This was 1978, and Mike Fornes, the TV/radio voice of the World Hockey Association’s Indianapolis Racers, was given an errand: He was to pick up a slight, 17-year-old Racers hockey player named Wayne Gretzky at his billet family’s home in suburban Indy and take him to nearby Castleton Mall for an autograph signing.
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Fornes did as he was told and headed down Allisonville Road, carrying a young man who would go on to score the most goals and assists in NHL history, win four Stanley Cups as a member of the dynastic Edmonton Oilers and earn the simple nickname, The Great One.
But this was 1978. And this was Indianapolis, a city best known at the time for basketball and motorsports. (The Colts didn’t arrive until 1984.) At that point, only the hockey cognoscenti, the ones who regularly read the back pages of The Hockey News, knew that Gretzky was the Next Great Player, having put up ridiculous statistics everywhere he had played, including 70 goals and 182 assists in 63 games in junior hockey’s Sault Ste. Marie.
The city shrugged.
“People kept coming up to me — ‘Can you sign this for me?'” Fornes recalled. “I’m saying, ‘Wait, get this kid to sign for you.’ They’d say, ‘Who’s that?’ Nobody knew who he was. I mean, nobody. It was early in his tenure, but nobody had any idea, and it was embarrassing to me because I thought the focus should be on him.”
It’s a weird footnote in Indianapolis sports history; Gretzky, the greatest player ever to lace up a pair of skates, began his professional career right here, practicing at the Coliseum and playing at Market Square Arena.
“The city had no clue,” former Racers teammate Peter Driscoll said. He was not available for this story but spoke to me in 2018 when Gretzky returned to Indy for an ECHL All-Star Game. “Not in the least. It’s probably not much different now than it was back when we were playing; you have your hardcore 5,000 fans every night, and some nights we had more than that, but this isn’t a great hockey town. I wish that it was; I live here and all, but I’m just being honest.”
One year earlier, Gretzky had torn up junior hockey and now, at age 17, his options were dwindling. He was ready to make the next move up the ladder, but the NHL had a rule that players could not be drafted until they were 20. The upstart WHA allowed players to join its league at age 18, but for Gretzky, the league skirted the rule by allowing the Soon-To-Be Great One to sign a personal services contract with Indianapolis owner Nelson Skalbania.
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Now he was in Indy, taking some classes at Broad Ripple High School, living with a family in the Brookshire development in Carmel. “I went periodically,” Gretzky said with a laugh back in 2018.
He would play just eight games with the Racers, but his impact was muted. Indy had, and still has, a small hardcore contingent of hockey fans. Gretzky was a bit of a curiosity, but outside of the insular world of hockey, nobody really knew who he was or what he would eventually be.
In fact, the local paper, the Indianapolis Star, spelled his surname “Gretsky” in a headline.
But Gretzky’s curious tenure in Indianapolis was short. And almost as quickly as it started, it was over. Gretzky and some teammates were soon sold to the Oilers, where Gretzky, Jari Kurri, Grant Fuhr and so many other stars turned Edmonton into an NHL dynasty.
What might have been in Indianapolis …
Al Karlander and Ken Block, two former Racers who enjoyed long professional hockey careers and are now based in Indy, sat on the back porch of Prairie View Golf Club in Carmel recently. Their first impressions of Gretzky?
“He looked fragile,” said Karlander, who was Gordie Howe’s roommate when Karlander was a rookie with the Detroit Red Wings.
Block nodded.
“Yes, fragile,” he agreed. “I didn’t expect him to be that good. He was an OK skater, not great. He didn’t shoot the puck very hard. But as time went on, you started to see, he just knew where to be.”
Karlander: “He looked out of place out there in a lot of situations; he really did.”
Driscoll, who looked after Gretzky during his time in Indy, shared his first impressions when we spoke back in 2018.
“First, I thought, ‘Man, he’s got to pop some of those zits, this kid,'” he said. “Then you saw him play and the sense he had on the ice, it was a pleasure to watch him skate and play.”
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He was skinny, maybe 165-170 pounds at the time. He wasn’t a great skater and he didn’t have a Bobby Hull howitzer. But he had something else that made him transcendent: He understood time and space, had incredible vision, knew where the puck was going, and not where it was. He was a hockey prodigy, blessed with a next-level understanding of the game. Larry Bird in Daoust Skates.
At that point, though, he had not yet proven he could play with grown men, and both Karlander and Block wondered if opponents might take runs at him.
“There were guys (throughout the league) who had no problem trying to take him out,” Karlander recalled. “And we really didn’t have anybody who would back him up. We didn’t have a Dave Semenko (the Oilers enforcer who protected Gretzky in Edmonton) at the time. We didn’t have that kind of guy on our roster.”
Fornes heard whispers of doubt in the room.
“First few days of camp, I kept hearing, ‘He’s not that good,'” Fornes said. “I don’t know what they were expecting. Were they thinking he was going to be like Bobby Hull and shoot the puck from center ice and hit the top corner of the net?
“I mean, we didn’t have any idea of what he would become, especially in the sense of setting up his office behind the net, and how he would dictate the game from there. Nobody had done that before, but Wayne did. And the impressions changed daily. Every practice, every game, you saw more and more.”
Gretzky survived and slowly found his footing. And even if he lacked top-end skating speed, he was incredibly elusive and patient with the puck. He also had the ability to initiate offense from behind the net, something nobody else had really done.
“Once he got to Edmonton, they tested the players’ strength and speed and everything else, and he was near the bottom in everything,” Karlander said. “But you’d watch him, and you’d see those flashes. He played more of a mental game; you could see the wheels turning. He knew what he wanted to do whether he had the puck or not. He didn’t have the time and space in the pros, which was his game, the higher tempo and the size disadvantage and all of that, but you could slowly see it coming.
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“I thought, ‘He’s going to be a good hockey player,’ but I couldn’t see him becoming the player he eventually became.”
Racers coach Pat “Whitey” Stapleton wasn’t quite sure what to make of him.
“I think Whitey thought the whole thing was a bit gimmicky,” Karlander said. “He was old school; he wanted someone with experience.”
Karlander was concerned the WHA, which was desperately trying to establish its own identity in the hope of merging with the NHL, was throwing young players to the wolves.
“I thought, ‘Are we going too young?'” he said. “We had a kid our first year of the Racers, guy named Craig Hanmer, he was 18, and he wasn’t ready for it. It destroyed him. I’m thinking, ‘Slow down with the underaged kids.’ I saw some 18-year-olds come into our league and it ruined them.”
It didn’t ruin Gretzky. Or Mark Napier with the Birmingham Bulls. Or Mark Messier, who actually played five games for the Racers.
It took a few games for Gretzky to find his footing in Indy, but he finished with three goals and three assists in eight games, the first two goals coming in his fifth game.
“I watched some video of his first few goals for us yesterday; his first and second goals were total flukes, awful goals,” Karlander said, smiling. “One was a backhand that the goalie (Dave Dryden) flat missed and the other was a shot (four seconds later) from the corner that went off somebody’s knee and into the net. But he was crazy happy. I think there was a lot of pressure on him to produce.”
Gretzky was not made available for this story, but four years ago, he returned to Indy and spoke about his time here.
“We were probably all a little ahead of ourselves,” Gretzky said at the time. “I probably wasn’t old enough or good enough to be a flag bearer for a young franchise, so maybe I was in a little over my head …
“But I lived with a family in Carmel, they were wonderful to me, treated me like one of their own children. It was the most comfortable part of being here. When I was at the rink for practice and games, I was playing with grown men, so it was a whole different animal. My memories are good. I wish I could have been a better player at that age; maybe I still would have been here.”
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When Gretzky arrived in Indy, the older Racers told him to shed the Jofa helmet he always wore and play without protection; those were the times, and if you wanted to look like you belonged, you played without a bucket.
Well, one day, Gretzky’s father, Walter, came down to Indy from Ontario to watch the Racers practice. His son was not wearing a helmet. Walter pounded on the glass.
“Put that helmet back on,” Walter yelled to his son.
He put the helmet back on.
Gretzky may have been a high school student, but he was a pro hockey player, and that meant … hitting the bars. You practice, you have a few pops. You play, you have a few pops. Gretzky, age 17, was one of the boys.
“We snuck him in all the time,” Block said, laughing. “I remember one time in Birmingham (Ala.), there was a bar right across the street from the rink. We snuck him in there. We did that all the time, at home, on the road. He just walked in with a bunch of guys on our team, have a few beers with us. He learned how to drink, that’s for sure.”
Gretzky was a quiet sort — Fornes recalled that Gretzky wasn’t terribly upset that nobody at the mall recognized him — but he made himself at home in Indy.
“One day, he comes into Whitey’s office, he sits down, puts his feet up on the secretary’s desk and calls his girlfriend at the time back in Sault Ste. Marie,” Karlander said. “Which is an international call and was probably five dollars a minute. And he’s chatting away, running up the bill.”
Money was always a problem for the Racers and specifically their owner, Skalbania. They were losing $40,000 per game, even with Gretzky in the lineup. Skalbania hoped — foolishly, it turned out — that Gretzky’s presence would goose attendance, but it never happened.
“I actually made sure guys went straight to the bank when they got paid,” Karlander said. “I don’t remember the year, but we were on the road in Cincinnati, we checked into the hotel and they asked who was paying for it. I actually used my Amex card to pay for the rooms. I got paid back — eventually — but (the Racers) were undercapitalized from the beginning.”
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After his eight games for the Racers, Gretzky was sold to the Oilers along with goalie Eddie Mio and Driscoll for a reported $850,000. The organization was bleeding red. The great experiment was failing.
“That was the end for us,” Karlander said. “When the trade was made, we knew it was over.”
Mio and Gretzky had never crossed paths until they arrived in Indianapolis but they quickly clicked. Management asked Mio and Driscoll, who lived about a mile away from Gretzky’s host family, to keep an eye on the wunderkind.
“First time I met him, he was this scrawny little kid, and I know everybody else was thinking the same thing,” said Mio, who is currently a player agent and living in Windsor, Ont. “We all thought, ‘Well, he better be one hell of a player because he’s so small.’ I mean, I worried he’d get wiped out, especially in the WHA, which was a rough league, a brawling league.
“We liked the kid right off the bat. We knew he’d be hanging around with his high school buddies, we’d drive around the Steak ‘n Shake (in Carmel) or his high school (Broad Ripple), we’d yell at the kid, ‘Hey, you need anything?’ and it built from there.”
Mio eventually became the best man in Gretzky’s wedding and vice versa, and Mio worked for one of Gretzky’s businesses after he retired. Mio had seven years on Gretzky, but they established their relationship during that short time in Indy, then became quite close during their days in Edmonton.
Despite Gretzky’s burgeoning reputation as a young player, teammates recalled there was little to no jealousy toward the young center. He was making good money, he was being used as the face of the franchise (with little success), but his Racers teammates seemed to warm up to him.
“We all liked him, and we did whatever we could to make him more comfortable,” former Racers teammate Blaine Stoughton said. “I had a girlfriend at the time, now my wife, and we would do whatever we could to make sure he was OK. Every practice, we’d ask him if we could do anything. And he was always fine. Always.”
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Said Fornes: “Wayne bought this brown Trans-Am, and it was the only thing you saw from this kid that said he was carrying around some money. The guys used to tease him, call him ‘Brinks.’ Funny thing, a couple of years later I was talking to him, he told me his first two checks from the Racers actually bounced. But he never said a word. He turned it over to his agent and that’s it. Not only did he see the ice in a certain way, but I think he saw life in the big picture; he knew this wasn’t going to be the end of the trail. He knew big things were coming, just to bide his time and do his job.”
If there was pressure, it didn’t often show.
“I can’t speak for him, but we’re talking about a 17-year-old who, for the last 13 years, has been touted as the best player to come out,” Mio said. “He had a lot of pressure on him, everybody was talking about him, so I’m sure he was a little nervous. But he had a great support system around him, starting with his family, and we tried to help him the best we could.”
In Indy, Gretzky took the first baby steps on his professional journey, but it didn’t take long for Mio to see the ethereal skills that would make him great.
“It was only eight games here (in Indy), but each game, you saw the potential and saw him growing into his game,” Mio said. “I remember a game after the (Indy-Edmonton) trade, we were in Cincinnati, for some reason he didn’t play much in the first and second period, but the third period, he got ice time, and he took over completely. … When you piss him off, he’s going to make you pay. (Then-Edmonton coach Glen) Sather pissed him off, Wayne went off and he never looked back. That’s when I really knew this kid was something.”
This, though, was the beginning of the end of big-time professional hockey in Indianapolis, which now features the ECHL’s Indy Fuel.
With finances getting messier by the day and players rushing to the bank in the hope of cashing their checks, Skalbania reached an unpopular conclusion. After selling off Gretzky in November, the Racers folded in December.
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“After practice, Whitey called the three of us outside the dressing room, said go home and pack, take your equipment and meet at the airport at 2,” Mio recalled. “He told us, ‘You’re being sold.'”
Where? they asked.
Not sure, they were told. Either Winnipeg or Edmonton.
“So we got to the airport, no word, no word, sat there and hour and a half, finally Whitey got a phone call: ‘go to Minneapolis and the deal should be done by the time you get there,'” Mio said. “So we loaded everything up on this Lear jets, took off, and five minutes into the flight, the pilot comes back and says, ‘By the way, who’s going to pay for this?'”
The players looked at one another, and figured the team waiting on them, either Winnipeg or Edmonton, would take care of the bill. But no. The pilot wanted to be paid immediately.
“Do you take credit card?” Mio asked.
Strangely for the times, the pilot had a credit-card sweeper and did his business, charging Mio roughly $10,000 for the trip. But there was a potential problem.
“You think they’ll check?” Mio asked his teammates.
“Check what?”
“Well, it’s got a limit of 500 dollars Canadian per day on it. Luckily, he didn’t check. Then we were met by the Oilers PR man, he said, “‘C’mon guys, hurry up, hurry up, the press has been waiting two, three hours.’ I said, ‘I’m not going anywhere until you take care of this (bill).’ Remember, I was only making $35,000 a year at that time. They paid me back eventually. I wish I had given it to Wayne in a nice plaque. History was made. Who knew then what he would be.”
If only Indy had known …
(Top image: John Bradford / The Athletic. Photos: Bruce Bennett Studios via Getty Images Studios / Getty Images)