Dispatches from the Sporting Life (20 page)

Seven years older than Howe, Richard played eighteen seasons, retiring in 1960. Astonishingly, he never won a scoring championship, coming second to Howe twice and failing two more times by a maddening point. He was voted MVP only once. But Maurice Richard was the first player to score fifty goals in fifty games. That was in the 1944–45 season, in the old six-team league, when anybody netting twenty goals was considered a star. Toe Blake, once a linemate of the Rocket and a partisan to this day, maintains, “There’s only one thing that counts in this game and that’s the Stanley Cup. How many did Jack Adams win with Gordie and how many did we take with the Rocket?”

The answer to that one is that Detroit took four cups with Gordie and the Canadiens won eight propelled by the Rocket. However, Richard’s supporting cast included, at one time or another, Elmer Lach, Blake, Richard’s brother Henri, Jean Beliveau, Boom Boom Geoffrion, Dickie Moore, Doug Harvey, Butch Bouchard, and Jacques Plante. Howe had Sid Abel and Terrible Ted Lindsay playing alongside him, and there was also Alex Delvecchio. He was backed up by Red Kelly on defence, either Glenn Hall or Terry Sawchuk in the nets, and, for the rest, mostly a number of journeymen. Even so, the Red Wings, led by Gordie Howe, finished first in regular-season play seven times in a row, from 1949 to 1955.
They beat the Canadiens in the 1954 Stanley Cup final and again in 1955, although that year the issue was clouded, a seething Richard having been suspended for the series.

“Gordie Howe is the best hockey player I have ever seen,” Beliveau has said. Even Maurice Richard allows, “He was a far better all-round player than I was.”

Yes, certainly, but there’s a kicker. A big one.

The Rocket’s younger brother, former Canadiens centre Henri Richard, has said, “There is no doubt that Gordie was better than Maurice. But build two rinks across from one another. Then put Gordie in one and Maurice in the other, and see which one would be filled.”

Unlike the Rocket, Bobby Hull, Bobby Orr, and Guy Lafleur, Howe always lacked one dimension. He couldn’t lift fans out of their seats, hearts thumping, charged with expectation, merely by taking a pass and streaking down the ice. The most capable all-round player the game may have known was possibly deficient in only one thing—star quality. But my oh my, he certainly could get things done. In the one-time rivalry between Detroit and Montreal, two games linger in the mind—but first a few words from Mr. Elbows himself on just how bright that rivalry burned during those halcyon years.

“Hockey’s different today, isn’t it? The animosity is gone.
I mean, we didn’t play golf with referees and linesmen.
Why, in the old days with the Red Wings, I
remember once we and the Canadiens were travelling to a game in Detroit on the same train. We were starving, but their car was between ours and the diner, and there was no way we were going to walk through there. We waited until the train stopped in London and we walked around the Canadiens’ car to eat.”

Going into a game in Detroit against the Canadiens, on October 27, 1963, Howe had 543 goals, one short of the retired Rocket’s then record of 544. The aroused Canadiens, determined not to allow Howe to score a landmark goal against them, designated Henri Richard his brother’s recordkeeper, setting his line against Howe’s again and again. But in the third period Howe, who had failed to score in three previous games, made his second shot of the night a good one. He deflected a goalmouth pass past Gump Worsley to tie the record. Howe, then thirty-five, did not score again for two weeks, until the Canadiens came to town once more. Again they put everything into stopping Howe. But in the second period,
with Montreal on the power play,
Detroit’s Billy McNeil sailed down the ice with the puck, Howe trailing. As they swept in on the Canadiens’ net, Howe took the puck and flipped a fifteen-foot shot past Charlie Hodge, breaking the Rocket’s record, one he would later improve on by 127 NHL goals.

Item: In 1960, there was a reporter sufficiently brash to ask Howe when he planned to retire. Blinking, as is his habit, he replied, “I don’t want to retire, because you stay retired for an awfully long time.”

Twenty years later, on June 4, 1980, Howe stepped up to the podium at the Hartford Hilton and reluctantly announced his retirement. “I think I have
another half year in me, but it’s always nice to keep something in reserve.” The one record he was terribly proud of, he added, “is the longevity record.”

Thirty-two years.

And just possibly we were unfair to him for most of those years. True, he eventually became an institution. Certainly he won all the glittering prizes. But true veneration always eluded Howe. Even in his glory days he generated more respect, sometimes even grudging at that, than real excitement. Outside of the West, where he ruled supreme, he was generally regarded as the ultimate pro (say, like his good friend of the Detroit years, Tiger outfielder Al Kaline), but not a player possessed. Like the Rocket.

In good writing, Hemingway once ventured, only the tip of the iceberg shows. Put another way, authentic art doesn’t advertise. Possibly that was the trouble with Gordie on ice. During his vintage years, you seldom noticed the flash of elbows, only the debris they left behind. He never seemed
that
fast, but somehow he got there first. He didn’t wind up to shoot, like so many of today’s golfers, but next time the goalie dared to peek, the puck was behind him.

With hindsight, I’m prepared to allow that Gordie may not only have been a better all-round player than the Rocket but maybe the more complete artist as well. The problem could have been the fans, myself included, who not only wanted art to be done but wanted to see it being done. We also required it to look hard, not all just in a day’s work.

A career of such magnitude as Gordie Howe’s has certain natural perimeters, obligatory tales that demand to be repeated here. The signing. The injury that all but killed him in his fourth season. The rivalry with the Rocket, already dealt with. The disenchantment with Detroit. Born-again Gordie, playing the WHA with his two sons. The return to the NHL with the Hartford Whalers. The last ceremonial season, culminating in his final goal.

History is riddled with might-have-beens. Caesar, anticipating unfavourable winds, could have remained in bed on March 15. That most disgruntled of stringers, Karl Marx, might have gone from contributor to editor of the
New York Tribune.
Bobby Thomson could have struck out. Similarly, Gordie Howe might have been a New York Ranger. When he was fifteen, he was invited to the Rangers’ try-out camp in Winnipeg, but they intended to ship him to Regina, and he didn’t sign because he knew nobody from Saskatoon who would be playing there. The Red Wings wanted him to join their team in Windsor, Ontario. “They told me there would be carloads of kids I knew, so I signed. I didn’t want to be alone.”

The following season, the Red Wings handed Gordie a $500 bonus and a $1,700 salary to play with their Omaha farm club. (“Twenty-two hundred dollars,” Gordie said. “I earn that much per diem now.”) A year later he was with the Red Wings, signed for a starting salary of $6,000. “After we signed him,” coach Jack Adams said, “he left the office. Later, when I went into the hall, he was still there, looking glum. ‘All right, Gordie, what’s bothering you?’

“‘Well, you promised me a Red Wing jacket, but I don’t have it yet.’”

He got the jacket, he scored a goal in his first game with the Red Wings, and he was soon playing three-, even four-minute shifts on right wing. A fast, effortless skater with a wrist shot said to travel at 110 miles per hour. Then, in a 1950 playoff game against the Toronto Maple Leafs, Howe collided with Leaf captain Teeder Kennedy and fell unconscious to the ice. Howe was rushed to a hospital for emergency surgery. “In the hospital,” Sid Abel recalled, “they opened up Gordie’s skull to relieve the pressure on his brain and the blood shot to the ceiling like a geyser.”

The injury left Howe with a permanent facial tic, and on his return the following season, his teammates dubbed him “Blinky,” a nickname that stuck. Other injuries, over the years, have called for some four hundred stitches, mostly in his face. Howe can no longer count how many times his nose has been broken. There also have been broken ribs, a broken wrist, a detached retina, and operations on both knees. He retires with seven fewer teeth than he started with.

The glory years with Detroit came to an end in 1971, Howe hanging up his skates after twenty-five seasons. Once a contender, the team had gone sour. Howe’s arthritic wrist meant that he was playing with constant pain. Hockey, he let it be known, was no longer fun. But, alas, the position he took in the Red Wings’ front office (“a pasture job,” his wife, Colleen, said) proved frustrating, even though it was his first $100,000 job. “They paid me to sit in that office, but they didn’t give me anything to do.”

After two years of retirement, the then forty-five-year-old
Howe bounced back. In 1973, he found true happiness, realizing what he said was a lifelong dream, a chance to play with two of his sons for the Houston Aeros of the WHA. The dream was sweetened by a $1 million contract, which called for Howe to play for one season followed by three in management. Furthermore, nineteen-year-old Marty and eighteen-year-old Mark were signed for a reputed $400,000 each for four years. A package put together by the formidable Colleen, business manager of the Howe family enterprises.

Howe led the Aeros to the WHA championship; he scored one hundred points and was named the league’s most valuable player. Mark was voted rookie of the year. A third son, Murray, later shunned hockey to enter pre-med school at the University of Michigan. Murray, who was twenty years old in 1980, also wrote poetry:

Gordie went on to play three more seasons with the Aeros and two with the Whalers, finishing his WHA career with 174 goals and 334 assists. With the demise of that league and the acceptance of the Whalers by the NHL in 1979, Howe decided to play one more year so that the father-and-sons combination could make it into the NHL record books.

It almost didn’t happen, what with Marty being sent down to Springfield. But they finally did play together on March 9 in Boston. And then, three nights later, out there in Detroit,
his
Detroit, Gordie finally got to take a shift in the NHL on a line with his two sons, Marty moving up from his natural position on defence. “After that game, Gordie could have just walked off,” Colleen said. “‘I’ve done all I’ve ever wanted,’ he told me.”

I caught up with Gordie toward the end of the 1980 season, on March 22, when the Whalers came to the Montreal Forum for their last regular-season appearance. Before the game, Gordie Howe jokes abounded among the younger writers in the press box. Scanning the Hartford lineup, noting the presence of Bobby Hull and Dave Keon, both then in their forties, one wag ventured, “If only they’d put them together on the ice with Howe, we could call it the Geritol Line.”

Another said, “When is he going to stop embarrassing himself out there and announce his retirement?”

“If he’s that bad,” a Hartford writer cut in, “why do they allow him so much room out there?”

“Because nobody wants to go into the record books as the kid who crippled old Gordie.”

Going into the game, Hartford’s seventy-second of the season, Howe had fourteen goals and twenty-three assists, and there he sat on the bench, one of only six Whalers without a helmet.

There were lots of empty seats in the Forum. It was not the usual Saturday-night crowd. Many a season ticket holder had yielded his coveted seat in the reds to a country cousin, a secretary, or an unlucky nephew. Kids were everywhere. Howe, who had scored his eight-hundredth goal a long twenty-three days earlier, jumped over the boards for his first shift at 1:27 of the first period, the Forum erupting in sentimental cheers. He did not come on again for another five minutes, this time joining a Hartford power play. Howe took to the ice again with four and a half minutes left in the period, kicking the puck to Jordy Douglas from behind the Montreal net, earning an assist on Douglas’s goal. Not the only listless forward out there, often trailing the play, pacing himself, but his passing still notably crisp, right on target each time, Howe came out six more times in the second period. On his very first shift in the first period, he had thrown a check at Réjean Houle, sending him flying. Hello, hello, I’m still here. But his second time out, Howe drew a tripping penalty, and the Canadiens scored on their power play. The game, a clinker, ended in a 5–5 tie.

In the locker room, microphones were thrust at a weary Gordie. He was confronted by notebooks. Somebody asked, “Do you plan to retire at the end of the season, Gordie?”

“Not that fucking question again,” Gordie replied.

So somebody else said, “No, certainly not. But could you tell me what your plans are for next year?”

Gordie grinned, appreciative.

A little more than two weeks later, on April 8, the Whalers were back, it having been ordained that these upstarts would be fed to the Canadiens in their first NHL playoff series. This time the Canadiens, in no mood to fiddle, beat the Whalers 6–1. Howe, who didn’t play until the first period was seven minutes old, took his first shift alongside his son Mark. He appeared only twice more in the first period, but in the second he came on again, filling in for the injured Blaine Stoughton on the Whalers’ big line. He was ineffectual, on for two goals against and hardly touching the puck during a Hartford power play. Consequently, in the third period, he was allowed but four brief shifts. There must have been some satisfaction for him, however, in the fact that Mark Howe was easily the best Whaler on ice, scoring the goal that cost Dennis Herron his shutout.

The next night, with Montreal leading 8–3 midway in the third period, the only thing the crowd was still waiting for finally happened. Gordie Howe flipped in a backhander. It was his sixty-eighth NHL playoff goal—but his first in a decade. It wasn’t a pretty goal. Nor did it matter much. It was slipped in there by a fifty-two-year-old grandfather who had scored his first NHL goal in Toronto thirty-four years earlier when the Boston Red Sox left-fielder Carl Yastrzemski was only seven years old, pot was something you cooked the stew in, and Ronald Reagan was just another actor. “Hartford goal by Gordie Howe,” Michel Lacroix announced over the PA system. “Assist, Mark Howe.” The crowd gave Gordie a standing ovation.