SPECIAL SECTION/CANADA'S TEAM/WOMEN'S HOCKEY	FEBRUARY 2, 1998 VOL. 151 NO. 4
	Call Her Mozart Long a prodigy, Hayley Wickenheiser is the formidable force anchoring Nagano's most highly talented team. She also plays piano By MICHAEL FARBER alter Gretzky was not the only hockey parent who owned a garden hose. When icy winters would grab Shaunavon, Sask., by the throat and squeeze, Tom Wickenheiser would hook up his hose to a sink and flood an empty lot some 20 m from the house so that his daughter Hayley and other kids could play. While it wasn't quite Gretzky Gardens, it was on that homemade rink, ringed by two-by-fours, that seven-year-old Hayley took what puckologists refer to as her Midnight Skate. Under the stars and the glow of a garage lamp, a little girl burst down the wing, cut to the middle, deked nocturnal ghosts and fired on net until her father, awakened by the gentle scrape-scrape-scrape of her blades, threw on a coat, walked outside and gently told her, "Hayley, it's time." Twelve years later, it is Hayley Wickenheiser's time again. If coach Shannon Miller's prediction of a gold medal in the first Olympic women's ice-hockey tournament is realized--hardly a rash forecast since Canada has won every one of four female world championships--Wickenheiser figures to be the major cause. "Hayley's got the strength, speed and smarts, and no defenseman in the world can handle her one on one," says Cammi Granato, star of the archrival U.S. women's team, which shocked the Canadians, 3-0, in the final of the Three Nations' Cup in December. The defeat shook Canada, which had beaten the U.S. in three previous meetings, but the Canadians remain the most talented Olympic team. The roster includes Jayna Hefford, who emerged as Canada's top scorer in the Nagano run-up; veteran captain Stacy Wilson; 38-year-old center France St. Louis; and the goaltending pair of Lesley Reddon and Manon Rheaume. The cornerstone, though, is Wickenheiser. "There's a perception that Hayley scores a lot," Miller says. "She's not the best scorer, but if you look at most of our games and ask who dominated the play, the answer usually will be Hayley." The 5-ft. 8 1/2-in., 173-lb. Wickenheiser could still improve her touch around the net, but she has a champion's grasp of the rest of the game, including some of its darker arts. "If Hayley can't get around you," says Judy Diduck, a Team Canada defenseman and Wickenheiser's roommate, "she'll go through you." She has been Eric Lindros scary ever since joining the national team four years ago at age 15. Say it again: 15. There are 15-year-old Olympic gymnasts and 15-year-old world-class figure skaters. But world-class hockey players? This, essentially, makes her Mozart. Even in her adolescence Wickenheiser had a sweet hesitation move in the offensive zone, a Gretzky-like curl, one stride across the blue line that was so unusual in women's hockey most teammates couldn't read it and would barge for the net instead of hanging back for a pass. Les Lawton, then national-team coach, agonized over taking this prodigy under his wing until Hockey Canada president Bob Nicholson reminded him that Wayne Gretzky was playing professionally at 17. If all the comparisons that come her way these days are to male hockey players, perhaps it is because Wickenheiser has always been defined by boys. She was fascinated by the flickering images of NHL players on the screen as a toddler, and even now posters of fellow Olympians Ray Bourque, Steve Yzerman and Gretzky hang in her bedroom. When she was 12, she actually met Mark Messier when a family friend who worked for the cbc took her to a practice at Northlands Coliseum in Edmonton. "He was just wearing a towel," Wickenheiser says. The Oilers dressing room was more lavish than the changing areas to which Wickenheiser was accustomed. In Shaunavon and later in Calgary, she played much of her hockey against boys, so, in the interest of propriety, she was banished to the boiler room or skate-sharpening cubicle or wherever there were exposed pipes and a minimum of privacy. She accepted it as part of the game, and the boys, awestruck by her skills, accepted her as part of their game. Tom and Marilyn Wickenheiser moved with Hayley and her younger siblings Ross and Jane to Calgary in 1990, and months later, the 12-year-old Wickenheiser, playing against 16- and 17-year-olds, scored the gold-medal-winning goal for Alberta in the Canada Winter Games. She was not quite 5 ft. tall, but she shot up during the next two years. Indeed, Wickenheiser was growing faster than her game. When Canada summoned Hayley for the 1994 world championship, Marilyn Wickenheiser wondered if her daughter shouldn't wait. "We wanted Hayley, and all our children, to be well rounded," says Marilyn. No worries there. Wickenheiser is first-team All-Everything. Hockey Canada officials refer to her as "the Franchise," but Wickenheiser also hopes to be the shortstop on Canada's softball team at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney. Although she has been on sabbatical from the University of Calgary to prepare for Nagano, she was carrying a 3.7 grade-point average in sciences before she took her leave. The one way to differentiate her from Mozart is at the keyboard. Wickenheiser, though, plays well enough as a pianist that after Canada's overtime win against the U.S. at the world championships in Kitchener, Ont., last year, she plopped a fedora on her head, stuck a cigar in her mouth and pounded out show tunes at the team party. "She's accomplished a lot but still is young, relatively speaking," Diduck says. "Maybe in four years another prodigy will come along, and we won't have to say she plays like Gretzky or Lindros but that she plays like Hayley Wickenheiser." In Nagano, if Wickenheiser plays like herself, Canada likes its chances.
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