It just wasn’t a good idea. He’d probably be terrified doing it, he wasn’t an actor. He was fully dedicated to hockey. That’s why Wayne Gretzky told his manager to politely decline Lorne Michael’s offer to host Saturday Night Live.
You could imagine his astonishment two days later when while on a plane to the Kentucky Derby with his wife Janet, he picked up a newspaper sporting the headline Wayne Gretzky to Host Saturday Night Live. “I knew right away,” Gretzky said.
“I just pulled down the paper, looked at my wife and said, 'Don't tell me you called.’ She said, 'Yeah, this is something you're going to be so happy that you did and so excited that you did.' As it turned out, she was 100 percent right.”
It was May, 1989. “The Great One” had just put up 54 goals and 114 assists in his first year with the L.A. Kings after being traded by the Edmonton Oilers. It remains one of, if not the most, shocking trades in the history of sports.
“He had of course written a lot of records by that time,” lead NHL play-by-play broadcaster Mike “Doc” Emrick said. “He transcended hockey. He was a sports figure who also played hockey.
“There was tremendous credibility that he brought to our sport because he was recognized everywhere. I mean he attended Ronald Reagan's funeral.”
Gretzky added another five goals and 17 assists in the playoffs in ‘89. The Kings won a seven game series vs. Wayne’s former team before getting swept by the Calgary Flames in the second round.
Upon realizing hosting the show was a done deal, his nerves began to subside.
“Once my wife did commit me to it, I was really excited to do it,” he said laughing.
He’d host episode 19 of season 14 on May 13 with musical guest the Fine Young Cannibals of She Drives Me Crazy fame.
The cast at the time included Dana Carvey, Phil Hartman, Nora Dunn, Jan Hooks, Kevin Nealon, Jon Lovitz, Dennis Miller and Victoria Jackson. The featured cast members were A. Whitney Brown, Al Franken, Mike Myers and Ben Stiller.
Myers started on January 21 of ‘89 and Stiller’s very brief stint lasted from March 25 to April 22, concluding before Gretzky's arrival. Notable season 14 writers included longtime head scribe Jim Downey, Conan O’Brien, Robert Smigel, Jack Handey, George Meyer and Bob Odenkirk.
“They were bringing us some new players like Ben Stiller,” Nealon said. “We were all kind of getting settled in and the show's ratings came up really high from when we took over (’86) and everybody was feeling good."
“We felt really good because when we came in in '86 with Phil Hartman and Jan Hooks and so forth, Kevin Nealon, the show was kind of in a low point,” Carvey said. “It gyrates, but it was at a very low point."
Lorne had just returned from hiatus in 1985 after leaving in 1980.
“So we were told, and I don't know if it was true or not, that we only had an eight-show pickup until Christmas and we were told to hit the ground running or you're out of here,” Carvey said.
“So by year three, when Wayne came around we really had gotten together as a cast. Everybody had their role and we'd added Mike (Myers), but other than that we were still a very small troupe, one of the last times that you would have kind of a pretty tight cast. So we were feeling good. We got the ship off the bottom of the ocean and it was floating.”
Hitting their stride, one of SNL’s most talented casts welcomed number 99 with open arms.
“I think there was a fervor at the time for Gretzky because of the trade and winning and the record he had,” Nealon said. “It's the same as when we had Michael Jordan on the show. It was like bedlam. People just love sports heroes.”
One Canadian hockey fan on the cast was especially enthused about that week’s guest, Mike Myers.
“He was levitating,” Carvey said of Myers. “He was out of his mind with joy. Mike is so Canadian and so loyal and loves Canada and of course he just flipped out that he's doing a sketch with Wayne Gretzky.”
Wayne arrived in New York for his shift at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, then the GE Building, the week of the show.
“I wasn't nervous and I really didn't get nervous until I guess Wednesday,” he said. “Tuesday you meet the cast and Tuesday night they stay up all night and they write all these skits.
“When we did the first reading, the first sit around on the Wednesday, that's when it hit me."
The cast, especially hockey-loving Myers, began carrying the load for the four-time Stanley Cup champion to make his week easier. Another player with an even deeper connection to Wayne emerged to lend a helping hand.
“One of the most intriguing parts for me was that Phil Hartman grew up and is from my home town,” Gretzky said. “So obviously, we developed a friendship after I met him there and he used to always tease that he was the second most popular person ever to come out of Brantford, Ontario.”
Nine years later, Hartman’s death would hit Wayne hard.
“You know, it's horrible and under the circumstances it's just something that you don't even imagine could ever happen,” Gretzky said. “But I always remember saying to Lorne, 'Oh my gosh, you got another boy from Brantford here.' And I'll never forget it, Lorne saying to me, 'Wayne, he might be the most talented person that's ever been on Saturday Night Live.”
“You've probably heard they called him the glue on the show because he held all the sketches together,” Nealon said. “If you were in sketch with Phil, you knew that if it didn't work, it was the writing.”
“I believe it was me that nicknamed him the glue at some point and it was sort of true,” Carvey said. “Phil was unique and also humble. Phil was so interested in everything else and it was kind of effortless for him like, 'What do you need?'
“If you were going to do a starting five for a sketch team, like a basketball team of all-time, it's hard to rank, but he'd be like a power forward, he’d be on your all-star starting line. You want to have that guy that can kind of do anything.
“Phil was very happy playing second fiddle or third fiddle or if it required him to take the lead, he was happy to do that. He was so experienced. He was a legend at the Groundlings as a sketch player.
“With Phil, he was a good person to learn from. He was also brilliant at not getting caught looking at the (cue) cards. He had all these tricks that he would do.”
Wayne’s nerves began to pick back up later in the week when he realized he hadn’t seen his monologue yet.
“You think that you're going to get the monologue early in the week but it's the last thing that you see before the show actually runs live,” Gretzky said.
He finally got the monologue on Friday. It was centered around him not being a good actor, but a good hockey player. It read well and took pressure off the host.
Wayne was also relieved most of the sketches were talk show focused, something he was used to.
Saturday was upon him. He was comfortable, he was up for the challenge, but dress rehearsal fell flat.
“I remember thinking, 'Well, I'm not sure about this.' And I remember going into Lorne's office after the live dress rehearsal I guess 20 minutes before we were about to go live and he said, ‘One thing I want to tell you is, don't worry about dress rehearsal.
'"It's always the exact opposite of the actual show, the energy is not the same, it's nothing to worry about. Everybody is working out the things that they need to do to get it right.' I remember thinking, 'Oh, okay. I hope you got that right.’”
“Sometimes you would peak at dress, but you didn't want to,” Carvey said. “You wanted dress to affirm that things were kind of working but you kind of wanted it just a little bit flat. You don't want the reverse that that audience is really cooking and then the air audience is flat.”
Lorne’s advice comforted Wayne and he was excited to go live.
The show’s rundown included:
Jimmy Carter in Panama - cold open (Panamanian soldiers making fun of then US president Jimmy Carter, played by Carvey, during Panama’s elections)
Wayne’s monologue:
Seconds before his cue to walk out onstage to begin the show, a stage director told Gretzky, “Now don't be nervous, there's only 20 million people watching you live.”
“I remember thinking, 'Oh my god, thanks,'" Wayne said. "And so for a split second I was a little bit nervous.
"But once I got out there and the energy was so high and the audience level was completely different than the dress rehearsal, I was fine. I just sort of went for it.”
Sleepytime Rat Control (A commercial parody recycled from another episode)
The Anal Retentive Fisherman (Phil Hartman was the host of a fishing show who was too pre-occupied with the organization of his fishing tools to notice a giant fish pull Gretzky from the boat)
Wayne’s World (Wayne Campbell dreams of beating Wayne Gretzky in one-on-one hockey with Garth playing goalie and Gretzky’s wife Janet spectating):
“I never skated,” Carvey said. “I never had a pair of ice skates on, we grew up poor, nobody skated. I had never played hockey, never held a hockey stick. So we're doing the sketch, we're filming it at a rink and I'm backstage and I'm trying to get my skates on and get them laced up properly.
“So Wayne, he gets down on one knee and he's just helping me properly do that and tie them off. So he's on his knees like I'm a four-year-old, but it's like, 'Who would do that?'
“Then I stand up and I have the hockey stick in my hand and he goes, 'Oh no, like this.' So he grabs it and shows me. I just thought, 'This is weird. Wayne Gretzky is showing me how to hold a hockey stick.' That was just kind of a surreal moment that you get on Saturday Night Live sometimes.”
“Well first of all I loved it,” Wayne said of the pre-taped sketch. “The Wayne's World phenomenon was sort of just snowballing at that time and just sort of getting going. I had obviously been watching the show, so I knew the skit."
This Week with David Brinkley (A traditional talking heads political show decides to tape an episode outside)
The Fine Young Cannibals perform She Drives Me Crazy
Weekend Update (Anchor Dennis Miller hears voices via Field of Dreams and Al Franken is having none of it)
Celebrity Hockey Ideas (Different celebrities like John Travolta (Carvey) and Jack Nicholson (Hartman) give advice to Gretzky on how to win in L.A. next season):
“Phil was paying Nicholson and he would just come in and always say (in a Nicholson voice) 'Great one,' and then he would give the advice. So every time he said, 'Great One’, Wayne would just really crack up, really laugh, every single rehearsal, every time.
“I was Travolta. (Travolta voice) 'Everyone just rushes the net. Like, everybody. Everybody goes right at it.' And that was funny.”
Point Blank (Victoria Jackson plays host as callers ask Wayne, the guest, questions that have nothing to do with hockey such as: “Do grandparents have any rights in a divorce?”)
The Fine Young Cannibals perform Good Thing
Waikiki Hockey (In a parody of Elvis movies, Gretzky plays a busboy who enters a Hawaiian ice hockey tournament to impress a girl played by Jan Hooks):
“We were waterskiing actually in some sketch where we had our shirts off,” Carvey said. “So I was kind of teasing him, 'Okay, coming up we'll see who's got the goods with the shirt off.' Kind of just being goofy and he was really laughing.
“So then we took off our shirts, I thought he'd be built. I didn't know about hockey players. So he's kind of really thin and not muscle bound at all.
"He explained that it's all in the legs. He didn't really want to carry a lot of weight. That was kind of funny, I looked as strong as Wayne Gretzky.”
Wayne was supposed to hit a piece of meat with a hockey stick in the sketch, to his and everyone’s surprise, the hunk went in a garbage can on-air.
“I was just supposed to sort of hit it like a hockey move,” he said. “I was on such a high at that point in time and I'm so excited to be on the show and we sort of had come to near the end and I'm thinking, 'Wow so far so good.'
“So when I did hit it and it went in, I think everybody froze for a second like, 'Oh that honestly just went in?' Trust me, I could hit it 99 times and miss it 98, but it just happened to be that one time when it went in. The rest is history.”
“He had a thing like sort of a quiet charisma because certain people have this confidence but this shyness,” Carvey said. “I'm not saying he is Elvis Presley, but he ended up doing a sketch where he's kind of doing an Elvis type singer type thing.
"He was scared to do it all week and we didn't know how he's going to come off and then when he actually did it, he kind of owned it, but he also was being Canadian shy with it.
"So it really popped. I remember going, 'Damn, he's really doing this. This is fantastic.' So that was kind of cool to see.”
The show ended on a high note. Wayne didn’t have any noticeable flubs, the adrenaline was flowing.
“I was on such a high,” Gretzky said. “And of course after the show everybody sort of pops by for a bite to eat at some location and everybody kind of showed up for a bit, came by. Even to that point I was still on a high.
“It was at least 24 hours later until I really started to calm down. It's like winning a big hockey game or a game seven, you don't really come down for at least 24 hours because the emotion is so exciting.”
“He really killed it,” Carvey said. “Absolutely. Some athlete hosts are disappointed. Sometimes they stay in the dressing room for while thinking they didn't kill it. But with Gretzky, that episode I just remember being strong and funny and he peaked on-air.
“He did everything the best when it really counted. So maybe a mirror of how he was as an athlete, more pressure, better performing. A really good memory of the show. Really fun.”
“He really was like the perfect athlete and person to be a host and I think it's one of the most memorable shows we had with an athlete,” Nealon said. “And I think it's a big part of the SNL history too.”
“I can remember the next morning walking down Fifth Avenue just so excited about being part of it and I remember my wife saying, ‘You got the moody blues don't you?' And I remember thinking, 'Yeah, I kind of do.'
“You know, that it was over. It was so exciting for me because everybody was so nice to me. Everybody couldn't have been more cordial.
"I can only tell you that my experience was a plus-10. I can't say enough about how great, how classy everybody was. And that starts with Lorne, he sets that tone, the leader sets that tone. And you could just sense it with everybody in there that it was top notch.”
