Dispatches from the Sporting Life (21 page)

Later, in the Whalers’ dressing room, coach Don Blackburn was asked what his team might do
differently in Hartford for the third game. “Show up,” he said.

Though the Whalers played their best hockey of the series in the next game, they lost in overtime. In the dressing room, everybody wanted to know if this had been Gordie’s last game. “I haven’t made up my mind about when I’m going to retire yet,” he said.

But earlier, in the press box, a Hartford reporter had assured everybody that this was a night in hockey history: April 11, 1980, Gordie Howe’s last game. He said Whaler director of hockey operations Jack Kelley had told him as much. “They’ve got a kid they want to bring up. Gordie’s holding him back. The problem is they don’t know what to do with him. I mean, shit, you can’t have Gordie Howe running the goddamn gift shop.”

The triumphant Canadiens stayed overnight in Hartford, and I joined their poker game: Claude Mouton, Claude Ruel, the trainers, the team doctor, Floyd “Busher” Curry, Toe Blake. “Jack Adams always used him too much during the regular season,” Toe said, “so he had nothing left when the playoffs came round.”

“Do you think he was really a dirtier player than most?” I asked.

“Well, you saw the big guy yesterday. What did he tell you?”

“He said his elbows never put anybody in the hospital, but he was there five times.”

Suddenly everybody was laughing at me. Speak to Donnie Marshall, they said. Or John Ferguson. Or, still better, ask Lou Fontinato.

When Donnie Marshall was with the Rangers, he
was asked what it was like to play against Howe. In reply, he lifted his shirt to reveal a foot-long angry welt across his rib cage. “Second period,” he said.

One night, when then Winnipeg general manager John Ferguson was still playing with the Canadiens, a frustrated Howe stuck the blade of his stick into his mouth and hooked his tongue for nine stitches.

But Howe’s most notorious altercation was with Ranger defenceman Lou Fontinato in Madison Square Garden in 1959. Frank Udvari, who was the referee, recalled, “The puck had gone into the corner. Howe had collided with Eddie Shack behind the net and lost his balance. He was just getting to his feet when here’s Fontinato at my elbow, trying to get at him.

“‘I want him,’ he said.

“‘Leave him alone, use your head,’ I said.

“‘I want him.’

“‘Be my guest.’”

Fontinato charged. Shedding his gloves, Howe seized Fontinato’s jersey at the neck and drove his right fist into his face. “Never in my life had I heard anything like it, except maybe the sound of somebody chopping wood,” Udvari said.
“Thwack!
And all of a sudden Louie’s breathing out of his cheekbone.”

Howe broke Fontinato’s nose, fractured his cheekbone, and knocked out several teeth. Plastic surgeons had to reconstruct his face.

The afternoon before what was to be Howe’s last game, I had taken a taxi to his house in the suburbs of Hartford. “You can’t be a pauper living out here,”
the driver said. “I’ll bet he’s got racehorses and everything. There’s only money out here.”

Appropriately enough, the venerable Howe, hockey’s very own King Arthur, lived down a secluded side road in a town called Glastonbury. Outside the large house, set on fifteen acres of land, a sign read Howe’s Corner. Inside, a secretary ushered me through the office of Howe Enterprises, a burgeoning concern that held personal-service contracts with Anheuser-Busch, Chrysler, and Colonial Bank. A bespectacled, wary Howe was waiting for me in the sun-filled living room. Prominently displayed on the coffee table was an enormous volume of Ben Shahn reproductions.

“I had no idea,” I said, impressed, “that you were an admirer of Ben Shahn.”

“Oh, that. The book. I spoke at a dinner. They presented it to me.”

After all his years in the United States, Howe remained a Canadian citizen. “I can pay my taxes here and all the other good things, but I can’t vote.” He was one of nine children, he added, and the family was now spread out like manure. “It would be nice to get together again without having to go to another funeral.”

Sitting with Howe, our dialogue stilted, not really getting anywhere, I remembered how A. J. Liebling was once sent a batch of how-to-write books for review by a literary editor and promptly bounced them back with a curt note: “The only way to write is well and how you do it is your own damn business.” Without being able to put it so succinctly, Howe possibly felt the same way about
hockey. Furthermore, over the years, he had also heard all the questions and now greeted them with a flick of the conversational elbow. But for the record, Howe adjudged today’s hockey talent bigger and better than ever. Wayne Gretzky reminded him of Sid Abel. “He’s sneaky clever—the puck always seems to be coming back to him. Lafleur is something else. He stays on for two shifts. I don’t mind that, but he doesn’t even breathe heavy.” Sawchuk was the best goalie he ever saw, and he never knew a line to compare with Boston’s Kraut Line: Milt Schmidt, Woody Dumart, Bobby Bauer. Howe was still bitter about how his years in Detroit came to an end with that meaningless front-office job. “Hell, you’ve been on the ice for twenty-five years, there’s little else you learn. I was a pro at seventeen. Colleen used to answer my fan mail for me—I didn’t have the words. Now it’s better for the kids. They get their basic twelve years of school and then pick a college.”

Determined to surface with fresh questions, I asked when he planned to retire.

“I can’t say just yet exactly when I’m going to retire, but I’m the one who will make that decision.”

The next morning, in the Whalers’ offices, Jack Kelley asked me, “Did he say that?”

“Yes.”

“He’s retiring at the end of the season.”

Almost two months later, on June 4, Howe made it official. “It’s not easy to retire,” he told reporters. “No one teaches you how. I found that out when I tried it the first time. I’m not a quitter. But I will now quit the game of hockey.”

Howe had kept everybody waiting for half an hour after the scheduled start of his 10:00 a.m. press conference. “As it got close to ten-thirty I had the funny suspicion that he had changed his mind again,” Kelley said.

But this time Howe left no doubt in anybody’s mind. “My last retirement was an unhappy one, because I knew I still had some years in me. This is a happy one, because I know it’s time.”

An ice age had come to an end.

“They ought to bottle Gordie Howe’s sweat,” King Clancy of the Maple Leafs once said. “It would make a great liniment to rub on hockey players.”

Yes, certainly. But I remember my afternoon at Howe’s Corner with a certain sadness. He knew what was coming, and before I left he insisted that I scan the awards mounted on a hall wall. The Victors Award. The American Academy of Achievement Golden Plate Award. The American Captain of Achievement Award. “I played in all eighty games this year, and I got my fifteenth goal in the last game of the season. Last year I suffered from dizzy spells. My doctor wanted me to quit. But I was determined to play with my boys in the NHL. I don’t think I have the temperament for coaching. I tried it a couple of times and I got so excited, watching the play, that I forgot all about the line changes.”

That afternoon only one thing seemed to animate him. The large Amway flow chart that hung from a stand, dominating the living room. Gordie Howe—one of the greatest players the game had ever known, a Canadian institution at last—Blinky, the third-grade repeater who had become a millionaire—now
distributed health-care items, cosmetics, jewellery, and gardening materials for Amway.

Offering me a lift back to my hotel in Hartford, Howe led me into his garage. There were cartons, cartons, everywhere, ready for delivery. Cosmetics. Gardening materials. It looked like the back room of a prairie general store.

“I understand you write novels,” Howe said.

“Yes.”

“There must be a very good market for them. You see them on racks in all the supermarkets now.”

“Right. Tell me, Gordie, do you deliver this stuff yourself?”

“You can earn a lot of money with Amway,” he said, “working out of your own home.”

Say it ain’t so, Gordie.

November 1980

C
rouching over home plate in Riverfront Stadium one night in September 1984, claiming it in that aggressive manner he has made his own, he couldn’t be confused with one of your latter-day California-bred players: flaxen-haired, features finely chiselled, the manner of a man who in the off season might be doing a guest spot on
Dynasty
or finishing a Merrill Lynch trainee course. Endlessly striving Pete Rose, home at last, at bat for the 15,099th time in his major league life, was a throwback to an earlier age. If he didn’t exist, Ring Lardner might have invented him. If he hadn’t been capable of playing ball, then surely the alternative would have been shifting beer cases or working on a construction site. He hit a line drive. A single. “If he had the natural ability of a Johnny Bench,” said one of the sportswriters, “he would have had to pack it in long ago. But he never had natural ability. It’s all hustle.”

Going into the new season, the legendary Rose, player-manager for the Cincinnati Reds, was only 94 hits shy of the game’s ultimate statistic: Ty Cobb’s record of 4,191 career hits. “All the reporters do is
ask me about it,” Rose complained by rote. “All I do is answer them. It would be great for baseball if I got it, but I’m not going to jump off a bridge if I don’t.” But later, his eyes hot, his manner disconcertingly boyish considering his age, he added, “It took Ty Cobb twenty-four seasons. I’m going to do it in twenty-three.”

But sour baseball rabbis waiting in the tall grass would certainly howl that Rose had already had 1,982 more times at bat than Cobb and, furthermore, that Cobb’s career batting average was.367, whereas Rose’s stood at.305. Rose was forty-three years old in 1984, his long-pursued grail within tantalizing sight. He allowed that he now found it harder to overcome injuries, but also insisted, “Medical people tell me I have the body of a thirty-year-old. I know I’ve got the brain of a fifteen-year-old. You got both, you can play baseball.”

Rose, a shrewd judge of his own quotes, watched for my reaction. I asked him if he had any other interests. “Say, politics.”

“When Reagan was coming here for a campaign rally he called me from Air Force One; he wanted me to introduce him. I can’t do that. Maybe 51 percent of the people are for Reagan, 49 percent against him. I introduce him, 49 percent of the fans don’t like me. So Johnny Bench introduces him, he doesn’t have to worry about being booed anymore. On the podium, Reagan tells them he called me. They made it seem I was sorry I couldn’t be there.”

In 1984, Rose played for the Expos until August 15. He started out in left field, but less than two weeks into the season his elbow went bad on him. Rose, who could no longer throw more than one
hundred feet, was shifted to first base. Then, on July 26, the foundering Expos traded for another first baseman, Dan Driessen of the Reds, because Rose was hitting only.259. So the man who had been three times the National League batting champion, with National League and World Series MVP awards to his credit, and who had connected for two hundred hits a season ten times, was benched by a second-division club.

Rose, who had come off an embarrassing.245 season with Philadelphia in 1983, reduced to an aging sideshow for hire, might have gone to Seattle but opted for the Expos. “They brought me there to teach them how to win,” he said, “but I never played for a team that took losing so easy. Gary Carter ran that team. He’s okay as long as he goes two for four; otherwise, he doesn’t work the pitchers. He’s always saying, ‘I did this, did you see me do that?’ I told him, ‘Hey there, kid, I played with Johnny Bench.’”Later Rose, wearing his manager’s hat, would say that if the Expos ever wanted to trade Carter, he would be glad to have him. But the Mets got him.

Before I caught up with Rose, my first afternoon in Cincinnati, I met with his agent, Reuven Katz, in a hotel bar. Johnny Bench joined us. “Being a playermanager,” he said, “would be awkward for anybody but Pete. When I first came up, he took me under his wing. He always wanted me to hit .300. I told him, ‘You hit .300, I’ll drive you in.’ Nobody else will ever get four thousand hits.”

In 1978, Bob Trumpy, a sportscaster for WLW radio, had the inspired notion of declaring Pete Rose a national monument. “He represented the work ethic
here,” Trumpy said. “He’s a role model. Cincinnati belongs to him. He can park his Rolls anywhere, nobody will touch him. He can floor it in one of his Porsches and the cops will look the other way. You can take away all the records, everything, Rose has all the intangibles rolled into one. He’s unique. He’s an art form, the baseball diamond his canvas. But when he came back here, he had to talk to Bob Howsam for an hour and a half on the phone to convince him that he could still play ball. When he left here the fans called in one after another to say, ‘I will never return to Riverfront Stadium as long as Pete Rose is not playing.’ And they didn’t.”

Bob Howsam, the amiable club president and CEO, allowed that since the days of the fabled Big Red Machine, attendance had slipped from 2.5 million a season to 1.4 million. “We’re more interested in him as a manager than a player,” he said. “We’ll have to see how well he does.”