Wayne Gretzky, Showed He’s Goat on Ice but Melts on Field as the NHL Champ Proposed to His Wife in a Bizarrely Simple Manner

Wayne Gretzky is a legendary hockey player. While a reporter gave him the nickname “The great one”, he lived up to it with his spectacular performance throughout his career.

Although if you’ll get to know about his off-field antics, you’ll realize that he truly is great. No one does it as he does. In an interview with Graham Bensinger in 2016, Gretzky revealed how he asked the big question.

When Wayne Gretzky popped the question

For the last 34 years, Wayne Gretzky has been happily married to the American actress Janet Jones. The two first met in 1984 in the show Dance Fever, where he was the judge she was the contestant. However, it was in 1987 that they met again at the Lakers’ games and they finally hit it off.

Within a year, the NHL star proposed and the rest, as they say, is history. With their story, one might think the star gave a grand proposal to his leading lady and be the hero we see in the movies. While he played the hero, it wasn’t a Jamie or a Nick like you imagined. He pulled out a Jackie Robinson on Janet Jones.

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When Jones was supposed to leave for a 5-week work trip, Gretzky proposed to her over a phone call. According to Gretzky this is how it went down, “It was one of those things where when you were chatting over the phone……basically was like…well why don’t we get married and so we just yeah why wait..and we did it over the phone. Obviously, when she came back to Edmonton Obviously, we had a proper dinner and proper event to get ready.”

The royal-like wedding of Gretzky and Jones

On July 16, 1988, Wayne Gretzky tied the knot with Janet Jones in a lavish wedding. Renowned celebrities and athletes attended the wedding ceremony. The wedding took place in Edmonton. While Gretzky donned the classic black tuxedo with a bowtie, Jones was wearing a beautiful white gown with puffed full sleeves.

While the proposal was surprising, the wedding ceremony was grand. The media outlets compared the Gretzky-Jones wedding to a royal wedding, owing to the enormous crowd that gathered around the church that day. People speculate that around 10000 fans were present outside the wedding venue just to get a glimpse of the newlyweds.

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The couple has built a happy family with five children, namely, Paulina, Ty, Trevor, Tristan, and Emma.