Wayne Gretzky opens up on his friendship with Post legend Larry Brooks: ‘Nobody knew more’

By the time the man forever dubbed The Great One reached New York City, late in his career, he was, by his own admission, less than great every shift he played here.

“I wasn’t the 22-year-old Wayne Gretzky anymore,” the 64-year-old Wayne Gretzky said Thursday, recalling the 35-year-old Wayne Gretzky who reported to Madison Square Garden for the first of the three seasons he played with the Rangers that closed out his career. “I knew it. The fans knew it.”

Gretzky laughed.

“And you’d better believe Larry knew it,” he said.

Gretzky and Larry Brooks, The Post’s longtime hockey writer and columnist who died Thursday morning at age 75, had already known each other for years, and Brooks had already written a few hundred thousand words on Gretzky — let’s call that one GOAT chronicling another — and they’d swapped more than a few funny lines and shared more than a few postgame beers together.

“We were friends,” Gretzky said. “In those days, players weren’t ashamed to call writers friends and the writers weren’t afraid to call the players friends. We all shared the common language. We all wanted to talk about hockey 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And nobody knew more than Larry.”

Still, friendship is one thing. Reporting on the twilight hours of a man who, at his best, was maybe the greatest hockey player who’s ever lived, was something else. And there came a day when Brooks had to confirm to his readers that he, too, had seen Gretzky play poorly in the game the night before. None of this was news to Gretzky.

Still, it stings to read about it over your morning coffee.

The next day Brooks was at practice, of course, because Rule No. 1 for Larry Brooks — a lesson he imparted to generations of younger reporters and columnists who came after him — was this: You show up. You show your face. You give the athlete/coach/GM you’ve ripped the opportunity to respond. That’s not looking for a fight, just being a professional.

Gretzky saw Brooks. They shook hands.

“Larry,” the Great One said, “I was bad, but I wasn’t that bad.”

“Wayne,” Brooks replied, “you were that bad.”

They laughed.

“Yeah,” Gretzky said. “I guess I was.”

The thing is, Brooks’ greatest professional joy came in celebrating the game and its stars, not in chiding them. To colleagues, he often quoted Earl Warren, formerly chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, who famously said: “I always turn to the sports pages first, which records people’s accomplishments. The front page has nothing but man’s failures.”

“That was Larry to a tee,” Gretzky said. “I knew that he’d grown up a die-hard Rangers fan. In his heart of hearts he wanted the Rangers to do well, and for the players to do well. He knew what the Rangers meant to the city, and the fact that when they were good it meant more people cared about hockey. And he especially loved writing about playoff hockey.”

Gretzky said he often struggled in those three years as a Ranger — even as he scored the final 57 of the 894 goals he accumulated as a pro (a record that stood until last winter), even as he piled up the final 249 of his 2,857 career points (a mark that will probably last forever). It was important for Gretzky in those years that the three most veteran Rangers beat writers — Brooks, John Dellapina and Rick Carpiniello — were there to ease his transition.

“At the end, I knew I was going to retire and I wanted to retire in New York,” Gretzky said. “We were in Ottawa and I told those guys but I didn’t want it to come out there because it would have been crazy. I asked them if they could wait a day. I knew they had jobs to do and I knew it was a lot to ask but I did, and they understood.”

He said the hockey community — most of whom had been the target of Brooks’ barbs at one point or another in their careers — understood what Brooks’ readers did: when he wrote something it was because he had it cold. If he had a strong opinion it was one he’d worked hard to formulate in order to be fair.

“The fans knew what the players knew,” Gretzky said. “They knew that what he was writing was fact and not bulls–t.”

Gretzky texted with Brooks not long before the end. They exchanged warm thoughts and warmer memories.

“I wanted him to know,” Gretzky said, “that as a hockey fan, I always loved reading him.”