Wayne Gretzky's Ghost by Roy Macgregor

Author:Roy Macgregor [MacGregor, Roy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-37605-3
Publisher: Random House of Canada
Published: 2011-10-31T16:00:00+00:00

Alexandre Daigle’s response has been decidedly different. He has surrounded himself with a small circle of friends, men and women, who are intellectuals and artists. Very privately, he has sought to repair an education that ended, as so often happens in hockey, in high school. Where he once bragged he was learning English by watching Beavis and Butt-head cartoons on television, his television show of choice now is Biography. He now reads the classics—Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet this past summer—and is working his way through a thick book on the great philosophers of history: Socrates, Plato …

“That’s one of my dreams,” Daigle once told Yannick Mailloux. “Having a degree in something.” Three years ago, during the lockout, Daigle secretly enrolled in courses at the University of Ottawa, hoping to study administration. Had he not been advised to return to his junior hockey club in Victoriaville, he would have kept up the studies, delighting in the fact that, in the few classes he attended, no one had asked him a single hockey question. Perhaps it was because, when they went around the classroom and asked each student to talk a little about himself or herself, he told them he was a “dancer.”

Harriet Bird—who shot Roy Hobbs in The Natural—would find a far different athlete in Alexandre Daigle, for it is he who is constantly asking the pivotal question of both the book and the movie: “Is that all?” It is for others to say he might have been better off if he had never signed that contract that branded him for life. Asked endlessly if he would do it all differently if he could, Daigle has always smiled and replied, “I would not be so foolish.

“My first contract was a big thing,” he says. “But I never wished I’d never signed it. I’m twenty-two years old and I’m secure for life. In the long run, I’m a winner.”

“Money,” Jean-Yves Daigle had said, “is not the most important thing in life. The most important thing, être heureux—to be content.”

Had it not been for money, Alexandre Daigle might never have found the contentment he came across almost by accident, and by paying dearly, two summers ago. He was coming off the worst season of his life. Five goals, a dozen assists, injury and ridicule. He wanted nothing to do with Ottawa, nothing to do with Quebec, nothing to do with friends or teammates or the omnipresent, inquiring media.

He flew to Los Angeles and checked into the Ritz-Carlton. He rented a car deliberately unlike his image—a green Cadillac Fleetwood. He hired a personal fitness instructor and became what he calls a “gym rat,” working out obsessively. He put on muscle and weight. He went out and purchased the finest pair of Roller Blades that money could buy and put them in the trunk of the big Cadillac and began driving out to the boardwalks of Venice Beach and Marina del Ray, where he would strap them on and skate for miles in the sunshine.

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