post 15

• He lied. He told them the 4 were there to do a special story about Wayne - for the Oilers. They bought it, SI got its cover picture, and Wayne got his award. Estimated cost of that one cover picture: $80,000. The episode had an interesting sidelight. The Wayne Gretzky on the cover of the magazine didn't look quite like the Wayne Gretzky who received the Grcian Urn trophy between periods of a game in Edmonton, on December 22.
• For Wayne, that's becoming a problem. For instance, how do you think he felt on November 2, 1983, when an RCMP officer knocked on his door and asked him what he knew about his investment in a pirate ship? We'd heard something about it 2 weeks earlier - a call to CorpSport from a man in Pennsylvania who'd heard Wayne was in on some investment in Europe. About 2 hours after that, I got a call from Gus Badali. Did I know anything about an investment Wayne had made in some ship? Something about a 40 per cent investment in some kind of pirate ship in Europe. The FBI was involved and about $600,000 had been put into it by other investors and now the money had disappeared and they're trying to get it back; then they'd heard from a gut in Trenton, N.J. that the investment had been made on Wayne's behalf by his father, Walter Gretzky, and the FBI will be in touch with the RCMP. Then they were talking about it and Wayne said he was under age and if he had signed anything, it wouldn' have mattered. It was a pirate ship, all right. But not a movie pirate ship. Not a Errol Flynn kind of pirate ship, roving the seas and knocking off merchant ships. A genuine pirate ship positioned off the coast of Europe.
• A lawyer from somewhere in the U.S. wrote to Wayne a nice letter congratulating him on being one of the new investors in the sip, pointing out that he (the lawyer) had been working on the project since 1981 - and enclosing a bill for services rendered, requesting immediate payment. The bill was for $113,575.
• The Wayne Gretzky Celebrity tennis Tournament actually was born at 4 a.m. late in the 1980-81 hockey season during one of those late-night bull sessions between Wayne and Charlie Henry.
• Brantford, Ont., population 74,800.
• If Wayne Gretzky was holding a tennis tournament then it wasn't guiet or little. It was an Event. It was a Place to Be.
• The tournament is big now, the costs incredible. Air fares run about $14,000, accommodations $5,000, ceivic centre and banquet hall rental $12,000 - the list goes on and on. We make money every year. For the 2 years it went into research for the blind. Funds from the 1983 event were used to purchase machines to play the "talking books" to the bling - 275 units at a total cost of $45,000, distrubited across Canada, all with money raised through the tournament.