Born in Brantford, Ontario, on a Thursday of this same date in 1961, Wayne Gretzky is 61 today, so here’s a tap of the Titan TPM to him, followed by another from a notional Easton Aluminum HXP 5100. That’s young Wayne above, fronting Maclean’s in February of 1982, when he was 21 (the Trudeau mentioned was another, older-model prime minister).

Does the occasion call for some verse? Probably so. Here’s one of Gary Barwin’s from his “Haiku Night in Canada” sequence, which was published in his 1998 collection Outside The Hat:

Gretzky writes poem:
across the blue line the moon
like a puck, wayning.