For somebody who followed Alexander Ovechkin's chase for as long and closely as I had, I didn’t get much fun out of his pursuit of Wayne Gretzky. A small, stupid wager I made with a buddy more than a decade ago screwed everything up. See, I bet against the Great 8. Dammit.
I was listening to the local radio broadcast on Friday night when Ovechkin scored two goals against the visiting Chicago Blackhawks to tie Gretzky at 894. Given how Ovechkin was buzzing around the net in the third period, had that game lasted another minute he surely would have gotten 895 in the only home arena he’s known in his 20-year NHL career. As it was, the record-breaker came a couple days later on the road against the New York Islanders, when Ovechkin netted a scorching wrister just 26 seconds into the Caps’ first power play of the game. The goal was his sixth in five games, but the moment was still as thrilling as it was inevitable.
Real soon after Ovechkin went into his celebratory head-first dive on the Long Island ice, I texted my pal Bill Rademaekers congrats and asked how he wanted his $50.
Bill was my first friend in journalism and adulthood. After college, I moved to a group house downtown full of cops and got a gig as an intern at Washington City Paper, where he was also a new intern. We hung out outside of work, too, and had tons of fun. Our shared interests included drinking, all things D.C. sports, and betting. We learned we both had compulsive tendencies during occasional trips to the racetrack. Neither of us knew the racing game, and we both found the Daily Racing Form minutiae and the exotic wager options offered overwhelming and overly expensive, though I remember both of us had a fondness for horses with the “first-time Lasix” tag in the program. (Lasix is a performance-enhancing diuretic once used on almost all racehorses but which has since been banned at most tracks.) So rather than give all our money to the track, we’d augment the $2 win, place, show, and exacta box bets we placed at the betting window with small, very simple side bets with each other. Like, we’d each pick a horse and whoever’s animal came in ahead of the other's got $1, so at least one of us could win something each race.
Soon enough, we were placing as many bets amongst ourselves as with the house. We weren’t cool enough to know a bookie, but we took our act to Caps, Orioles, and Washington Football Team games. We both were lifelong and hardcore fans of the local teams, so we never put money on wins or losses. Just prop bets, which we proposed to each other throughout whatever event we attended. The standard bet was $1, sometimes with odds. A lot of our wagers were basic and obvious. Like at WFT games, we’d bet on if a play would be run or pass, and whether a kick returner would make it past the 30-yard line. At Camden Yards we’d bet on balls and strikes, and hits and outs. But nothing was off limits. Bill reminded me over the weekend that our versions of exotic bets included between-innings wagers on what gender the next fan to walk through the portal would be, and whether we could find a fan wearing a toupee. (I’d love to remember the odds given on that one, and who won.) Our rules held that if one of us proposed a bet, the other could accept it, reject it, or, to prevent unfair proposals, take the other side. Once terms were set, a fist bump would seal the deal. The loser had to either quickly come up with a double-or-nothing proposal or pay up. Bill and I both have the fondest memories of our bet bet bet bet betting phase. But apparently our parimutuelly assured destruction wasn't so fun for those around us. Bill says his sister still rides him, 30 years and change later, about us ruining her day at RFK Stadium with endless wager proposals, fist bumps, and $1 bill exchanges.
Bill moved to the West Coast in the early 1990s. We’ve stayed close friends, always getting together when we can and going on trips together. He retained his love for the hometown teams despite the distance. But our one-on-one betting binges fell away. I found myself working at the racetrack for a few years later in the decade, and had my passion for gambling mostly beaten out of me in the Pimlico press box, which had its own betting window with a dedicated teller. I saw lots of renowned horseplayers lose lots of money, and lost too much of my own there.
But at some point—neither of us are sure exactly when but figure it was probably around 2015, when Ovechkin was nearing the halfway point of the Gretzky chase—me and Bill briefly reverted to form. We were on the phone talking about the Caps. I said Gretzky’s mark would survive Ovechkin’s burgeoning challenge. Nah, Bill said. And, just like old times, our words turned into a bet. I offered 10-to-1 odds for $5, and I remember thinking I was being chintzy and he’d hold out for a bigger number. We’d never made a futures or phone wager before. But I got the verbal fist bump. The bet was in.
I understand why I took Gretzky. Before there was any wager against Ovechkin—hell, before there were any bets with Bill, and before there even was an Alex Ovechkin—I was a Gretzky fan. As was anybody who gave a damn about hockey, and lots of people who didn’t, when he came to the NHL. The guy was an absolute phenomenon in ways Ovi never was.
I’m sure this thought isn’t unique to me, but I’ve long looked at Ovechkin as Hank Aaron to Gretzky’s Babe Ruth. The Sultan of Swat yanked baseball out of the dead-ball era all by himself: In 1920, his first year with the New York Yankees, Ruth hit 54 home runs, more than any other team in the American League that season; he outhomered all other AL teams again in 1927. Aaron, meanwhile, never hit more than 47 in a single season. Likewise, nobody in NHL history posted stats like the ones Gretzky and his Edmonton Oilers did when they came over in the WHA merger. The most eye-popping and enduring of Gretzky’s near-mythical numbers is his 92 goals in the 1981–82 season, which began when he was just 20 years old; only one other player in NHL history (Phil Esposito) had ever scored even 70 to that point, and to this day nobody’s come close. The top five slots in the NHL record book’s team-goals-in-a-season category still belong to Gretzky's Edmonton squads from the early- and mid-1980s. It’s also ridiculous that over his career Gretzky had more assists than Ovechkin, or any other player in NHL history, had points. Gretzky’s got three more Cups, too.
But there was more to the Gretzky mystique than numbers. That he and his team were dominating the league from a town that was so far up and to the left from where I lived made him even easier to root for, as did the impression of Canadian niceness he gave off.
I got to see Gretzky and the Oilers in the flesh early in his career when they came to D.C. to face the Caps, and was completely starstruck. The only other hockey player I'd ever gotten goosebumpy for was Gordie Howe, who I saw at the end of his career with the Whalers alongside his sons Mark and Marty. But Howe by then was a weathered legend just hanging on; I caught Gretzky at the peak of his powers. I was by no means a student of the game, but hell if even I couldn’t tell Gretzky moved differently than everybody else on the ice; I remember him losing his defender by making a pirouette move I’d only seen from figure skaters.
So when I made the bet, even if it was mostly because I wanted Gretzky’s mark to stand, I was really sure it would.
Ovechkin only came within 30 goals of Gretzky’s Ruthian 92-goal season one time, in 2007–08, when he scored a comparatively pedestrian 65. That’s also Ovi’s only season that ranks among the top 50 in NHL history for goals in a year. But he has led the NHL in goals an amazing nine seasons; Gretzky only did that five times. It can be argued that the fact that Ovechkin toiled in a comparatively goalie-dominated, dead-puck era of the game makes his personal career stats that much more amazing. But through the years, I’ve left it to folks that didn’t have a bet against him to make that argument.
I definitely taunted Bill whenever stories about Ovi’s fealty to Vladimir Putin came out during the chase. Like how Ovechkin started a fan club for the Russian leader, and how a few years into the invasion of Ukraine, he still uses a photo of him with Putin as his Instagram header. (Putin took a brief timeout from bombing civilians in Kryvyi Rih to congratulate Ovechkin, saying the record goal was cause for "a real celebration for fans in Russia and abroad," according to a transcript from Radio Free Europe.)
But Ovechkin ain’t the only one associating with the guilty. This week I’ve been forced to mull over how much I’ve ignored Gretzky buddying up to a Putin-lovin’ big bully of his own for a while now. Gretzky partied hard with Donald Trump on election night and again at the inauguration. Then Gretzky for some reason started lugging FBI director Kash Patel along as he followed Ovechkin around. Patel was with Gretzky for the record-tying goal on Friday night and again on Sunday in New York for the record breaker, and tweeted out photos from the locker rooms after both games. Gretzky's countrymen didn’t let that stuff go. So why did I? Because of the bet? I’d wager so.
I'm cheap. I really didn’t want Ovechkin to break the record! I only went to one Caps game this year, against Anaheim in January. I couldn’t have passed a lie detector test saying I hoped to see Ovi score that night. The guy had just come back from a broken leg at 39 years old and didn’t miss a beat, for crissakes! And there he was on the verge of going from an all-time great scorer to the all-time greatest scorer, and I’m rooting against him? That’s messed up.
Yesterday, I Venmoed the $50. Congrats, Ovi and Bill. Gambling is ass.
