounds.

Those ubiquitous American institutions, sports bars, are much harder to find up north — probably because a large quadrant of the Canadian sports brain simply goes dark over the summer. If Canadian capitalism were as supple and well-developed as its American cousin, sports bars would spring up here in makeshift tents with satellite dishes every April, operate until June and then fold up like small-town fairs. Only the NHL playoffs will fill a Canadian bar with upturned faces, cheering, groaning and throwing peanuts at the TV. And for the past 20 years, Canadian hockey has largely been exemplified by one skinny guy from Brantford, Ontario. Now he’s hung up the skates. Needless to say, we’re choked.

It was suggested in some of those voluminous tributes that Wayne Gretzky was just a regular guy who became special through sheer hard work. That’s a swell idea, and there is a kernel of truth in it. Gretzky was not the best skater, hardest shooter or grittiest hard-nosed grinder. But neither was he ordinary. Remember when Robert Kennedy said, “Some men see things as they are and say ‘Why?’ I dream things that never were and say ‘Why not?’” Never mind what your teacher said — Bobby was talking about Wayne Gretzky. The Great One’s on-ice vision suggested he had more eyes than a housefly, and his vision was wedded to an innate knowledge of the game that allowed him to anticipate the progress of every play. While everyone else on the ice was still trying to figure out where the puck was, Gretzky was already skating to the place where it was going to go.

At least some of that ability really did come from hard work — that and a good, cheap coach. From age 3, little Wayne skated on a backyard rink made for him by his dad. Walter Gretzky would be classified as your typical tyrannical parent, driving a hollow-eyed child through endless hours of drilling, but for one thing — Walt was really only trying to hang onto the leash. It was the younger Gretzky who most wanted to stay on the ice, some days for eight hours at a stretch. Walter’s famous son has said many times that his passion for the game was his true gift, and it paid off in the development of sharply honed skills and a hockey brain capable of crunching data and spitting out psychic passes instantaneously — Deep Blue on skates.

Walter and Phyllis Gretzky also taught their son humility. About the worst tag that ever stuck to the Wayner was the Whiner — opposing fans would chant that nickname whenever Gretzky bitched to the referees about the ceaseless hacking and slashing lesser players subjected him to. Off the ice, though, Gretzky never betrayed the swelled head to which he was so obviously entitled.

Gretzky was no Joe Montana, a late-round draft pick who surprised the world. Wayne was a star from at least the age of 10. That’s when he scored 378 goals in 68 games for his Brantford peewee team, eking out victory in the goal-scoring race by a margin of 338. (One of the most remarkable accomplishments on that team was made by another player: goalie Greg Stefan, who actually managed to reach the NHL even after getting the early lesson that a goalie can succeed without ever taking his finger out of his nose.) All through his teens Gretzky was watched closely as a rising phenom, always playing against older competitors until, at age 17, he turned pro with the Indianapolis Racers of the upstart World Hockey Association. Eight games into the season his contract was sold to the Edmonton Oilers. When the WHA folded the following year, the Oilers and three other teams survived to enter the NHL, and 19-year-old Wayne Gretzky was in the bigs.

After all the hype, how did the Gretzky Show play? Imagine if The Phantom Menace had turned out to be another “Citizen Kane.” His very first season in the league, 1979-80, Gretzky tied for first in scoring (with future Hall of Famer and top three all-time scoring ace Marcel Dionne). No one else would get to share top billing for quite a while. Gretzky topped the scoring race 10 times in his career. In 1981-82 he scored 92 goals, obliterating the previous mark of 76. It’s been pointed out that Mark McGwire would’ve had to hit another 15 homers last year to smash Roger Maris’ record as badly as Gretzky vaporized Phil Esposito’s.

And yet, the man was subtle. Sportswriter Cam Cole recently confessed that he had to learn how to watch Gretzky. The Great One’s game was rarely pure, triple-distilled flash. By contrast, no one ever had to learn how to watch Guy Lafleur of the 1970s Montreal Canadiens coast down the ice, hair flying, an invisible motor seemingly attached to his butt. My clearest memory of the mighty Oilers teams that won four Stanley Cups during Gretzky’s tenure was not of Gretzky at all, but of sitting in the Edmonton Northlands Coliseum’s primo red seats for a playoff game against Winnipeg and watching star defenseman Paul Coffey knife through the entire Jet squad to score in classic hot-dog fashion. No hockey lessons required there.

But hockey newcomers drawn to Oilers games by tales of the young magician who looked like Princess Diana’s stunt double and treated the NHL record book as his personal diary often went away mystified by what they had — or hadn’t — seen. True, Gretzky would occasionally dipsy-doodle around the opposing team’s zone as though performing lonely drills on his backyard Brantford sheet. More often, though, it was all over before the inattentive fan knew what had happened. Suddenly the teams were facing off at center ice to the accompaniment of that familiar tune — “Oilers’ goal scored by No. 99, Wayne Gretzky; assisted by No. 4, Kevin Lowe.” If it was any consolation, the opposing defensemen were usually just as mystified. Wayne Gretzky, the genuine Phantom Menace, rarely disappointed.

Gretzky had his signature plays. The area directly behind the net became known as Gretzky’s office thanks to his habit of skating in there with the puck, stopping and turning to survey the situation. Should a player follow him in, he would come out the other side to wreak havoc. Should two players attack, one from each end, Gretzky lasered a pass to the resulting open man. Eventually, opposing players learned that all they could do was simply wait, the game suddenly turning into a touch-football play with nobody rushing the passer. Wayne’s teammates would skate around until someone got open, whereupon the puck would instantly find that player’s stick — because, for all his scoring records, Gretzky turned out to be above all a playmaker. Wayne Gretzky had 1,963 career assists (passes that result in goals). That’s more assists than any previous player’s goals and assists combined.

He could score, too, of course. That off-the-goalie’s-ass claim was not an idle one. True, no stats are kept on heinie bank shots, but Gretzky would surely get whatever malodorous trophy they might dream up for it. First, he would move into the opposing team’s corner. So far, so good, opposing players reasoned — if puck-to-net is his plan, he can’t get there from here. The goalie would relax and move out a little to face potential scorers positioned in front of the net. Then Gretzky, still in the corner, would bounce the puck off the goalie’s wide derrihre (or a defenseman’s skate) into the net. Such goals used to be called “flukes.” With Gretzky, you knew better.

The Stanley Cup championships, the awards (among others, nine Hart Trophies as league MVP, two Conn Smythe Trophies as playoff MVP), the records and the gradual realization that the sports world was seeing a career unprecedented in hockey history — none of it came to pass right away. First, it required a team. Despite the kid’s promising start, the talented young Oilers had some setbacks while they figured out how to be champs. But the early observers who loudly proclaimed the Edmonton Oilers to be a “one-man team” were not paying attention. In fact, the 1980s Oilers featured budding superstars like Coffey, winger Jari Kurri, goalie Grant Fuhr and, most important, center Mark Messier. Well into the ’90s, general managers who lacked the eye for talent of Edmonton boss Glen Sather would attempt to build winners simply by throwing big contracts at aging Oilers.

Gretzky and I spent most of the ’80s together in Edmonton. He didn’t know it, but it’s true. The Alberta capital of just over half a million was Wayne Gretzky’s very own principality. His subjects were proud, protective, critical, awestruck, demanding, appreciative, gossipy. Gretzky’s 1988 marriage to former Playmate Janet Jones was predictably dubbed a royal wedding (which proved to be untrue — the couple is still together and has three kids). Edmonton was a fairly small bowl in which to hold the country’s biggest fish, and maintaining a semblance of a private life sometimes required the same kind of stealth Gretzky exhibited on ice.

One spring evening in 1987, I sat munching and reading in the Mandarin Restaurant on Edmonton’s Whyte Avenue. It was Sunday, and like most eateries in that God-fearing province, the Mandarin was nearly deserted. Then, a sudden flurry of activity — the owner set a bevy of staff members in furious motion before heading for the door to personally escort a large group to an out-of-the-way corner. It would have resembled a typical family outing — prairie white folks stepping out for a mildly exotic Sunday dinner — but for the presence of the world’s greatest hockey player, giving the big round table a focal point every bit as powerful as King Arthur’s. I buried my nose in a copy of “Don Quixote” and furtively eyed the giant from afar. The rest of his merry band consisted mostly of relatives of Vicki Moss (Gretzky’s longtime girlfriend during the pre-Jones era). In the almost empty room, overhearing conversation was unavoidable, even if you weren’t straining with every follicle of your inner ear to pick up the slightest incriminating murmur.

The Great One was never safe from his adoring public. Edmonton was a grateful hockey town, certainly, but gratitude gets boring after a while. Eventually the sheer perversity of human nature takes over and people become resentful of their imperious champions. And the champions usually help the process along. Feet of clay are almost de rigueur for the modern sports hero, and nasty rumors — drug use, general misconduct — had followed some of Gretzky’s teammates long before those rumors were repeated in Sports Illustrated. Any public room, be it press conference site or sparsely populated Chinese joint, held dangers for Wayne Gretzky (as he often called himself when answering reporters’ questions). Wayne Gretzky never knew when some jug-eared little weasel, sick of athletes who refer to themselves in the third person, might be lying in wait behind a copy of “Don Quixote,” ready to observe a prima donna routine or collect some salacious piece of dirt to tell the world.

Ann Landers herself would never convict me on this one. Can repeating overheard conversation truly be considered rude when it reveals its source to be an intelligent, well-spoken gentleman? Granted, the guy was with his girlfriend’s family — not the likeliest crowd to regale with stories of how you beat a cocaine bust with the promise of an autographed stick. (No such rumor ever attached itself to Gretzky anyway, a point that needs to be made lest my enraged fellow Canadians sentence me to the traditional death-by-tongue-frozen-to-school-fence method. A slow and painful end.) Still, his casual banter that night made it clear that this was a regular Joe who worked his way up from the peewee league to royalty.

Gretzky didn’t talk hockey. He did speak of having been lucky enough to meet people like Jack Nicholson and, in fact, just about everybody he would want to meet (except, he noted, Elvis). He spoke with noncommittal interest about two little girls in Poland who were drawing crowds with visions of the Virgin Mary — a story that was not widely reported until sometime later. Obviously the man found time between games to keep informed. He never referred to himself in the third person. He was gracious and easygoing with friends and restaurant staff alike. He was, in short, Wayne Gretzky.

At the time he appeared untouchable, destined to remain an Oiler and a champion all his playing days. But only one year later, financially troubled Oilers owner Peter Pocklington sold Gretzky to Bruce McNall, the future financially troubled-to-the-point-of-incarceration Los Angeles Kings owner. More successes and an endless stream of career scoring marks would follow for Gretzky as he moved from Los Angeles to New York via St. Louis. But there would be no more championships. After Edmonton, his greatest impact would be on the profile of the game itself. Americans would discover hockey’s superstar choirboy and decide that perhaps Canada’s favorite game was more than just stick boxing. As we sat in that restaurant together, Gretzky still had hours of highlight-reel moments ahead of him — nonetheless, he was riding a wave of professional success that would soon be played out for good.

My dinner with Wayne wasn’t perfect. He failed to pick up my tab. It was OK. Gretzky didn’t owe me or anybody else in that city a thing. And though it’s 12 years too late, I’ll say now what I wanted to say then — thanks for everything, buddy. Try the sizzling rice with prawns.

Farley Mowat is different, and is a northern national icon. Mowat’s books — “People of the Deer” (1952), “Never
Cry Wolf” (1963) and “A Whale for the Killing” (1972), among many
others — tell stories of the wilderness, the animals and the people of a
hard, cold, sublimely beautiful land. It’s Canada as the world knows it
(when the world spares it a thought). But even aside from his
celebrations of terrible northern grandeur, Mowat has two other
attributes crucial to any quintessentially Canadian celebrity. First,
Mowat is openly suspicious of America. And second, Canadians are
suspicious of Mowat.

In a country that is definitely on the short end of a sibling
rivalry — the Frank Stallone of the Western world — a little resentment is
inevitable. Farley Mowat would be considered a Canadian national
treasure just for the frequent kicks he delivers to the American shin
and the official enmity he has earned in return. “We Canadians are
hardly more than house slaves of the American empire,” he wrote in the
1985 book “My Discovery of America.” “Of course, we are better off than
the field slaves of South America.”

That’s the book Mowat wrote after he was included on a U.S. government list of
undesirables and was subsequently refused entry into the States for a
lecture tour. You can hardly blame them — Mowat once claimed to have fired
his .22 at U.S. Strategic Air Command planes flying over his home in
Newfoundland. No surprise then that Mowat is prominently featured at a
Web site called Canadian World Domination HQ. (Of course, the CWD Web
site is only mock-belligerent. As a world threat, Canadian jingoism ranks right up there with Tibetan soccer hooliganism.)

To an extent Americans would never understand, a large part of the
Canadian identity involves arguing about whether or not we have one. A
recent contest to come up with a northern equivalent of the phrase
“As American as apple pie” produced the suggestion “As Canadian as
possible.” Hockey, curling, government health care, gun control,
kick-ass beer, eh, a few idiosyncratic pronunciations, the faint
vestiges of Peter Jennings’ accent — these are the paltry exhibits for the
defense. And the case against our distinct ethnic nationhood? Shania
Twain. There’s more, but why pile it on?

Faced with the disconcerting evidence of our indistinguishable
North-Americanness, Canadians turn in desperation to persistent
Yank-bashing. Mowat excels at this, and thus is much beloved.
Conversely — and this is crucial to understanding the Canadian psyche, but
pay attention anyway — Mowat’s credibility as a Yank-basher stems almost
entirely from the fact that he is successful in the States. According to
publisher Key Porter, his 36 books have sold over 14 million copies in
52 languages. Another source puts it at 24 languages — at any rate, one of
them is American. “Never Cry Wolf” was made into a Disney movie. Americans
like Mowat, muses the Canadian, therefore Mowat is.

Mowat’s status as a national hero is probably aided by the number of
Canadian towns that can lay claim to him. Born in Belleville, Ontario, on
May 12, 1921, Mowat bounced around the country with his librarian father
and kept the rambling habit as an adult. During World War II he fought
in Italy, later recounting the experience in “And No Birds Sang.” He
traveled to the Northwest Territories in 1947, beginning an association
with the far north that first bore fruit in “People of the Deer.” The book was
a tremendous success. In it, Mowat told of hitching a ride with a bush
pilot who dropped him in the middle of nowhere, then of being led by a trapper to an Inuit camp — the first white man to see it. Mowat
detailed Inuit life and the threat of starvation that resulted from
white encroachment on Inuit hunting grounds. A young person’s novel,
“Lost in the Barrens,” followed in 1956, and three years later “The
Desperate People” returned to the plight of the northern Inuit tribe. “Never Cry Wolf,” perhaps his best-known
book, described Mowat’s lengthy study of wolf behavior as he fought to
save the animals from human hostility and government-sponsored
extermination.

From the beginning Mowat established himself as both passionate advocate and master storyteller. The educational aspects of his works made them natural homework for resentful students, but this was nutritional cereal that tasted great, too — readers got first-hand accounts of life in the wild packed with scientific information, but also man-runs-naked-with-wolves adventure tales. Autobiographical stories of his youth, like “Owls in the Family” (1961) and “The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be” (1957), captured kids’ imaginations, while works like the 1984 “Sea of Slaughter” rallied them to environmental action once they had grown up. Eight years spent in Newfoundland led to several books centered on that most idiosyncratic of Canadian provinces, although Mowat and his wife, Claire, now divide their time between Ontario and Nova Scotia. Books as varied as “The Regiment” (1961) and “The Farfarers” (1998) have ranged over landscapes of earth, time and memory — stories of history both national and personal.

His northern tales mark Mowat as a distinctively Canadian writer. That
those early books are now mired in controversy deeper than spring trail
mud may be a different kind of Canadian marker — the kind of scar that
this country often inflicts on its most uppity citizens. An illustrative
joke: A man waiting to be seated at a seafood restaurant notices that
one of the lobster tanks has no lid. He alerts the mbitre d’ to a
possible escape in progress. “Ah,” says the mbitre d’, “don’t worry,
sir. Those are Canadian lobsters. If one of them starts to crawl out,
the others will just drag it back down.”

In Farley Mowat’s case, though, it’s hard to argue that the problem was
only Canada’s national brand of small-town envy. The scandal began with
the May 1996 issue of Saturday Night, one of Canada’s most prominent
national magazines. On the cover was a black-and-white photo of Mowat,
the northern sage, looking woodsy with his full beard and wool sweater.
Another woodsy touch was the Pinocchio nose, electronically added to
Mowat’s face by the waggish art department. It wasn’t a good sign. Seeing that
cover, Mowat must have felt something like the guy whose girlfriend has
just announced that she wants to tell him something — on the Jerry
Springer show. Sure enough, John Goddard’s heavily researched story, “A
Real Whopper,” made devastating accusations about Mowat’s first three
nonfiction books: “People of the Deer,” “The Desperate People” and “Never
Cry Wolf.”

Wrote Goddard: “Documents recently made public at the National Archives
of Canada, and papers that the author himself sold years ago to McMaster
University, show that Mowat did not spend two years in the Keewatin
District in 1947 and 1948 as the books say. He spent two summer field
seasons in the district — totaling less than six months — and mostly in a
more southern part of the district than he describes. He did not
casually drop in alone but traveled on both occasions as a junior member
of well-planned scientific expeditions. He did not once — contrary to the
impression he leaves — see a starving Inuit person. He did not once set
foot in an Inuit camp. As for the authenticity of his wolf story, he
virtually abandoned his wolf-den observations after less than four
weeks.”

The article reported that residents of the Northwest Territories often
refer to Farley Mowat by the derisive nickname “Hardly Know-it.” After
noting the claims of scrupulous authenticity Mowat made within the books
themselves, Goddard described a very different Mowat attitude displayed
in notes and conversation. “I never let the facts get in the way of the
truth,” Goddard claims Mowat told him. Goddard also came across Mowat’s
self-proclaimed motto in a catalog of the author’s papers: “On
occasions when the facts have particularly infuriated me, Fuck the
Facts!”

Ironically, the article confirmed Mowat’s preeminent status in Canada
by causing a national furor. Even political cartoonists weighed in — the
Edmonton Journal’s Malcolm Mayes depicted Mowat’s wife informing her
husband, “The wolf’s at the door, and he’s got a few questions.”

Mowat’s friends — including virtually the entire Canadian literary
establishment — rose to his defense and anxiously awaited the great man’s
rebuttal. It was swift and disappointing. Mowat gave interviews
describing Goddard’s article as “bullshit, pure and simple … this guy’s
got as many facts wrong as there are flies on a toad that’s roadkill.”
(On the other hand, he didn’t mind the rude cover trick. “You know what
they say about men with long noses,” he reasoned.)

In a widely published statement, Mowat excoriated Saturday Night as
another National Enquirer and savaged Goddard as a “hired gun” and
“despicable.” “His piece is stuffed with factual errors,” Mowat wrote.
“I don’t have the space here to catalogue his errors of omission and
commission … Even more to the point, he consistently misses the truth
behind the ‘facts.’”

Putting the word “facts” in quotation marks hardly inspired confidence.
Nor did his refusal to refute Goddard’s major claims. Tellingly, both
Mowat’s attackers and defenders quickly staked out the same
ground — namely, the author’s admitted reputation as a “teller of tales.”
Critics pointed out that similar accusations had been made before,
notably by Frank Banfield of the Canadian Wildlife Federation in a 1964
article published in the Canadian Field-Naturalist. Banfield compared
Mowat’s 1963 bestseller to another famous wolf tale: “Little Red Riding
Hood.” “I hope that readers of “Never Cry Wolf” will realize that both
stories have about the same factual content,” Banfield wrote.

Sure, sure, replied the FOFs (Friends of Farley). That’s the secret of
his charm. Wrote one correspondent to Saturday Night: “There is more
truth in one of his outrageous exaggerations than in a shelf-load of
pretentious twaddle.” A news story quoted naturalist and author Stuart
Houston: “Anyone who knows Farley knows that he has a difficult time
understanding where truth ends and his imagination begins … and we love
him for it.” Mowat must have been touched — it was the kind of stirring
endorsement that his heirs could use to dispute his will.

“The primary consideration for a writer is to entertain,” Goddard quotes
Mowat as saying. “Using entertainment you can then inform, you can
propagandize, you can elucidate … As far as I’m concerned ‘People of the
Deer’ did nothing but good for individual people, the survivors … Nobody
was going to pay any attention to them unless their situation was
dramatized, and I dramatized it.”

The pro-Mowat camp succeeded in pointing out that Goddard’s attack
overreached on some charges and inappropriately downplayed very real
problems the Inuit faced. But many of Goddard’s claims, among them that
Mowat demonized the federal government and significantly distorted the
official attitude toward both wolves and Inuit, went unanswered. More
fundamentally, Mowat’s reputation as a nonfiction writer was
compromised, perhaps permanently.

Permanently, like a life sentence for murder. Three years later, few
traces of the 1996 Saturday Night shootout are evident. Online reviews
and biographies rarely mention the controversy, which apparently went
largely unnoticed outside of Canada anyway. In the end, John Goddard
appears to have been Farley Mowat’s very own Gennifer Flowers. Charges
were made, much harrumphing ensued, the charges remained unchallenged
and no harm was done. Onward and upward for Slick Farley.

But some readers, particularly historians, will not forget so easily. The
University of Toronto’s Michael Bliss called the fudging “utterly
appalling,” while the University of Alberta’s Rod Macleod suggested that
those who lie for a good cause ultimately do that cause “more harm than
good.” But if the tempest has had any lasting effect for most Mowat
readers, it seems to have been this: They identified what they valued
about his writing and found themselves agreeing with the author’s
contention that, while they may fall short as history, his stories
survive as ripping yarns that serve a greater good. Hollywood’s
attraction to “Never Cry Wolf” now seems perfectly fitting — both Mowat and
Tinseltown value storytelling over strict accuracy.

(Harder to interpret is maverick Vancouver writer/filmmaker Ken Hegan’s short subject, “Farley Mowat Ate My Brother.” Adapted from a radio play, the
eight-minute flick tells of a Hegan frhre who, irked by having to write
boring book reports, leaves to lodge a personal complaint with the
famous author, then mysteriously disappears. The joking accusation of
cannibalism won Best Short at the New York Underground Film Festival in
1996, capping what was just a generally bad year for Mowat. Since
Hegan’s CBC-TV productions also include the short film “William Shatner
Lent Me His Hairpiece,” this work appears to be another example of the
aforementioned national tendency to savage our most cherished national
symbols.)

As for Farley Mowat the Canadian icon, today that role fits the man
better than ever. You powerful nations can go on and choose as your national
heroes any titans you want — conquerors, noble patriots, swaggering studs
whose names can serve as battle cries for bar fights or amphibious
landings. But every country reserves the right to select the figureheads
that represent it best. We’ve chosen Farley Mowat. Because, as you know,
we Canadians are not real sure what we’re all about.