Living with a nickname you are awarded at 10 years old is not exactly a recipe for success. Who you are as a pre-teen tends to have fairly little correlation to the adult you will eventually become, especially when it comes to the specific familiarties that make a nickname possible.
Luckily for Wayne Gretzky, his childhood nickname worked out just fine for him. Speaking at TNT’s broadcast desk during Game 5 of the Stanley Cup Final between the Florida Panthers and Edmonton Oilers, Gretzky explained how he eventually got dubbed as “The Great One” as a child.
“I was 10 years old. A reporter from the London Free Press came down and did a story on me. I scored 400 goals that year,” Gretzky explained. “At the end of the article he said, ‘NHL guys have one nickname. Mr. Hockey. The Golden Jet. We should just call him The Great One.’ My dad tried to kill that right away, but it just kept coming back and coming back. Finally I was just like, well, we’re going to have to live with it.”
First, can you imagine playing youth hockey against a 10-year-old Gretzky? How many games do youth hockey player play in Canada? Was he averaging 10 goals per game?
Next, this reporter who felt bold enough to tell a child, “Yeah, we’re just going to call you The Great One,” I mean, it worked out, but still, maybe just have a little concern about the weight of expectations before coming down with that one.
Finally, shout out to Gretzky’s dad, who apparently tried in vain for years to scrub The Great One moniker from his son, only for Wayne to continually prove that he was, in fact, The Great One.
Glad it worked out for everyone in the end.
More on Sports Illustrated
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Wayne Gretzky Explains How He Got Dubbed 'The Great One' at Age 10.
