Mr. Hockey My Story (20 page)

The club didn’t spare any expenses for Gordie Howe Night, going so far as to line up about $10,000 worth of gifts, including clothes, a paid vacation, and toys for the kids. The capper was a new Oldsmobile. They’d wrapped the station wagon in cellophane and stuck a bow on it, and then driven it onto the ice. When I went to unwrap it, who do you think was sitting in the car? My parents. The team had flown them in secretly and put them up in a hotel. There I was at center ice, supposedly some big tough hockey player, and I was overwhelmed with emotion. I felt so proud that my parents could be there for that moment. I was still pretty choked up when they handed me the microphone to say a few words. Standing there with my mother and father, I was having trouble fighting back the tears. Even thinking about it now can bring a tear to my eye. I took the microphone and said the only thing that came to mind: “It’s a long way from Saskatoon.” Standing in front of thousands of fans at the Olympia, I felt a million miles away from the little guy who’d grown up sliding around the potato patch. At the same time, looking at my parents brought me right back home again. Taking stock of my life that night, I didn’t have any complaints. At home,
we had two beautiful, healthy kids and Colleen was about to give birth to our third. At the arena, things had gone almost as well. The team had won four Stanley Cups in my time and we had hopes for some more. By that time, I’d spent thirteen years in the NHL, which was already considered a long career. Although I already felt like the old man in the dressing room next to my younger teammates, I couldn’t have dreamed how much more hockey I still had left to
play.

Nine

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HE
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hen the NHL expanded to twelve teams in 1967, I remember thinking how much it changed the feel of the league. Doubling the number of teams gave a whole generation of players a chance to crack into the NHL on rosters that hadn’t existed when fellas of my vintage were coming up. Playing in a league of thirty teams, as they do today, would be something else entirely. In the six-team era, you got to know everyone on the ice pretty quickly, for better and worse. A seventy-game schedule meant that teams faced each other fourteen times a year. Add to that a seven-game playoff series or two and you ended up playing a lot of hockey against the same faces. Not too many nights went by that you didn’t have a history with at least a few guys on the other bench. The league was hungry back then. With only six teams, not only was it hard for a player to make it to the NHL
but, once you broke in, you also had to fight like hell to stay there. Every season brought a new crop of young players looking to make their mark. They didn’t want to go back down to the minors and the veterans weren’t about to let anyone take food off their tables. No one gave an inch.

The circumstances are different today. I’m not saying players aren’t tough, because they are. One look at their size tells you that much. Their understanding of diet and conditioning is also miles ahead of where we were. In my era, I was one of the bigger guys at six feet tall. Nowadays, I’d be average at best. It’s easy to see why things have changed. Instead of just bird-dogging in small-town Canada, scouts now go around the world hunting for talent. Drawing from a global pool means that the size, speed, and skills of the players in the NHL just keep going up. The league is no longer composed of just the best Canadians and Americans, but also the top Russians, Swedes, Finns, Czechs, Germans, Slovenians, Slovakians, Latvians, and others. It makes for good hockey, but it’s also a different game than the one we played. To be honest, I don’t think it’s as tough. That’s not the same as saying that today’s players aren’t tough, just that the game itself has changed. When there were only six teams, every player in the league came prepared to claw over his best friend the second the puck dropped. With every NHL job being so precious, the play itself had an intensity that hasn’t been seen since. Facing each other so often only ratcheted up the potential for animosity.

The most famous run-in I ever had was born out of those conditions. I was no stranger to fighting, particularly when I played in Omaha, but Detroit’s management had long made it clear that if I had a choice, they’d rather keep me on the ice than see me in the penalty box. During a game in early 1959, New York’s tough
guy, Lou Fontinato, made sure I didn’t have much of a choice. He consistently ranked among the NHL’s leaders in penalty minutes and made it a point to tangle with anyone in the league who was considered tough. I guess you’d call him an enforcer. His coach figured that Louie irritated the hell out of me, so whenever I hit the ice he wanted him out there to try to take my head out of the game. At least one time, I remember, it worked just as they’d planned. I was so eager to get a piece of Louie that I forgot a valuable piece of Ted Lindsay’s hockey wisdom: Always let the other guy drop his stick first. After banging on each other all night, Louie finally squared off with me and asked if I wanted to go. I was happy to oblige, so I threw my stick on the ice and dropped my gloves. Bad move. Louie still had his stick and he used it to split open my head for a few stitches. I knew that somewhere Ted was shaking his head at me. It’s not a mistake I’d make again. Fool me once, as they say. As much as Louie and I went at each other, it took years before we actually settled things once and for all.

We were in New York playing the Rangers when Red Kelly got mixed up with Eddie Shack behind the net. I was watching them tussle when it dawned on me that I had better get a fix on Louie in case he was getting any ideas. When I turned around, sure enough his gloves and stick were at the blue line. He was about ten feet away and charging hard, obviously looking to do more than just say hello. I slipped my hands out of my gloves, just holding them with my fingertips, and waited for what was coming. He didn’t know I had spotted him, so he figured he was swinging at a sitting duck. I moved just in time to miss the haymaker he threw at my head. I’m sure he was licking his chops at the thought of knocking me out with one big punch. Bill Gadsby, who was playing for the Rangers at the time, later told me that my career would have been over if
Louie had connected. To his surprise, I ducked the punch, dropped my gloves, and was ready to get it on.

Whenever I fought on the ice, I’d try to grab the other guy’s sweater at the armpit of his power arm with my left hand. That would leave my right hand free to go to work and force him to throw with his weaker arm. It’s the reason why fighting southpaws is so tricky. You instinctively go for the wrong arm. After ducking Louie’s first punch, I tied up his right arm and started unloading on him with everything I had. I hit him as hard and as often as I could. The first few punches stunned him, but he managed to shake them off and land a few good lefts of his own. I didn’t enjoy getting hit in the side of the head, so I switched hands and tied up the arm that was doing the damage. I was putting in some good work with my left hand, until one of my punches landed wrong and I dislocated a finger. It hurt like a son of a gun. When the officials separated us, I began to realize the kind of number I’d done on Louie. His face was covered with blood and his nose wasn’t where it should have been. The whole thing was over in less than a minute, but the impression it left lasted much longer. Some of the reporters on hand described it as the worst beating they’d ever seen anyone take on the ice. I don’t know if that’s true, but the pictures afterward certainly didn’t do Louie any favors. It didn’t make me happy to see Louie in such bad shape, but I can’t say I felt sorry for him. That might make me sound cold-hearted, but to my way of thinking he was just doing his job and I was doing mine. One of us was going to take the worst of it and it turned out to be him.

I’d say I probably get asked about that fight more than any of the goals I ever scored. I’d rather talk about the Stanley Cups and some of the great teammates I was lucky enough to play with, but I guess that scrap does have its place in the scheme of my career. No
one was in much of a hurry to drop the gloves with me afterward, which was fine by me. I was grateful for anything that helped to keep me on the ice and out of the penalty box. Years later, I also learned a lesson from that night that didn’t have anything to do with the fight itself. Back when we played together, Jack Stewart, a Wings defenseman, and Milt Schmidt of the Bruins used to have quite a hate on for each other. Every time we played the Bruins, they’d spend the whole night whacking at each other whenever they got a chance. I think neither one felt like he’d played a good game unless he’d drawn blood. It was pure meanness between those two. One night, I figured I’d give Jack a hand. I’d noticed that Milt would sometimes go up on one leg, like a dancer, to try to get by a defenseman on the outside. Jack wasn’t too agile, so this often worked on him. For Milt, it was a gamble that left him off balance and vulnerable. I waited for my moment and when I saw Milt go up on one leg, I charged over and caught him perfectly. I figured that Jack would enjoy seeing his adversary take a good lick, but, boy, was I wrong. Between periods, he stormed into the dressing room, picked me right up off my seat, and said, “Young man, that’s between that man and me. You stay the hell out of it.” Then he dropped me back down. It took me years to understand what I’d done to make him so angry.

Later, after both men had retired, I was playing one night when I heard a commotion start to build in the crowd. I looked up and saw Jack and Milt in the stands. They’d spotted each other and walked through the rows of seats to shake hands. The whole audience rose in a standing ovation when they met. At that moment, I finally understood why Jack had been so stern with me in the dressing room that day. Whatever happened between those two was personal, and he didn’t want anyone else muddying the waters. He
didn’t necessarily have to like Milt, but they respected each other. They were two professionals and playing hockey was their job. Win or lose, there’s an honor that exists between combatants that he didn’t want diminished.

After the game, I told Colleen how moved I was to see the sportsmanship embodied in that handshake. She pressed me and asked if I really felt that way. I told her I sure did. I should have recognized the look in her eyes at the time, but I didn’t. You had to be careful with Colleen, because the wheels in her head were always turning. The chickens didn’t come home to roost until some time later, when we were planning a trip to Vancouver for a charity banquet. It was a fund-raising event for disabled athletes and we were in charge of lining up some of the speakers. Colleen seized on the opportunity to remind me about Jack and Milt. If my feelings about their handshake were sincere, then she figured I should call up Louie and ask him to join us at the banquet in Vancouver. I didn’t like the idea at first, but it started to make sense the more I thought about it. There wasn’t really any bad blood between us; we had simply been two hockey players doing our jobs. I dialed his number and Louie and his wife joined us in Vancouver for a few days. After all those years of going at it on the ice, it’s my pleasure to now call him a friend.

•   •   •

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hen I was at home with Colleen and the kids, it took a lot for me to lose my temper. I don’t recall even raising my voice at our children that often, though I’m sure I did. Good as they may have been, our kids still weren’t exactly angels all of the time. Even so, yelling and carrying on just wasn’t in my nature. Colleen actually wished that I’d get more riled up sometimes. It bugged
her, if she was fussed, that I’d remain calm. I rarely obliged her, though. I just loved her too much to sweat the small stuff. My even temperament threw her for a loop. She couldn’t understand how I could be so easygoing at home, yet behave how I did on the ice. She thought I used the game as an outlet for my anger. I wasn’t one to disagree for no reason, but her theory felt too much like dime-store psychology to me. Every player gets mad sometimes but, in general, anger wasn’t a big part of my game.

What I learned early on was that you had to be a little crazy to survive in the NHL. And if you weren’t crazy naturally, you needed to fake it a bit so your opponents thought you were. If you didn’t, you became an easy target. I found that out the hard way. In my first NHL game, I had three teeth knocked out. From then on, if someone wanted to hit me in the mouth, I made sure they knew they’d have to come through some lumber to get there. I used to tell my boys that in order to get some respect on the ice, sometimes you needed to bend the rules. When I threw an elbow or got my stick up, it wasn’t ever by chance and it was rarely out of malice. It was all about letting the other guy know not to take any liberties with me. The math was simple in my mind. Respect equals space. Being effective on the ice is a function of how much room you have to maneuver. The more room you get, the more games you can help your team win.

I was lucky that I didn’t have to fake being crazy. It didn’t matter who was across from me; I never thought twice about getting hurt. Even if a guy had some size on me, he never seemed that big once when we were on the ice. I didn’t have any problem knocking down whoever was in my way. I figured that having the mindset that allowed me to play rough offered an advantage in hockey. The opposition is never too excited to tangle with someone who doesn’t
seem to care about getting hurt. A willingness to throw myself around the ice was one of the things that allowed me to stay in the league for so many years. Other players tended to give me a wide berth when I was on the ice, which is exactly what I wanted.

All that being said, it’s not like it’s anything goes when you’re on the ice. Among the players I skated against, the ones I respected the most were those who understood what lines shouldn’t be crossed. I played the game with a straightforward code. I didn’t get into it with anyone who didn’t have it coming. If someone played dirty, though, you’d better believe I took down his number. Payback might take a while, but when there was a score to settle I had a memory like an elephant. Whether it was the next game, five games down the road, or even the next season, I wouldn’t forget. The way I saw it, if you didn’t look out for yourself, no one would do it for you. If you let someone get away with something once, it was no one’s fault but your own when it happened again.