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With his Stanley and World Cups as a player and his Olympic gold as a coach, The Great One always seemed to know the right place to be in the biggest games.

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So it’s no surprise that Wayne Gretzky was spotted at the biggest party of all at Mar-a-Lago in Florida to celebrate Donald Trump’s big victory in the presidential election on Tuesday and Wednesday morning.

The NHL’s all-time leading scorer and member of the Hockey Hall of Fame not only appeared in a photo posted on social media with his wife Janet, his daughter Paulina and her husband and champion golfer Dustin Johnson, and their son Trevor, but also appeared in a second one. Image with Trump Organization Executive Vice President Larry Glick wearing a white Make America Great Again (MAGA) cap.

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But not everyone was happy with the fact that 99 was celebrating with 45 and soon to be 47.

“I have no problem with Gretzky being conservative,” CBC political panelist and newspaper columnist Andrew Coyne posted on X. “I do have a problem with him hanging out with Trump. Who, to begin with, is not conservative.”

My reaction to Wayne was defensive because I remember well what this Trump Derangement Syndrome crowd did to Bobby Orr when he supported the 45th president in 2020.

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Then I jumped on X with my response: “Who cares what you think? Wayne doesn’t and neither do most people. Nobody answers you or cares about what you have problem with. You’re just as bad at playing God as you are at reading politics. You lost and you’re too arrogant to accept it. 99 was on the winning side.”

I respect Coyne and his freedom to feel whatever he wants, but shaming one of our icons for being at a political victory party seemed wrong. It’s not the first thing Coyne is wrong about this week: it’s clear that he called for Kamala Harris to win the election.

I saw Gretzky come under attack before when he supported Prime Minister Stephen Harper in 2015 and wrote a similar column at the time about the reaction to that.

But this time I got into it, mainly because I’m still not happy with how Orr was treated four years ago. The wounds of that have not healed for No. 4, who himself told me that many of his old acquaintances did not support him.

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{“origin_id”:”893272″,”created_on”:”2020-10-31T13:46:10.000Z”,”url”:” Trump has delivered for all the American people, regardless of their race, gender or position in the “That’s the kind of teammate I want,” Bobby Orr wrote about Donald Trump in a full-page newspaper ad. full page spread in a newspaper. \u201cThat’s the kind of teammate I want.\u201d”,”credit”:”Dario Ayala”,”distributor”:”Montreal Gazette”,”width”:”1000″,” height”:”750″,” shortcode”:”(caption id=\”attachment_893272\” align=\”alignnone\” width=\”1000\”) “President Trump has delivered for all the American people, regardless of race, gender or station in life,” Bobby Orr wrote about Donald Trump in a full-page newspaper ad. “That’s the kind of teammate I want.\u201d(/caption)”,”type”:”image”,”channels”:(“desktop”,”tablet”,”phone”)}

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For a minute I could see that happening to Gretzky: the same kind of nasty game of cancellation that the far-left crowd played with Don Cherry five years ago this week over his position at Coach’s Corner on the use of the poppy for the Remembrance Day.

But I feel like things are changing. Quickly. In X, I was not alone in my rejection of Coyne’s shot at Gretzky. Many others expressed their own opinions.

“If only they had discovered a photo of Trump in blackface (Andrew Coyne), they would have loved him,” ParksNWreck posted on X.

Shannon B on Monthly? Perhaps you could draw up the list of acceptable associates. Do you offer this service to other Canadian athletes?

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But Coyne had his supporters in this.

“It’s disgusting that the two top scorers of our national pastime are fools of the worst rulers on Earth,” Peter Gabriel’s Monkey posted.

Andrew Perez posted: “Wow. Wayne Gretzky attended Trump’s victory party. “I’m not sure this guy is the Canadian icon and encapsulation of Canadian values ​​that many believe him to be.”

Duncan Dee responded that “Wayne Gretzky was a hockey player” and “what he says about politics matters to me as much as what he says about how airlines work. He didn’t ask people to vote for a candidate, he attended a party. “I’m not sure we should insist on this.”

But that’s what the mafia does. In 2020, they went after Orr with incredible viciousness after he ran an ad in a Boston newspaper showing a photo of himself with Trump at Mar-a-Lago with the words: The president is the kind of “teammate who wanna”.

Karli Zschogner wrote in the Parry Sound North Star: “Dear Parry Sounders… it’s time to get rid of Bobby Orr.”

Famed Montreal sportswriter Jack Todd wrote: “You have embarrassed a nation, made a fool of yourself, and tarnished your reputation forever.”

It was ridiculous then and it is now. Celebrities who supported Joe Biden in 2020 or Harris in 2024 don’t face any kind of backlash like this, and neither should they.

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In 2019 and 2020, the accumulation of Cherry and then Orr worked. Neither of them have been this public since they were treated so rudely. Since then, Parry Sound has not held the annual Bobby Orr golf tournament that raised $75,000 a year for local charities.

It’s obscene how they were treated. He didn’t do anything wrong either. What they did to them was wrong.

But things look different now with Gretzky’s endorsement along with other sports legends like football hall of famer Brett Favee. People no longer seem to care what progressives on the losing side think.

Gretzky is a winner and has the right to hang out with other champions or anyone he chooses.

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