The Rink

My name is Rodger Fowler. I'm 49 years old. I grew up in Ontario, a couple of hours north of Toronto, on frozen ponds and a backyard rink my father flooded with a garden hose every December. Every kid in Ontario had a rink like that. One kid in Brantford had a better one.

In 1975 I followed a job and a girl to Southern California. The job didn't last. The girl did; Donna and I have been married 23 years. Since 1981 I've managed an ice rink in the San Fernando Valley, the Glacier, two sheets of ice in a building that used to be a bowling alley, with a snack bar, a pro shop and a Zamboni older than some of my staff.

When I started there, hockey in the Valley was a handful of transplanted Canadians and Minnesotans, a few Kings fans, and one youth team that had trouble finding a goalie. The figure skaters had most of the ice, and the public sessions paid the bills.

Then the Kings got Wayne Gretzky, and everything changed. This page is about him, and about what he did for a hockey rink in a place where it hits 105 in August.

(Why silver and black? Because that's what the Kings switched to the summer he came. Purple and gold went out, silver and black came in, and for a while it was the coolest jersey in sports. They've gone to purple and black and silver now, but this page stays the way it was in 1988.)

August 9, 1988

I was in my office behind the pro shop doing the ice schedule for the fall when one of the guys who skated our noon pickup game came in without knocking and said, "They got him." I thought he meant somebody had caught a burglar.

The Kings had traded for Gretzky, with Marty McSorley and Mike Krushelnyski coming along, and Edmonton got Jimmy Carson, Martin Gelinas, three first-round picks and a pile of money. All of Canada went into mourning. People back home still talk about it like a death in the family. My brother in Ontario didn't speak to me for about a week, as though it were my fault.

Here is what happened at one rink in the Valley:

That last line is the one I feel in my knees. Every rink manager in Southern California will tell you some version of the same story. Kids who had never seen ice watched number 99 on television or at the Forum and showed up at our front desk the next week with their parents, asking how you get started. A lot of those first kids are in college now. A few of them are playing college hockey back East, and I couldn't be prouder if they were my own.

And it wasn't only us. San Jose got the Sharks in 1991 and Anaheim got the Mighty Ducks in 1993. New rinks went up all over the Southland. Roller hockey took over every cul-de-sac and schoolyard. You'd drive through the Valley on a Saturday and see kids in Kings jerseys playing in the street with a tennis ball, in shorts, in January. I grew up in Ontario and I never thought I'd see that.

His Career

Those are the facts. What the facts don't tell you is how he played. He wasn't the biggest or the fastest or the hardest shooter. He just knew where everybody was going to be two seconds before they knew it themselves, and he'd set up shop behind the other team's net like it was his office. Every coach I know has spent twenty years trying to teach kids to see the ice the way he did. You can't teach it. You can only show them the tapes.

The Last Game

He announced it on a Friday, and on Sunday, April 18, he played his last game, at Madison Square Garden against Pittsburgh. Before the game the commissioner announced that nobody in the NHL will ever wear number 99 again. Then he went out and played.

It was an afternoon game in New York, so it was late morning here. We had a public session on, and I put the game on the TV over the snack bar and let the session run long. By the third period there were about sixty people in skates crowded around that counter, kids and parents and two of my rink guards, and nobody was skating. The Rangers lost 2-1 in overtime. His last point was an assist on a goal by Brian Leetch. When he took his last lap around the Garden ice, a nine-year-old girl in our learn-to-play program asked me why I was crying. I told her it was the cold.

The Hall

Normally a player has to wait three years after he retires before he can go into the Hockey Hall of Fame. For Gretzky they waived it, and he goes in on November 22, in Toronto. If anyone ever deserved to skip the line, it's him. I've told Donna that if I can swing the plane fare I'm going home for it. She says we'll see. She has said "we'll see" about Toronto for 23 years.

And this fall the Kings leave the Forum and move downtown to their new arena. It will be the first NHL season in twenty years without number 99 on anybody's roster. I'll be there anyway. Somebody's got to keep the Valley's hockey kids honest.

On to the records >> His best-known numbers, in one table.