{"id":282,"date":"2009-12-09T10:45:23","date_gmt":"2009-12-09T15:45:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/?p=282"},"modified":"2009-12-16T15:26:25","modified_gmt":"2009-12-16T20:26:25","slug":"gretzky-trade-shattered-canadas-sporting-innocence-brunt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/2009\/12\/gretzky-trade-shattered-canadas-sporting-innocence-brunt\/","title":{"rendered":"Gretzky trade shattered Canada&#8217;s hockey innocence: sports writer"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_283\" style=\"width: 559px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-283\" decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-full wp-image-283  \" title=\"stephenbruntweb\" src=\"http:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/12\/stephenbruntweb.jpg\" alt=\"Stephen Brunt\" width=\"549\" height=\"324\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-283\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Stephen Brunt speaking to Sport Management students at Brock<\/p><\/div>\n<p>For Canadian hockey fans possessive of their country\u2019s talent, Wayne Gretzky\u2019s 1988 trade to the Los Angeles Kings was a tear jerker, says Stephen Brunt, <em>Globe and Mail<\/em> sports writer and author of seven books.<\/p>\n<p>The Great One summed it up for all of us during the pivotal news conference announcing his trade from the Edmonton Oilers to sunny California. The spin was working well for the American franchise, Brunt told a Brock audience Dec. 3. Then Gretzky began to cry.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt was as if this guy was being dragged away against his will,\u201d Brunt said. \u201cIt was something of ours that was being taken from us.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt was an American coming in, plunking down money and saying \u2018I want that.\u2019 And that resonates pretty deeply in our culture.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Brunt spoke at Brock to promote his new book, <em>Gretzky\u2019s Tears: Hockey, Canada and the Day Everything Changed<\/em>. It is an account of the trade and its impact on Canadian sports culture. The Department of Sport Management hosted the event.<\/p>\n<p>With the trade, Brunt said, Gretzky showed that he was a new breed of athlete. His girlfriend, Janet Jones, was a Hollywood actress. He was already living in Los Angeles during the off-season anyway, Brunt said.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cHe understood how big he could be,\u201d he said. \u201cHe was maxed out in Canada in terms of how much he could make.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Gordie Howe once took a jacket from the Detroit Red Wings in lieu of a pay raise, Brunt said, because playing hockey in Detroit was still better than working on a farm in Saskatchewan. Gretzky introduced a new concept &#8211; the \u201cathlete entrepreneur.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Brunt answered questions from the floor on a range of topics, including recent attempts by the Buffalo Bills to hold home games in Toronto.<\/p>\n<p>The attempts, Brunt said, overlook why sports teams are so successful \u2013 the loyalty of the hometown crowd.<\/p>\n<p>\u201c(Buffalo) is selling out this year because people live and die with that team,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s something you can\u2019t just transport to Toronto. It\u2019s not that Toronto isn\u2019t big enough, or that it doesn\u2019t like football. It\u2019s that Toronto doesn\u2019t care about that team. If Toronto was on the front of those jerseys, it would be a different story.\u201d<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_284\" style=\"width: 310px\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\"><img aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-284\" decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-284\" title=\"bruntweb\" src=\"http:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/12\/bruntweb-300x177.jpg\" alt=\"Stephen Brunt signs copies of his new book, Gretzky's Tears\" width=\"300\" height=\"177\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-284\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Stephen Brunt signs copies of his new book, Gretzky&#39;s Tears<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Wayne Gretzky&#8217;s 1988 trade to the Los Angeles Kings ended the era of professional hockey players who were just happy to be there, Stephen Brunt says.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":283,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3,1],"tags":[28,60,59,64,66,57,3331],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=282"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":448,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282\/revisions\/448"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/283"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=282"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=282"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=282"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}