182 Points and Gone: The Year the Soo Invented 99

By 1977 Wayne Gretzky was already the most publicized child athlete in Canada - 378 goals in a single novice season at age 10, then a Junior B apprenticeship against players years older, and even a three-game emergency cameo with the Peterborough Petes at 15 that produced three assists. None of it made him the first pick. Walter Gretzky had told the Ontario teams, in writing, that his son would not move to Sault Ste. Marie, a northern outpost whose junior team endured the league's most brutal travel; the family expected Wayne to land in Peterborough, close to Brantford. Oshawa took Tom McCarthy first. Niagara Falls took Steve Peters second. And Greyhounds general manager Angelo Bumbacco, holding the third pick for a team that had just finished third-last, decided a written refusal was a negotiating position rather than a fact, and called the name anyway. It remains one of the great calculated risks in junior hockey history: the two clubs that flinched are trivia answers, and the one that gambled owns the origin story of 99.

The standoff lasted most of the summer, and Bumbacco won it the way small-market lifers do: patiently, personally, and with terms nobody else had thought to offer. He worked on Walter directly, and the package that turned the family was practical rather than glamorous - a guarantee of four years of tuition at any North American university if Wayne was ever cut or injured, and a billet arrangement with a family the Gretzkys already knew, which solved the loneliness problem that 700 kilometers had created. Wayne signed on August 16, 1977. The detail that sealed the relationship came later, and it is the most Bumbacco story of all: on a cold August day, when the 16-year-old admitted he owned no warm jacket for the winter ahead, the general manager simply went out and bought him a coat. Gretzky would say the city ended up reminding him of Brantford. The travel his father feared was real - the Soo's road trips were the league's worst - but the kid the town got in exchange doubled attendance at Memorial Gardens by himself and put a struggling franchise on Hockey Night in Canada.

The most valuable piece of intellectual property in hockey was improvised in the Soo dressing room inside a month. Gretzky arrived wanting 9, the number of his idol Gordie Howe, and ran into the most consequential jersey squatter in sports history: teammate Brian Gualazzi, who already wore it and kept it. So Gretzky wore 19 through the exhibition schedule, then 14 on opening night - a night he marked with a hat trick and three assists, his first junior goal a backhand 4 minutes and 43 seconds into the season. A few games in came the suggestion that changed the sport's iconography: if one 9 was taken, wear two - the same logic Phil Esposito had just applied in New York, doubling his taken 7 into 77. Accounts differ on exactly who said it first, with most crediting coach Muzz MacPherson and some the front office, but everyone agrees on the date of birth: 99 first appeared on a hockey sweater in Sault Ste. Marie in the fall of 1977, on the back of a 16-year-old, as a workaround. Twenty-three years later the NHL retired it league-wide. Gualazzi kept his 9 all the way to a law practice, presumably at peace with his role in history.

The season itself was a sustained impossibility. Gretzky opened his OMJHL career on a 23-game point streak, piled up points at 2.84 per game, and finished with 70 goals and 112 assists for 182 - numbers that remain, five decades later, the Greyhounds' single-season franchise record. He was the youngest regular in a league of men up to four years older, at 5-foot-8 and 155 pounds, and the only player who beat him was exactly that: 20-year-old Bobby Smith of Ottawa, in his fourth and final junior season, won the scoring title 192 to 182. The league gave Gretzky the Emms Family Award as rookie of the year and the William Hanley Trophy as its most sportsmanlike player; the hockey world gave him something bigger, when the 1978 World Juniors in Montreal turned the 16-year-old into the tournament's leading scorer with 17 points in 6 games against the planet's best under-20s. Arenas sold out across Ontario to see him, media requests grew so relentless he once asked a reporter to buy him breakfast in exchange, and the team around him - which endured a 12-game losing streak despite all of it - could never quite keep up. In the playoffs he somehow raised the degree of difficulty and still produced: 26 points in 13 games, six goals and 20 assists, two points a night in the spring of his 17th birthday. And the season has aged even better than the legend: nearly fifty years later, the 182 points and 112 assists STILL stand as OHL rookie single-season records, the 70 goals rank second all-time among the league's rookies, the 182 remains the second-highest point total in any OHL season ever played - behind only Smith's 192 from the very same winter - and the league named him to its Second All-Star Team on the way out. This May, the CHL ranked him No. 3 on its Top 50 Players of the Last 50 Years, one spot ahead of Connor McDavid; the Greyhounds, who made him the centre on their All-Time Team back in 1999, put out the announcement themselves.

The departure was written into the calendar before the season even ended, because the NHL's rules made staying pointless. The league did not permit players under 20, which meant the best 17-year-old on earth faced THREE more junior winters before the 1981 draft could touch him - and by midwinter, everything in the Soo was pushing the other way. Muzz MacPherson, the coach who had suggested the two nines, was replaced mid-season by Paul Theriault, who cut Gretzky's ice time by a reported ten minutes a game and wanted his style reshaped; Gretzky was open about his unhappiness, asked about a trade closer to Brantford, floated returning to Junior B, and even mused at the World Juniors about playing professionally in Sweden - and the league nixed every exit. Except one, which was not the league's to close. The World Hockey Association, at war with the NHL and dying for attention, had no age minimum, and on June 12, 1978, Indianapolis Racers owner Nelson Skalbania signed the 17-year-old to a personal services contract famously negotiated aboard his private jet, reported at $1.75 million over seven years. The Racers lasted eight games as his employer before Skalbania, hemorrhaging money, sold him to Edmonton and a man named Peter Pocklington - whose family's own strange place in hockey history we have covered separately. One year after a written refusal, the Soo's gamble was over: 64 games, 182 points, one number invented, and gone.

Every game Wayne Gretzky played in and around the OMJHL, per the standard record - including the Peterborough cameo nobody remembers and the World Junior detour that announced him to the planet. The gold row is the season this article exists for.

Twelve months, start to finish - from the pick his father forbade to the jet that ended junior hockey's claim on him.

No complete game-by-game log of the 1977-78 season survives in public records - the OHL did not keep digital game data for another two decades, and the full 64-game ledger lives only in the Sault Star's microfilm. But the documented record supports an honest per-game breakdown, because one number was tracked in real time all winter: the 23-game point streak Gretzky opened his junior career with, worth 75 points. Everything below is derived from that streak and the official season totals, and labeled accordingly.

The documented nights fill in the texture the log cannot. Opening night alone is fully preserved: first junior goal at 4:43 of the first period, a backhand over Oshawa's Georges Gagnon; the hat trick complete 6:37 into the second; three assists on top of it in a 6-1 win - a six-point debut at sixteen. The streak that followed means he averaged better than three points a game for the season's first two months while the whole league adjusted arenas and expectations around him, and the 2.61 he 'settled' into afterward would still have led most teams in the league by itself.

Three bar charts that carry the season's weight. The scoring race he lost to a grown man, the age-16 comparison with the only rival his legend ever had, and the pace he kept when the games got heavier.

The margins of the file: the trivia the draft created, the man who kept his number, the aftershave, and where the story went next.

Sault Ste. Marie had Wayne Gretzky for sixty-four games plus thirteen more in the spring, and it turned out to be exactly enough: enough to invent the number, set a record that has survived half a century of Greyhounds, and prove that the family's fears and the team's gamble could both be right at once. The city that was too far from home is now permanently attached to the name. Some investments are measured in seasons. The Soo's was measured in nines.