which impressed Canada in 1972, had nothing new to offer him: "I'd been doing these drills since I was three. My Dad was very smart." In his autobiography, Gretzky describes how at practices his father would drill him on the fundamentals of smart hockey: Him: "Where's the last place a guy looks before he passes it?" Me: "The guy he's passing to." Him: "Which means ..." Me: "Get over there and intercept it." Him: "Where do you skate?" Me: "To where the puck is going, not where it's been." Him: "If you get cut off, what are you gonna do?" Me: "Peel." Him: "Which way?" Me: "Away from the guy, not towards him." Gretzky also credits his coach at the Edmonton Oilers, Glen ("Slats") Sather, as an important influence in his development as a hockey player. Gretzky played for 10 years with the Oilers, with Sather as coach. "It's as if my father raised me until age 17, then turned me over to Slats and said, 'You take him from here.'" Early start Where Gretzky differed from others in his development was in the extraordinary commitment of time on the ice. "From the age of 3 to the age of 12, I could easily be out there for eight to 10 hours a day", Gretzky has said. In his autobiography, he wrote: All I wanted to do in the winters was be on the ice. I'd get up in the morning, skate from 7:00 to 8:30, go to school, come home at 3:30, stay on the ice until my mom insisted I come in for dinner, eat in my skates, then go back out until 9:00. When asked how he managed, at age ten, to score 378 goals in a single season, Gretzky explained, See, kids usually don't start playing hockey until they're six or seven. Ice isn't grass. It's a whole new surface and everybody starts from ground zero. ... By the time I was ten, I had eight years on skates instead of four, and a few seasons' worth of ice time against ten-year-olds. So I had a long head start on everyone else. Study of game Much has been written about Gretzky's highly developed hockey instincts, but he once explained that what appeared to be instinct was, in large part, the effect of his relentless study and practice of the game, in co-operation with his coaches. As