Gretzky gave us a spectacle of meme-able proportions at the World Cup draw

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Amidst all the low-wattage stars on display at FIFA’s World Cup draw on Friday, only one really shone out – Wayne Gretzky. That’s not a good thing.

It shouldn’t have been this way. Gretzky was only hauled out on stage an hour and a half into proceedings, after you’d already been convinced that this schmaltz-fest couldn’t get any worse. But like the country he occasionally pretends to represent, Gretzky is determined.

Gretzky’s duty was to draw the teams from Pot 4. That pot contained a surplus of nations who are still looking to qualify for the tournament.

They’re not all household names, I’ll grant you, but if I was going to be saying them out loud in front of up to a billion viewers, I might’ve taken the trouble to practice them. I guess our boy Wayne is more of an instinctive performer.

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You think you’ve lived, but you hadn’t until you watched the greatest hockey player of all time giving himself a good couple of seconds to wind into the “North Macedonia,” and still getting it as wrong as you can get it.

“I want to know how I got all the names,” Gretzky, the designated name caller, grumbled.

The four or five minutes when Gretzky was drawing, hands getting shakier, voice tremblier, knowing Suriname, Türkiye and even Curaçao were still coming – that was theatre.

Everything else was so bad, my brain has already erased it, as it tends to do with traumatic experiences.

If you want to know why people consider FIFA bloated and out of touch, I submit to you FIFA boss Gianni Infantino’s opening remarks.

Never a shy, retiring type, Infantino has clearly advanced into the Lin-Manuel Miranda phase of his rule – he needs to perform, and he needs people to see him do it.

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Matched against the energy of show hosts Heidi Klum (rigid and mannequinesque) and Kevin Hart (bored and lost), Infantino was a fireball of intent. He was here to accomplish two things – sell an event that doesn’t require selling, and convince Donald Trump that he’s a really cool guy despite the funny accent.

FIFA is “the official happiness provider for humanity,” Infantino said. I think he was serious.

The World Cup is “the greatest event that mankind has ever seen and will ever see,” he further said. I know he was serious about that one.

After Robbie Williams and Nicole Scherzinger set the musical tone, Infantino was back to award the inaugural FIFA Peace Prize. The tension was thick. Would the winner be Canada’s Mark Carney (grinning like a man who knows he should have begged off sick) or Mexican leader Claudia Sheinbaum (trying to say, do and even move as little as possible, thereby salvaging some dignity)?

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No, you guessed it.

Trump came up on stage looking mildly interested. Infantino gave him a medal. Then he read from a certificate. He held the certificate up as he did so, perhaps in the hope that Trump would tuck in beside him and read along. They could touch heads and Infantino could put the photo on his gravestone.

When Trump began his remarks with, “Gianni and I were discussing this. We saved millions and millions of lives …” it looked like Infantino might weep from joy.

Many ambitious people have toadied through history, but none has ever toadied as hard as Infantino did on Friday. At this point, all toads should start calling themselves frogs. They’re never going to toad like that.

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Infantino kept promising to leave, and he kept coming back. He did a canned bit with Trump, Carney and Sheinbaum that involved each leader drawing a ball with the name of their own country tucked inside. Infantino had his own ball – it read ‘FIFA’.

This way, all four leaders could hold up the ‘nations’ they represent for a photo op. Next thing, Infantino will start showing up at the UN General Assembly, looking around for a seat.

I want to be fair here – everyone else was just as terrible, but they all had the decency to seem embarrassed about it. Hart, in particular, looked forlorn at his own decision. No guest role in Rush Hour 4 is worth this.

We can now see the spread of sports’ recent cultural iterations a little more clearly. From 2016 to about 2023, sports was in its revolution phase. To be a star meant having a position. Few of these positions were cogently argued, or well thought out. Mostly, it was the hive mind with new orders – Oh, we kneel now? Okay, great.

The last couple of years have been a transitional period as everyone tries to figure out what good soldiering looks like these days. Are the pros supposed to be complaining? Or should they be happier? Who are the bad guys again? And how will we recognize them?

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Friday’s event was sports’ next phase – pure cheese. If the ructions of 2020 were the early 1970s redux, we’re in the polyester-pant-suit end of that decade now.

This is beyond politics. If they’d hauled a clay bust of Cthulhu on stage on Friday, Infantino would have praised it as the greatest graven head in history and given it a commemorative brooch.

The new rules are you get as much for yourself as you can, however you can. Money is a part of it. Attention is just as good.

The point isn’t to be good. It’s to be seen. It’s to be memed and talked about and even mocked. That’s the point of the World Cup, as Infantino and Trump describe it. A chance to sell a lot of tickets. More tickets than ever. Bigger and more, including more ridiculous.

Gretzky’s performance on Friday will be seen by far, far more people than any of his goals. In this new sports world, that’s a win. Wayne’s a thing again. In North Macedonia at least.