Wayne Gretzky's Ghost by Roy Macgregor Page A

physical resistance,” says Béliveau. “It’s because he’s so hyper,” says Shutt. “He winds himself up like a coil.”
    The bad nerves are a mixed blessing: what Lafleur gains inreflex and metabolism he gives up in what it does to his mental fitness. Before particularly important games he has been discovered in the dressing room at three o’clock in the afternoon—his equipment on, his skates tightened—fully five hours before game time. By the time the puck drops he is drained, which partially explains his periodic slumps in critical games. Before the pipe came along he tried to smoke out the devils inside, and there have been games, one teammate says, when he would begin chain-smoking hours before a game and continue through the intermissions.
    The best solution, he has discovered, is to rinse the mind completely of all hockey thought. He spends the jittery pre-game hours reading car magazines, clipping from architectural books for the dream-home file he keeps or taking bubble baths. On the road he and his roommate, Shutt, fight over the television, Shutt constantly looking for sports events and Lafleur’s bad nerves making any contest, even tennis, an unbearable agony. He is at his happiest watching reruns of
The Three Stooges
.
    It can be argued that the premium theorizing on most sports has fallen to the journeymen players—the Sheros and Nesterenkos of hockey, baseball’s Jim Bouton—and that the magnificently gifted—Rocket Richard in hockey, Pete Rose and Mickey Mantle in baseball—often appear to be in lifelong thinking slumps. Lafleur would rather keep things simple. His priorities always place the team and the game first, and either his fans or family second. Only once, when the team was in a rare slump, has Lafleur deliberately tried to inspire by anything but his own standard of play. He moved from his locker to the play blackboard near the showers, picked up the chalk, thought a moment, and then scribbled, “A winner never quits and a quitter never wins.” He then moved back to his locker where he sat staring up at the approving, legendary faces of
les Canadiens
of past years, and he read again the lines of poet John McRae that are stencilled just below the ceiling: “To you from failing hands we throw the torch; be yours to hold it high.”
    â€”
    I’ve always been there when he needed somebody.
He knows I’ll always be there. —Jean Béliveau
    â€œI may never be able to play like him,” Lafleur once said of Béliveau. “But I’d like to be the man he is.” It is a hero worship that has been both inspiration and salvation to Guy Lafleur. Twenty years ago in the Ottawa River town of Thurso, Quebec, Lafleur’s parents found him sleeping in his new hockey equipment, and though the dream of that night has long since faded, it is not unlikely that Jean Béliveau threaded a breakaway pass to his new young winger and that the roar of the Forum crowd for Lafleur’s goal sounds yet in whatever dimension dreams retire to.
    As Béliveau had before him, Lafleur left the small town for Quebec City, and their resulting glory was comparable. As an “amateur” junior, Lafleur made close to $20,000 a year, drove a free Buick and dressed in the finest “gift” clothes. He wore No. 4, Béliveau’s signature in Montreal, and Lafleur made sure he kept a poster of his idol taped to the wall beside his locker.
    In Lafleur’s final year—when he scored an astonishing 130 goals—it was arranged that the sensation would come to Montreal. By rights, as the best amateur in the country, he should have gone to the last-place California Golden Seals, but a celebrated sleight of hand involving trades and draft picks engineered by Montreal’s general manager Sam Pollock saw the Canadiens come up with Lafleur.
    It was accepted that Lafleur was carrying Béliveau’s torch