Wayne Gretzky's Ghost by Roy Macgregor

same friendly eyes could have spilled tears over the red, white and blue Canadiens-coloured chesterfield in Jean Béliveau’s office as Lafleur sat crying over whatever it was that had gone so wrong with his promised life.
    But eyes can also weep for joy. And Antoine Viau, who has waited much of his life for this moment, is dampening slightly as he stands watching his beloved Canadiens skate and shoot and actually breathe. The Montreal Forum is empty of fans, but Guy Lafleur—who an hour earlier has said “What good is money when you play and lose?”—is skating with Stanley Cup intentions during a $25-per-player pre-season scrimmage. His wispy hair matted with the cream cake his teammates have used to celebrate his twenty-seventh birthday, Lafleur commands his magic to turn a 4–2 deficit into victory. In the dying minutes he scores, sets up the tying goal, then single-handedly wins the game in overtime with a phantom shot from the point. He has served notice against the best hockey team in the world, his own, that Lafleur is ready for the new season. For Antoine Viau, who sweeps floors nights at the American-owned IBM plant, the state of
les Canadiens
is, in many ways, the state of his own well-being. The team and Lafleur are an unspoken vindication.
    â€œAh, Lafleur,” Viau says, courteously speaking English to the reporter who helped him sneak in. “Lafleur … Lafleur … I love it!”
    Guy Lafleur is more symbol than human to a great many Québécois. “There is,” says Jerry Petrie, Lafleur’s agent, “probably more pressure on him to perform from the people in this province than there is on René Lévesque.”
    We may be, as Irving Layton has said, “a dull people enamoured of childish games,” but Layton is certainly not speaking for those to whom hockey is a far more mature passion than politics. For them, Lafleur occupies the highest office in the land.“Guy is the true throwback,” says Ken Dryden, the Canadiens’ goaltender. “I look out sometimes and see the St. Lawrence skater, not the player, and it is a beautiful thing to behold.”
    Pierre Larouche, who came to Montreal from Pittsburgh last year, says he actually used to cheer for Lafleur when their teams played: “They’d be ahead 6–1 and I’d be on the bench wishing he’d score more, just so I could watch and see how it is done.”
    The last to recognize this special status has probably been Lafleur himself. In Moscow this summer he was asked by the head of hockey and the director of all Soviet sports to pick his own world all-star team and when he came to right wing he blushed deeply and said “Me!”—quickly covering his embarrassment with a laugh that implied it was merely his own little joke, but the Soviet officials gravely nodded in total agreement.
    â€œThe Flower is a very strange person,” says Lafleur’s linemate and good friend Steve Shutt. It is not for any obvious idiosyncrasy such as his superstitious tap of the goal netting to start each game and period; what is truly odd, in Shutt’s evaluation, is that Lafleur is “the furthest thing from an athlete you’d ever want to see off the ice.” A loyal consumer of Molson’s ale (the brewery owns his team) and a chain-smoker who two weeks ago switched to a pipe, Lafleur does little more than work out with suntan oil in the off-season.
    â€œHe shows up at camp, puts on his skates and it’s the first time he’s been on them since the playoff,” says Larry Robinson of the Canadiens. “And the frightening thing is he just flies by everybody immediately.”
    For people like Jean Béliveau, who even in retirement runs two to three miles a day, it is a continuing mystery how Lafleur—who hasn’t attended an optional practice in years—remains so fit. “The most amazing thing about him is his