The Great One's kid

[IFallsRon]

December 15, 2006

Son of the Great One: Skating in Gretzky's Shadow

By PAT BORZI

FARIBAULT, Minn., Dec. 9 — At 15, Ty Gretzky is far from the budding hockey superstar that his father, Wayne, was at the same age.

In only his second season of competitive hockey, he has four goals and six assists in 29 games as a center for the lowest level of the four upper-school boys teams at the Shattuck-St. Mary’s School. Often, he said, he hears taunts from opponents who expect more from a player with a famous last name.

“I get smack-talked all the time on the ice from other players,” said Ty, a 10th-grader. “Just like, ‘I thought you were going to be a lot better,’ stuff like that.”

He said he ignores it, but the attention may not fade soon. The hockey coaches at Shattuck-St. Mary’s still talk about one particular scene with astonishment.

“Tell him about Fort Frances,” Tom Ward, the school’s director of hockey, said to the Midget AA coach, Christian Bragnalo, as they sat in Ward’s office. So Bragnalo described what took place at a game in early October in a town across the Ontario border from International Falls, Minn.

The stands were packed. The Fort Frances Times estimated the crowd at 800 people, unusually large for a midget game. Afterward, Bragnalo noticed dozens of fans waiting with cards and photographs of Wayne Gretzky, the Ontario native who is the National Hockey League’s career scoring leader. Gretzky was not there — he coaches the N.H.L.’s Phoenix Coyotes — but the fans wanted Ty to autograph their items.

“It was weird,” Ty said later.

The commotion in Fort Frances partly illustrates why Gretzky and his wife, Janet, enrolled their son at the small boarding school in rural Minnesota, about 50 miles south of Minneapolis-St. Paul. Players like Sidney Crosby of the Pittsburgh Penguins and Zach Parise of the Devils once played at the school. Parise’s father, the former Minnesota North Star and Islander J. P. Parise, ran the hockey program for almost a decade and is now the school’s director of prospect evaluation.

Gretzky wanted his son to have top-level coaching and to grow as a player away from the spotlight, without someone trying to label him the next Great One.

No prodigy could compare with Wayne Gretzky. He scored a goal for a 10-and-under team as a 6-year-old, had 378 goals in 85 games for an atom team at age 10 and had 6 goals in his first major junior game at age 16.

Gretzky said that Ty, the second oldest of his five children, had realistic goals.

“By no means does he think he’s going to be the next Sidney Crosby,” Gretzky said after his Coyotes played the Wild in St. Paul recently. “But he loves to play.”

Ty skated briefly for a nontraveling team at Chelsea Piers in New York while his father finished his career with the Rangers. He played no other organized hockey until last season, when he lived with his father and had 24 goals and 37 points in 16 games for the Brophy College Preparatory junior varsity team in Phoenix.

Ty missed the league scoring title by a point, and Brophy won the seven-team league, although the competition was not the greatest, with one team of girls finishing the season 0-19-1.

In 2004, the family considered letting Ty live and attend school in Brantford, Ontario, with Wayne’s parents, Walter and Phyllis. Ty spent several weeks there during the World Cup of Hockey, but he grew homesick.

Last year, they discussed school again. Wayne Gretzky had heard of Shattuck through friends and knew that Crosby and Zach Parise had gone there. So he called J. P. Parise.

Gretzky and his son visited the campus over the summer and liked the charm of its old stone buildings. The school was founded in 1858 and has 387 students from 20 countries in grades 6-12. Tuition and fees can approach $40,000 for boarding hockey players, and a dress code is strictly enforced.

It was a place where Ty could blend in. Shattuck’s players wear only numbers, not names, on the backs of their sweaters. The highest number available for skaters is 22, and Ty wears No. 17 as a nod to Ladislav Nagy, a left wing for Phoenix whom he calls his favorite player. A home game Saturday night against Stonewall Manitoba drew 44 spectators, almost all parents and students.

At first, Ty struggled with his conditioning. “He came to training camp and almost died,” J. P. Parise said.

But Ty says he loves Shattuck and has not been homesick yet. Before a recent practice, he sat in Parise’s office in shorts and a long-sleeved shirt, his dark blond hair sticking out from under a knit cap. He was one of the last players off the ice that day, firing loose pucks into the net.

Listed at 5 feet 11 inches and 135 pounds, Ty Gretzky is one of the lighter players on his team. He skates with the same hunched-over style of his father, but that is where the similarities end. His skating needs work, his coaches say, although his instincts are good and his defensive play has improved markedly.

Saturday night, Gretzky played third-line center and was not on the ice for any goals in the Sabres’ 4-3 victory. He won about half his face-offs, but appeared to tire midway through the game, Shattuck’s second of the day. [The Sabres were 12-15-2 heading into their holiday break.]

“If he had been in more of a hockey culture, he would be further along,” Ward said. “He’s one of several kids who have come from nontraditional hockey areas that, once they get the ice time, they blossom. Who knows if it’s going to work out for Ty? But I think he’s in an environment now that, if there’s a chance for it to come out, it will. It seems like he’s having fun.”

And not only with hockey. Ty said he hoped to play lacrosse in the spring. After the Thanksgiving break, he and several teammates had their left ears pieced, which made Ward cringe, because earrings are forbidden in the hockey complex.

“I just did it because people on our team did it, just for fun,” Ty said. “It was kind of a joke.”

How did his parents react? “They asked me to take it out, and I’m going to,” he said. “But they didn’t get mad at me.”

Wayne Gretzky described his son as “a really good young man” who is still learning about himself.

“I told him one day: ‘Don’t worry about the pressure. You’re not Wayne Gretzky, you’re Ty Gretzky,’ ” he said. “And he told me that I shouldn’t need to worry about that, because there aren’t too many guys who are Wayne Gretzky anyway. So I said, ‘I guess you’ve got it figured out.’ ”

[jwhjr]

Interesting, thanks IFallsRon.