“In Search of Greatness,” a new documentary about athletic genius and creativity, features a memorable scene in which Wayne Gretzky describes his habit, as a four-year-old, of watching hockey games on television with a pen and paper in hand. On the paper, he would draw a rink: the ice surface, as viewed from above. Then, while staring at the action on the screen, and without diverting his eyes to the paper, he would trace the movement of the puck. When play stopped, he would look down at his scrawls and observe what he recalls, in retrospect, as patterns: areas of the ice where the flow seemed to concentrate, and others that his pencil scarcely touched. The image resonates as a kind of eureka moment, a founding mythology for a boy who, though never particularly strong or fast, would grow up to become the Great One, rewriting the record books by exploiting an uncanny spatial awareness—skating to where the puck is going, not where it has been, as the business-school cliché has it.
A boy who saw “In Search of Greatness” recently was inspired to replicate the Gretzky method while watching a Premier League soccer game between West Ham and Tottenham. He used an orange marker. His father took a picture of the end result and sent it to Gabe Polsky, the film’s director, who in turn forwarded the flow chart to some other sports fans. One replied, “Proves . . . you wanna be on the field.” The drawing is charming but also a tangled mass of lines that covers nearly every inch of the diagrammed pitch. The lesson I might take from it, as an amateur observer, is: you’d better be prepared to run, because the ball really travels.
I mention this not to undermine Gretzky or the film but to reinforce one of its implicit lessons, which is that you can’t teach greatness; you can only encourage it or stifle it. Gretzky’s free-associative line drawings weren’t a teaching tool so much as a manifestation of precocious and intense curiosity. He says on camera that he has a sort of permanent memory bank, in which all of the plays in all of his games remain vividly accessible. And he told me the other day that, like many famous people, he is often confronted by strangers who are eager to recall their fleeting encounters with him as children, forty-five years earlier. The difference is that he usually remembers, too (“nine times out of ten”), as long as these encounters were on the ice. “I ran into a guy one time, and he said, ‘We played against each other when we were ten,’ ” Gretzky said. “I asked, ‘What team were you on?’ He said, ‘I was on a team called the Detroit Blazers.’ And I said to him, ‘You guys wore blue and green and the goalie was left-handed.’ He goes, ‘I was the goalie!’ I said, ‘Yeah, we won, 8–1.’ He goes, ‘I know.’ ”
There’s a special aptitude there, to be sure, and also an obsession, or a “passion,” as Gretzky prefers to call it—a matter of caring enough to notice. He also says that he was always acutely aware of whether his friends and family in the stands had vacated their seats during gameplay to visit the bathroom or the concession stand—aware, in effect, of others who may or may not have been paying as much attention as he was. “It was always wonderful when you were a kid to look in the stands and see your mum and dad and sometimes your grandparents,” he told me, adding, “it doesn’t change when you get in the N.H.L.” But he granted that this wasn’t true of all pros, in his experience, only the ones who remained “kids at heart.”
“I didn’t feel like, as a kid, I was missing anything by, you know, not going to movies, or not going on a two-week family holiday,” Gretzky said. “My passion was being on the ice—and more times than not, it was on the ice by myself, in the back yard, for hours.” Walter Gretzky, Wayne’s father, flooded the grass behind the family’s home, in Brantford, Ontario, each winter. “And like my dad always says, ‘I don’t know why the good lord blessed you, but you’ve got a love for this thing like he’s never seen.’ And I think that’s sort of carried me through my whole memory of the game.”
Polsky also interviewed Pelé (“I never accepted the order of the teacher,” he says) and Jerry Rice, the all-time-great wide receiver, while splicing in footage of, among others, the Williams sisters, Tom Brady, Muhammad Ali, and David Bowie: nonconformists all, is the idea. (Rice didn’t start playing football until his sophomore year in high school; according to lore, he was a truant, and it was his speed in evading the principal that won him a spot on the team.) Michael Jordan’s less than magnanimous Hall of Fame induction speech—twenty minutes of calling out doubters and recounting slights—is revisited. The authors David Epstein (“The Sports Gene”) and Sir Ken Robinson, whose TED talk on whether or not “schools kill creativity” has been viewed fifty-four million times, appear onscreen, too, explaining concepts like “the rage to master” and warning that, with the culture’s current fixation on data and measurement, “the tail has started to wag the dog.” That is: scouting combines may be directing our ideas about what makes a good football player rather than measuring effectiveness made evident on the field.
In interviews, Polsky has called his documentary a deeply personal project, owing to his experience as a Division I hockey player at Yale, and in a sense the film can be viewed as a veiled Jordan-style speech directed at a coaching eminence, Tim Taylor, who emphasized structure and system at the crushing expense, Polsky felt, of individual creativity. (In addition to coaching at Yale for nearly thirty years, Taylor led the U.S. men’s Olympic team to an eighth-place finish, in 1994.) This was in the late nineties and early two-thousands, a time when élite hockey in general, as an aesthetic enterprise, was suffering from an excess of structural thinking—of employing systems to control for the inherent unpredictability of a free-flowing game. In a way, you could almost blame it on Gretzky, whose peculiar talents weren’t replicable enough to model, and whose trade to the Los Angeles Kings, in 1988, was meant to herald a boom in hockey fandom across the Sun Belt. N.H.L. teams sprouted in Tampa and San Jose and Anaheim, and northern franchises relocated to Dallas and Phoenix and Raleigh. Meanwhile, there weren’t enough Gretzky-like attractions to spread around the expanded league, and the owners felt, as owners often do, that winning trumped artistry as a priority for maintaining the loyalty of their new customers. Defensive traps and opportunistic counterattacking proved effective in negating talent advantages, and a semblance of parity was achieved. The Florida Panthers advanced to the Stanley Cup finals in just their third season. Youth hockey participation in this country increased substantially even as mainstream interest in the sport seemed to diminish.
Looking at today’s trends of early specialization, tiger parenting, and the obscene costs of travelling programs and private lessons in youth sports across the board, Polsky sees understandable reason for concern. There is too much coaching and not enough unstructured play. How many would-be Gretzkys and Pelés, Polsky wonders, will never be discovered—will never even discover themselves—because they’ve self-identified as gymnasts or swimmers beginning in preschool? (Even Gretzky, the film points out, played some baseball and lacrosse, not just hockey.)
It’s a fair question, but I couldn’t help thinking, while watching “In Search of Greatness,” of a conversation I’d just had with one of my older son’s friends, a seven-year-old boy, during a playdate. He spent several minutes practicing stickhandling a street-hockey ball between his legs, with great persistence, and finally told me, “I’m trying to do a William Karlsson,” alluding to this highlight from March: a breakaway in which the Vegas Golden Knights center evaded the goalie’s poke check by pulling the puck back between his own legs and then flicking it upward—into the net—from behind his skate blade. In the film, we see footage from the X Games, in 1999, when the skateboarder Tony Hawk attempted, again and again, to land a nine-hundred-degree spin, finally nailing it on his eleventh attempt. (It came after the alloted time, which only allowed for ten tries, had expired.) I knew, from my previous immersion in X Games history, that this was one of action sports’ most famous moments—a demonstration of “progression,” an expansion of the collectively known human repertoire. A decade and a half later, a dozen people had equalled or bested the feat, including a ten-year-old boy who had never known a world in which nine-hundreds weren’t thought possible.
It’s been thirty years since Gretzky arrived in California, and the new N.H.L. season began, last month, with one of his records being eclipsed by a Latino skater who grew up in the Arizona desert: a progression of demographics and degrees. The player in question is Auston Matthews, of the Toronto Maple Leafs, and though the record was minor—at twenty-one, he became the youngest player ever to register two or more points in each of his team’s first five games—his skill level is not. He represents a wave of young talent that seems poised to rescue the professional game from the so-called dead-puck doldrums that afflicted the previous generation. (In our conversation, Gretzky conceded, “the game’s just getting better, simple as that.”) Matthews’s mother, Ema, is from Hermosillo, Mexico. His father, Brian, is from California. His great-uncle Wes returned punts briefly for the Miami Dolphins, in 1966. They obviously couldn’t flood the back yard, but no matter. “Maybe twenty years ago, a guy like that would have chose football or baseball,” Gretzky said. “He’s got great hockey sense, but he’s also got power and he’s got speed.” One nice thing about greatness is that it often comes from where you least expect it.
