I'm not saying Gretzky isn't slippery and can't avoid hits, few were better, but I've always heard rumblings that you didn't line up to cream him, I did find this:
Many NHL players struggle with deciding when to retire, but for Wayne Gretzky, the time to hang up the skates became clear when opponents would warn "The Great One" before hitting him.
"I got hit -- I didn't get hit as much as people probably wanted me to get hit, especially on the opposing teams, " Gretzky said Thursday night during an appearance on the TBS show "Conan." "But I knew it was time to retire when I was playing my last year, and people I was playing against, before they would hit me, they would scream my name, and I remember thinking, 'Wow, something's not right about this.'"
The Great One retired after the 1998-99 season as a member of the New York Rangers.
Even though opponents wanted to play physical with Gretzky and knock him off his game, guys crossing the line and taking runs at him was rare. The players knew Gretzky was the driving force in the sport's enormous increase in popularity in the late 1980s and early 1990s, especially after he was traded from the Edmonton Oilers to the Los Angeles Kings on Aug. 9, 1988.
Warnings from opponents told The Great One he needed to retire.
www.foxsports.com
But I also did find this:
In the years since, a myth has developed that McCreary never played in the NHL after this particular game. More specifically, it’s been claimed that he was blackballed for daring to hit the slightly-built Gretzky when he was off-limits for such abuse. The problem is that despite plenty of evidence to the contrary, this gets repeated far too frequently as fact.
I do not know the exact origin of this myth. I know it’s on an early Don Cherry video from the Rock ‘Em Sock’Em Hockey series, but I cannot definitively say that Cherry is the source of it. However, given his widespread audience and his credibility as someone connected to the “inside game”, I’d argue that Cherry has been responsible for disseminating this to more people than anyone.
According to the folks at hockey-reference.com, there have been 43 players in history who have played just 12 NHL games before hanging up the skates for good. It’s a motley list, filled with…
nathangabay.com
And thanks to to the second link it reminded me where I did hear this from - Don Cherry.