Name: Wayne Gretzky | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #471
Uploaded: 2023-11-21T16:00:17.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Wayne Gretzky | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #471' from Theo Von on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-11-21. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Wayne Gretzky | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #471' from Theo Von on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-11-21. Transcript available.

Wayne Gretzky | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #471

Today's guest is a legend in the sport of hockey and a legend just in humanity,
in human history.
It's a name that's synonymous with being victorious.
He's a four-time Stanley Cup winner.
He has more records than Sun Studios.
This guy has more records in hockey than anyone.
You can catch him on the TNT NHL panel.
I'm so thankful to spend time with him today, Mr. Wayne Gretzky.
Shine that light on me
I'll sit and tell you my stories
Shine on me
And I will find a song I've been singing
I'm going to stay
I'm from Louisiana, man. It's pretty good. We didn't ever had...
We had a team...
I think it was the Algae or something. I don't know what our...
It was the East Coast League, probably.
Yeah, it was like, are the Mudbirds or something. Some team.
Mudbirds.
Yeah, it was definitely like, even the mascot sounded like it wasn't going to
survive, you know.
It was like, I think it was the...
That's funny.
I think it was like...
The mascot got traded.
I think it was the oil spill pigeons or something.
Like, because there was... We had a lot of issues down there.
That was very funny.
So, I think our mascot was...
Yeah, it was bad. The mascot always had bandages on and stuff.
I remember they break...
It was just... It didn't do well.
Yeah.
The timing probably wasn't great. It's kind of grown now. Like, there's a team
here in Atlanta
that does pretty well. It's like comparable to AA in baseball. It's not AAA.
And they do pretty
good here. And they're talking about bringing another NHL team to Atlanta.
No way.
It'll be the third time in 40 years, but...
Yeah, they tried it twice, I know, over the history of time. And do you know,
like, yeah,
why doesn't it succeed, you think, in certain markets? Is it just not the... Is
it...
Well...
Does it just take people to be there? Or does it take something special to be
in a market
for hockey to survive?
It's a little bit of both, because we don't have... You know, we don't have...
Like, baseball
and football, it's been in the South and the Southwest forever, right?
Oh, yeah.
Hockey's just kind of getting there. So, back in the 70s, when the Flames first
came in,
the expansion rules were different. The owners wanted the money, the league
wanted the money,
but they gave you the worst teams. So, they would go five, six, seven years and
go,
well, it's not a hockey city. Well, people get tired of paying to watch a team
lose, right?
Yeah.
So, then they came back again, it was kind of the same expansion rules, and it
failed again.
Everybody got wiser. And when Vegas came in, they got the ninth best player on
every team.
They got low draft picks, and they built a foundation, and people got excited.
Look,
our team's good. Seattle got the same sort of thing as Vegas. If Atlanta gets
another team,
they're going to get that advantage again, they're going to get good treatment.
And maybe this will
become a good hockey city because people are saying, geez, we're winning and
let's go to the
games. So, it's not fair to people of Atlanta, their teams were so bad, you
just say, I'm not
paying anymore.
Yeah. At a certain point, you can't go and be really supporting some of the
teams. I think in
the South, well, the South is also kind of religious. There's more religion
there. And the
only person we've ever seen even kind of, or the only person that people
believe behaves or gets
wild on water is Jesus, really. So, I think the second you see a guy saying,
hey, look what I'm
going to do out here on this frozen lake, I think it makes you wonder what's
going on here.
Well, in Canada, we call our arenas, churches.
Oh, yeah? Really?
Because, you know, in Canada, it's hockey and religion. Those are the two
biggest things,
right? So, you can be, you know, sports is very popular in our country.
Football, Canadian
football, baseball, the Blue Jays do well. The Raptors have done really well.
So, it's
kind of Canada's team, the Raptors and the Blue Jays.
Yeah.
But hockey is everywhere, right? So, you can be driving in your car in July and
if you're
listening to talk radio, it's still 90% hockey that they're talking about June,
July, and
August.
Because you can still do it.
And it's so popular, right?
Oh, yeah. People love it. People, I think it's unbelievable.
Yeah. It's, you know, like down in the U.S., I always encourage parents to tell
their kids,
play every sport, tennis, baseball, football, basketball, soccer, field lacrosse,
and they're
all so big. And if you sat down here, you'd say, okay, baseball is probably the
most popular
sport or no, it's basketball is the biggest sport.
Yeah.
And then you're like, well, football's pretty big. But in Canada, there's no
definition.
It's one.
It's one.
It's ice hockey.
It's hockey.
That's it.
Yeah. I think, I'm trying to think of why we never, yeah, I think, yeah, up
there, if
everything's frozen, you, you know, yeah, well, we got a big advantage because
you got free
ice. Yeah. You got free ice. Right. You know, it's a big thing, you know? Oh,
yeah. Ice is,
I think, $18 a bag where I'm from. Yeah. It's, it's, ice is expensive. And, you
know, parents,
a lot of parents, it's hard for them to afford hockey equipment, ice skates,
paying for ice
time. But in Canada, most of the places you can play, I grew up in Southern
Ontario, which
is, uh, basically between Niagara Falls, New York and, uh, Detroit. Oh yeah.
That's, I mean,
that's the third shelf of the freezer section, buddy. That's pretty, it gets
pretty chilly
there. So we had an ice rink in my backyard from the time I was three years old.
Yeah. Yeah.
I saw, I saw some lore about that. Yeah. So my dad would go and he would buy a
sprinkler
head in December, which they always thought he was crazy. Who's buying a sprinkler
head Christmas
time anyway. And he would put it out in the middle of the ice and he would let
it go back
and forth for like two hours and then go move it. And now there's part of the
ice. And his
ice was always about this thick and it would last till probably the end of
March. Did he
lay a good rank? Oh, he had the best. Really? Yeah. And he was funny. People
used to stop
by the house and say, how does Walter get his grass so green? What do you do?
What are you
putting in your grass? My dad didn't do anything. It was just probably from the
ice being so
good for the grass. He always had the greenest grass in the neighborhood and
didn't do anything.
That's pretty classic, man. Yeah. We had some uneven areas. I remember I played
baseball.
I mean, I didn't, I don't know if I was, you know, mom signed me up a couple
seasons, man,
and it wasn't great for me, but our field was uneven. We had an uneven field.
So every ball,
if you hit anything second base, it was all ended up in right field, right? We
probably had
25% gradient on the field. So we had at least two right fielders always, at
least.
Well, that's probably, now listen, I grew up loving baseball. I went and saw my
grandson play the
other day. He had his hat on backwards. I think he was picking Danny Lyons.
Always. Yeah. Oh yeah. There's always that kid out there who ends up doing
being a gardener or
something. Yeah. And then I took them to, we went to watch them play ice hockey
the next day and
they're out there sweating and skating for an hour, loving it. Yeah. And they
got to figure out a way
to get these kids more enthusiastic about baseball because it's not a lot of
fun for some of them
who are standing out in the outfield. Yeah. I think, and I think that's one of
the reasons made,
I don't know if baseball is, I guess it's always America's sport because there's
something rooted
in tradition about it. There's something, I mean, you give an American a hot
dog, they'll sit there
and do anything for a little while, you know, but I think it's true. Yeah. It's,
and I, you know,
I do it if somebody's like, and the history of the game, you know, the history
of baseball from
Babe Ruth, what he did to what Jackie Robinson did for everyone. Right. There's
so much history and
let's face it, it's economically easier to buy a pair of shoes and a baseball
glove than to have to
buy a whole entire hockey equipment sort of, yeah, to set that up in certain
parts. Right. And then
in other parts, it's the other way around, you know, like it would be tougher
to like heat a
basketball court in the winter in Canada. Yeah. So that people have the
opportunity to be there
and play as much. Yeah. We don't, you know, although the Raptors have really
found a niche
in our country. Yeah. Like they're huge. Yeah. People love them. I was in your
country when they
won the championship games and I wasn't in Vancouver, but people were like
beating each other
and hugging each other at the same time. So like in our country, like you're in
Vancouver,
you're a Canucks fan and you're in Alberta, you're either Flames, Oilers and
all the way across.
Right. But if you're in Vancouver or Newfoundland, you're a Blue Jays fan or a
Raptors fan.
It's just, it's Canada's team and they just all cling to it. Yeah. It's
something pretty special
about it. And I always see when guys get traded up, they're more basketball
than baseball. And guys,
well, I don't want to play in Canada. I want to stay in my own country. But the
guys who go there
will tell you, they get treated phenomenally. It's a great city to live in. It's
a great country and
people are nice. Okay. People's always so nice in Canada. Even if somebody was
angry,
they may, I bet they would, they'd come across the street and they'd just say,
Hey, I'm angry,
but I'm sorry. Yeah. There's a lot of stories up there.
Yeah. They're just too kind. Well, I noticed even like, you know, I grew up in
the South. There's
a lot of like, I don't know if there's still as much, but especially when I was
growing up,
there was like more racial disparity down there, you know, cause there's a lot
of history of like
black and white racism down there. And, um, and when I was in Canada, I don't
feel that energy.
I don't, everybody seems the same. It's like, I often say that to people that
we just, we don't seem to have racism in our country. People all seem to get
along,
you know, and it's, that's why people always come up to me and they say, you're
from Canada,
right. And I say, yeah, like Canadians are all so nice. And I go, yeah, I think
they are. And I
said, but you know, I got five American kids, five American grandchildren, and
they're all nice kids
too. So you can meet a lot of nice people in the United States. Right. Yeah.
Well, I think if you're
coming out of that Gretzky lineage, I think you guys have to see, you guys, I
mean, it seemed pretty
just like nice folks, you know? Um, well, they got, they had a good mother. So,
you know, listen,
when you're, when you're working and playing hockey, you know, it's hard, you
know, the schedule is
tough. Oh yeah. You can't be like playing on the West coast in LA and Edmonton.
We're always
either playing or in an airplane. Right. So listen, uh, I love my kids dearly,
but it was the mother
who was around them. The mothers are so, so vital. It was like my, my
relationship with my mom and dad
was very close. My dad was sort of this hockey father of the country. You know,
people loved my dad,
Walter Gretzky, man, but I would always say, but it was my mom behind the
scenes that kept our family.
She was a wonderful lady and she always kind of stayed out of the limelight.
Like when I was a kid
and I play all the parents used to sit sort of together and my mom would sit in
the corner by
herself. So what did she like to do your mom? Like what were some, like when
she had time for
herself, what were some hobbies that she liked? Cause I, I mean, from what it
here, from what it sounds
like your dad probably got pretty involved with you once you started playing
hockey as much.
So a lot of people don't know this, but I had a, um, down syndrome aunt and she
was born in the
fifties. And back in those days, they would take these kids and basically they
put them in asylums
and medicate them. A