According to McNall, Buss also tapped him for the odd loan, when gambling losses caused a case of the shorts. Settling one of those debts gave McNall his first piece of the Kings in 1986. By 1988, he owned the team outright. “I was losing a lot of money with it,” Buss said in an interview for the book Gretzky’s Tears in 2009 (he died in 2013). “Bruce was there. He wanted it. It just kind of started to fall into place.”

Take a took at the NHL map in 1986. Twenty-one teams, with only Los Angeles west of St. Louis on the American side of the border. No presence in the sunbelt. Nothing across vast stretches of the United States.

Take a look at that same map now.

Of course, all of McNall’s vision and chutzpah and hustle wouldn’t have added up to all that much had he not pulled off the most destiny-altering trade in professional sports since the Boston Red Sox sent Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees. “If Gretzky played his entire career in Edmonton it wouldn’t have happened that way,” says Howard Baldwin, a close friend and sometime business partner of McNall’s, who was one of the founders of the WHA and at times owned various NHL teams, including the Minnesota North Stars and Pittsburgh Penguins. “On some level Bruce understood what it would mean to have Wayne play in Los Angeles. That’s part of his vision, that he made that trade understanding or believing … that you could do something with Wayne here that you couldn’t have ever done with him in a traditional hockey market.”

31 Thoughts: The Podcast Jeff Marek and Elliotte Friedman talk to a lot of people around the hockey world, and then they tell listeners all about what they’ve heard and what they think about it.

The events of August 1988 have been well documented: Pocklington needed cash. He was willing to sell Gretzky to get it. Gretzky was more than happy to move to Los Angeles.

It was just five months after McNall had bought the final piece of the Kings. He had access to the money — he was by then convincing bankers of the value of his antiquities and his race horses and his sports franchises and memorabilia the same way he’d worked the coin business — and he understood that the only way to get noticed in a town full of stars was to buy the best hockey player in the world. It didn’t matter if people knew nothing about the game; if they had completely failed to notice Gretzky and his teammates redefining the sport, rewriting the record books, and winning a string of Stanley Cups in Edmonton. It was the idea of Gretzky that mattered, the idea of the best. That’s what would finally put hockey on the Hollywood map.

You know what happened next: A nation in shock and mourning. The teary farewell press conference. The star-studded welcome in California. Everything changed.