post 7

• Hockey has taken Wayne all of the world. He's been to the Soviet Union, he's played in Europe, he's hopped back and forth across North America, and sometimes he's made the planes with seconds to spare and the door starting to close because, except for game trips, that's the way he is.
• But the longest, toughest trip he ever took covered only 60 miles, from Brantford to Toronto.
• In 1975, Wayne was 14, and by the time we knew we couldn't let things go on the way they had been. The pressures of being Wayne Gretzky in his home town, and a small town at that, were too much. It got to the point where we were afraid that he was losing his childhood.
• The MTHL said it was perfectly lefal for Wayne to play in Toronto, providing he had his release from the Brantford association and was residing in Toronto.
• Ron Sevier, president of the Brantford Minor Hockey Association, gave us that release and wished us well.
• Bill Cornish, Manager of the Nats' major bantam team for Wayne would be playing, had a boy who'd played on it 2 years earlier. Bill and his wife, Rita, offered to take Wayne into their home. He could live there, go to school, be in a good family situation, mix with the new kids, even get a trip to Europe with the Nats for a couple of exhibition games. He is living with Bill and Rita because his real parents think that it would be best for him to move out or live somewhere else for awhile.
• If we'd sent hime off to boarding school twice as far away, no one would have thought anything about it. People do that all the time, mainly because they want to give their children a better education.
• Wayne wasn't the only one in trouble. The parents of a 13 year old named Brian Rorabeck of Brighton, Ont., had also arranged to have their boy live in Toronto under legal gaurdinship so that he could play for the Young Nats' minor bantam team. So in fact, there were 2 similar cases, not one. But because Wayne was Wayne and had received so much recognition in his career, most of the publicity centred around him.
• We went around and round. They asked us why he was moving and we told them. One man said he understood what Wayne was going through in Brantford, that he had seen him play and seen it happen. We told them it was for Wayne's well being more than for his hockey.
• Wayne's father wanted him to move back to Brantford but Wayne didnt want to go, he decided to stay in Toronto and go to school and play in the junior "B" team.
• For the first time in months, he had a place to play and in his first game as a junior "B" he scored 2 goals.
• When he first joined the team, Wayne had tried to compensate by wearing defencemen's shinpads so that at least his legs would look bigger, but then he had to ditch them.
• Wayne played seven games with the nationals and had 5 goals and 5 assists. Wayne had a lot of things to learn - he couldn't make those soft passes he'd made in minor hockey, the league was to fast for that and he was having trouble getting the face-offs.