Wayne Gretzky

Gretzky married actress Janet Jones in 1988. The couple has five children: daughters Paulina and Emma, and sons Ty, Trevor, and Tristan. His oldest daughter, Paulina, pursued a career as a model. The family resides in California.

Outside of athletics, Gretzky has pursued several business ventures throughout his career and retirement, including involvement in both the restaurant and wine industries.

Gretzky began skating at age two and a half, learning the game from his father on a backyard rink known as the Wally Coliseum. By age six, he was competing against players ten and eleven years old. During his final season of peewee hockey, he scored 378 goals.

He was drafted third overall in the 1977 Ontario Major Junior Hockey League Midget draft and played for the Sault Ste. Marie Greyhounds. After leading the 1978 World Junior Championships in scoring while representing Canada, he turned professional in 1978 with the Indianapolis Racers of the World Hockey Association (WHA). When the franchise folded shortly afterward, his contract was sold to the Edmonton Oilers, who entered the NHL for the 1979-80 season.

In his debut NHL season with Edmonton, Gretzky posted 51 goals and 86 assists, becoming the first first-year player to win the Hart Memorial Trophy as the league's most valuable player. Centering a lineup alongside teammates Mark Messier, Jari Kurri, Glenn Anderson, Paul Coffey, and goaltender Grant Fuhr, Gretzky captained Edmonton to four Stanley Cup championships in 1984, 1985, 1987, and 1988.

His speed and playmaking transformed the style of the NHL. In the 1981-82 season, Gretzky set a single-season record with 92 goals along with 120 assists, becoming the first player to average over two points per game. In 1985-86, he achieved single-season league records with 163 assists and 215 total points. Over his career, he won the Art Ross Trophy ten times as the league's scoring champion and won the Hart Memorial Trophy nine times, including eight consecutive seasons from 1980 through 1987. His prominence in Canadian popular culture was celebrated with commercial merchandise and an official dollar coin minted by the Canadian government in 1983.

In August 1988, Edmonton traded Gretzky, along with Mike Krushelnyski and Marty McSorley, to the Los Angeles Kings in exchange for Jimmy Carson, Martin Gelinas, multiple first-round draft picks, and cash. His arrival in Los Angeles expanded the sport's profile across non-traditional hockey markets in the United States. Gretzky led the Kings to the Stanley Cup Finals in 1993, falling to the Montreal Canadiens.

During his tenure with Los Angeles, Gretzky surpassed Gordie Howe's all-time NHL career scoring record of 1,850 points in 1989-90 and eclipsed Howe's record of 801 career goals on March 23, 1994. In 1996, he was traded to the St. Louis Blues before signing with the New York Rangers later that year. He retired from professional hockey following the 1998-99 season with 2,857 points, 1,963 assists, and 894 goals across 1,487 regular-season games.

Gretzky was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1999, and the NHL retired his jersey number 99 across the entire league. He served as executive director of the Canadian men's Olympic hockey team, which won the gold medal at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, ending a 50-year championship drought for Canada.

In 2000, Gretzky became a minority owner and managing partner of the Phoenix Coyotes, later serving as the club's head coach from 2005 to 2009. He stepped down from coaching and relinquished his ownership stake in 2009 when the franchise entered bankruptcy. In 2016, he returned to the Edmonton Oilers organization as a partner and vice chairman before departing the role in 2021 to work as a television analyst.