Wayne Gretzky—The Great One—is one of the finest and most celebrated hockey players who ever lived. He holds sixty-one individual National Hockey League (NHL; see entry under 1910s—Sports and Games in volume 1) records. On ten occasions, he was the league's scoring champ. On nine occasions, he was named the league's Most Valuable Player (MVP). He was voted to the NHL All-Star team eighteen times, and three times was the All-Star game's MVP.

Gretzky began skating when he was two-and-a-half years old. At age ten, he scored 378 goals while playing for a peewee team in his hometown of Brantford, Ontario, Canada. In 1978, when he was seventeen, he signed his first professional contract with the Indianapolis Racers of the upstart World Hockey Association (WHA) but played in just eight games before being sold to the Edmonton Oilers. Following the merger between the WHA...