Who was the greatest baseball player of all time? Cobb? Clemente? Ruth? Mays? Aaron? What about the greatest heavyweight boxer? Louis? Ali? There's no consensus on this question in most sports, but in hockey it's almost axiomatically accepted: Wayne Gretzky was the best to ever play the game. Ask anyone. Ask Gordie Howe. Ask
the Hockey News. Just don't ask hockey heretic Kevin Hench.
Hench has written on FOXSports.com that Wayne Gretzky, the NHL's putative all-time number one,
is just plain old overrated. How does he explain this mass hallucination masquerading as conventional wisdom? Partly, he says, it's because Gretzky's reputation is founded solely on his offensive numbers. "Hockey is a physical game," he writes, and dismisses the Great One as "a guy with a concave chest who couldn't knock Michelle Kwan off stride."
Not only do we fail to consider any other aspect of Gretzky's game, Hench says, but we fail to consider his offensive numbers in context. He seems to think that Gretzky's numbers over-amaze today's fans because we evaluate them from the low-scoring present. This argument seems especially specious. Gretzky's pinball-high scoring was astonishing precisely because it was unprecedented. Fans in the '80s didn't evaluate these performances based on what would come later, but on what had come before.
To take an often-cited example, it was a singular accomplishment when Maurice Richard reached 50 goals in the first 50 games of the 1944 season. It was decades before anyone would equal the feat (Mike Bossy in 1980). But a year later, Gretzky simply obliterated it, scoring 50 in 39. Listen here to how Edmonton's radio voice Rod Phillips called the play:
"Gretzky has done the unbelievable!"
Without Gretzky, lots of numbers in the record books would still be "unbelievable."
The only other hockey-related item on Hench's list is myth/lie number six: "The 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team won the Cold War." Hench argues pointlessly that "the political impact of this game has been egregiously overstated." He doesn't say by whom. I'm curious, having never heard anyone claim that the game had much "political impact" at all.
Thanks to our pal Tim for emailing me this link.