It’s funny how memories are so closely tied to the places where they were formed. I doubt anyone will ever forget the unique rafters inside Maple Leaf Gardens, the famous escalators at the front of the Montreal Forum, or the portrait of Queen Elizabeth that hung in the old Winnipeg Arena. For me, the Northlands Coliseum will always be a special place. But I am lucky that I got to play at the Olympia, where those Red Wings teams I dreamt about as a kid won all those Stanley Cups. By the way, the Wings beat us 5–3.
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The Red Wings go all the way back to the Victoria Cougars of the WHL. Their roster was sold to a group of Detroit investors who won the franchise in the spring of 1926. The Victoria Cougars were a great team. They won the Stanley Cup in 1925 and lost to the Montreal Maroons in the 1926 finals.
Their biggest star was Frank Foyston. Frank was one of the first players that Lester and Frank Patrick went after to captain the Seattle Metropolitans when they added the team to their Pacific Coast Hockey Association (PCHA) in 1915–16. When the Metropolitans were just two years old in 1916–17, they played the Montreal Canadiens in a best-of-five series final. Foyston led the Metropolitans to the first Stanley Cup win for an American team. But by the time Frank came to Detroit, he was thirty-five years old and he was winding down.
Detroit finished last its first season and ended up more than $80,000 in debt. Frank Calder recommended Jack Adams as general manager and coach to the owners.
Jack Adams was the son of a railroader from Fort William, now part of Thunder Bay, Ontario. He was a rugged, physical player who could also put the puck in the net. In fact, he led the PCHA in scoring with Vancouver in 1921–22, and led the Toronto St. Pats playing on a line with Babe Dye (the guy Conn Smythe didn’t want in New York). He would win two Stanley Cups, and he retired from playing after winning with the Ottawa Senators in 1927. That year was the first time players were awarded Stanley Cup rings. Their rings were made of eighteen-carat gold with fourteen diamonds in the shape of an O. But it was as a coach and GM that Adams is best known. He was with the Wings for thirty-five seasons. Today, the annual trophy for the league’s best coach is named after him.
Adams turned the team around. In the first home game of 1927–28, Detroit’s second NHL season, when the new Olympia Stadium opened, more than 14,000 people turned out to watch the Detroit Cougars play the Ottawa Senators. The Detroit Times wrote that hockey “is football set to lightning.” Adams took the team into their first playoffs the next season.
After Major McLaughlin beat out Jim Norris Sr. for the hockey franchise in Chicago, the two of them never got along. Things got worse when the NHL forced McLaughlin to make Chicago Stadium the Hawks’ home ice. Norris had controlling ownership in the building. He had invested in it when he thought he was going to win a Chicago franchise. McLaughlin and Norris Sr. fought over the leasing arrangements for years.
Norris Sr. was quite a character. Because his son had the same name, his friends called him “Big Jim.” He made millions owning Great Lakes steamers and a successful grain brokerage firm. Norris wanted an NHL franchise, so he bought Olympia Stadium in Detroit along with the Cougars (who had by then become the Falcons), and renamed the team the Red Wings after the logo of the Montreal Athletic Club, whose amateur hockey team won the first two Stanley Cups. He paid off their debts and invested in player acquisition, farm team development, and scouting. He also kept Jack Adams on with the club.
The first year, Adams was on a very short leash, always in fear of losing his job. He had to call Norris after every game to report what happened. The next year Norris reportedly eliminated Adams’ contract and, on a handshake, told him to consider himself on probation until further notice. He was on probation for twenty-nine seasons, until 1962.
He was hard-nosed. Red Kelly told me how Adams would come into the locker room and stand right in front of the player that he was haranguing. He was a little pigeon-toed so he had to watch it or he’d trip. On every team the coach will pick on a guy just to get everyone’s attention. In Detroit in the early 1950s, one of the guys Adams liked to pick on was Benny Woit.
Adams sat right behind the bench. Sometimes his glasses would fog over and so he couldn’t really see who was on the ice. He used to insist that one defenseman stay back in front of the net at all times and if that defenseman moved out of position, Adams would yell at him after the game. He always seemed to assume it was Woit. Often he was wrong, but Woit never said anything. That was the way it was.
Adams would get on Woit so much that during one game after the second period, Woit got into the locker room fast, ahead of Adams, and grabbed an orange. He dropped the peels down right in front of his stall.
Adams came into the room all excited, ran up to Woit and started going off on him, but as he moved around his feet started to slip on the peels and he almost fell. It threw him off so much he forgot what he was yelling about and stormed out of the room.
Woit and Red Kelly played together on defense. Woit was strong, a really solid hitter, but not the greatest skater in the world. Red loved to carry the puck so Woit would clear the way. They had great chemistry as a pair. Red went on to win eight Stanley Cups, four with the Wings, four with the Leafs.
Bill Quackenbush was a big happy guy who liked to talk and break out into song. He helped out the younger defensemen like Red Kelly, who learned a lot from him his first year. Quackenbush was a good communicator. He’d yell, “Go get ’em Red!” Defensemen still do that today. One guy will yell, “Take ’em!” meaning “Don’t worry about this guy—you can commit to your man.” If you’re indecisive, guys will have the time and space to pick you apart. The key ingredient is communication. You’ve got to talk to each other.
Quackenbush got into trouble with Jack Adams in the playoffs. The Toronto Maple Leafs became the first NHL team to win three Cups in a row in 1949 when they swept Detroit four games to none for the second straight year. The Leafs outshot the Wings 31–15 in the last game and Adams was furious. The Ottawa Citizen called Detroit “leg-weary.” Adams waved the paper around looking for someone to blame. A little while later when he found out that Bill Quackenbush had gone golfing the day before the game, he traded him to Boston before the next season started.
When Tommy Ivan was the coach in Detroit from 1947 to 1954, he was the buffer between Adams and the players. Tommy Ivan was a smaller guy, only about 5’5”, and a really good dresser. He didn’t like to yell at the guys. He treated them with respect.
One of the first things Ivan did was to make Sid Abel the centerman between nineteen-year-old Gordie Howe and twenty-two-year-old Ted Lindsay. They were called the Production Line. Abel was the veteran, but his two wingers were best friends on and off the ice so they had a tendency to look for each other and forget about their centerman. But if Abel was open and they didn’t pass to him, he’d call them over and start bawling them out. And they’d listen. He got them into the habit of including him in the play.
Abel was sold to Chicago in 1952 and Alex Delvecchio replaced him. Gordie and Ted Lindsay were now the veterans. They didn’t need to listen to a twenty-year-old sophomore, and so they went back to passing to each other. That’s why if you look at the statistics, Gordie and Lindsay are often twenty to forty points ahead of Delvecchio.
Ted Lindsay was one of the greatest Wings to ever play the game. With Adams as GM, Lindsay was a key factor to four of Detroit’s Cups (1950, 1952, 1954, and 1955). In the mid-50s, Lindsay was the highest-scoring left-winger in NHL history. He was tough and he scared guys. Lindsay said you only found men in the corners, never chickens. He had seven hundred stitches in his head to prove it.
Lindsay would take on anyone—including his boss. And the whole league reaped the benefits. At the beginning of this book, I mentioned I’d like to thank the guys who played before me. Ted Lindsay is one of those at the top of that list. His unselfishness made a huge difference for all of us.
Lindsay was a hockey star and so he was financially comfortable, but he knew not many players made more than $10,000 a year. These were guys from small towns in Canada who often left school early to play hockey.
In 1956–57, the year he had eighty-five points, the most in his career, Lindsay formed a players’ association—the first step toward a union—along with other guys throughout the league, like Chicago’s Gus Mortson, Boston’s Fernie Flaman, New York’s Bill Gadsby, Toronto’s Jim Thomson and Tod Sloan, and Montreal’s Dollard St. Laurent. Doug Harvey, the best defenseman in Canadiens history, was one of the key organizers behind the association and Montreal traded him away as punishment a few seasons later. Harvey responded by winning another Norris Trophy that year.
Jack Adams pulled the C off Ted Lindsay’s jersey in 1956. The next season, after thirteen years with the Wings, Lindsay was traded to the Hawks. The fact that the owners were willing to make examples of future Hall of Famers like Harvey and Lindsay shows how seriously they took the threat to their power. Ultimately, the association failed. But it was only a matter of time before the players started to earn their fare share. The NHLPA finally got off the ground almost ten years later, in 1967.
Lindsay played three seasons for the Hawks. They made the playoffs the last two seasons he was with the team. But his heart wasn’t in it. He always said, “I still had a Red Wing on my forehead, on my backside and over my heart. I was existing. Nothing more.” Lindsay came out of retirement when he was thirty-nine years old to play one last year with Detroit so he could retire a Red Wing.
A lot of guys have worn other teams’ sweaters, but they are forever with their original team. I’m not sure people even remember Bobby Orr played a few games in two seasons with Chicago. Bobby Hull will always be a Black Hawk despite eight years with the Winnipeg Jets. Brian Leetch ended his career with the Bruins, but he will always be a New York Ranger. And when Ray Bourque won the 2001 Stanley Cup with Colorado, he took it home to Boston, where he had played for twenty-one seasons, and raised it over his head at City Hall Plaza to thousands of cheering fans. That’s the kind of amazing bond a guy can build in hockey. Ray Bourque’s win was their win.
Players weren’t the only people Lindsay stood up for. He was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1966, but declined to go to the ceremony because women weren’t allowed into the event. He felt his wife and family were part of his career and they deserved to be there. The next year, the rules were changed and families were invited.
Ted Lindsay is a pretty good example of what toughness means to a hockey player. People sometimes get the idea that hockey players simply like violence, but that’s not the case. They can be aggressive, and they don’t like getting pushed around, but real toughness isn’t about bullying another guy. It’s usually about sticking up for someone else—or taking a hit for someone else. Lindsay was known as “Terrible” Ted because he was as tough a competitor as they come. In fact, people say that the penalty for elbowing was put in the rule book because of Lindsay. But if you needed help, he had your back.
To say that you hate playing against a guy but that you would love to have him on your team is one of the biggest compliments in our game. Ted Lindsay may be more deserving of that compliment than anyone in the history of the game.
Seven
THE ORIGINAL SIX
Every year around the draft, fans of every team debate the importance of various roles on the team. Which is more valuable—a first-line center like Sidney Crosby? A lethal winger like Alex Ovechkin? A top-pairing defenseman like Erik Karlsson? A franchise goalie like Carey Price? These guys are scarce. There are only thirty first-line centers in the NHL, only thirty number-one goalies, and so on.
Now, imagine a league in which twenty-four of those guys aren’t good enough to keep their jobs. That was the Original Six.
That’s how it worked. Only six guys were good enough to take each of those jobs. Or put it this way: if you took only the first lines from every team in the league today, you would still have more forwards than you would roster spots on six teams. If you took only the goalies invited to the All-Star game, you’d have enough to fill the starters’ roles.
In other words, these guys were good.
To be fair, there were no Europeans to speak of in the league back then, and very few Americans. But still, anyone who was one of the best six players in North America at his position was a very good hockey player. With so few roster spots to go around, there were simply no weak players in the Original Six.
In 1942, at the start of the Original Six era, the league looked like this: Montreal Canadiens, Toronto Maple Leafs, Detroit Red Wings, Chicago Black Hawks, New York Rangers, and Boston Bruins. The Americans had dropped out. The Americans’ veteran defenseman and coach, Red Dutton, had retired from playing to manage and coach the team. Dutton thought moving the team to Brooklyn would create more of a rivalry with the Rangers. So even though they still played at Madison Square Garden, the team name was changed to the Brooklyn Americans for the 1941–42 season, but they finished in last place and suspended operations. There had been various numbers of teams in the league over the years. But when the dust settled there were six, and it stayed that way for decades.
In the early 1940s, the Second World War began taking its toll on the NHL as players enlisted. About eighty NHLers served in the military during the war—that was roughly about half the league. Each team was allowed to dress only thirteen skaters and one goalie per game. Boston was hit hard like all of the teams. They lost the entire “Kraut Line.”
We probably wouldn’t give a line a nickname based on an ethnic slur today, but those were different times, and all three guys were of German ancestry. Milt Schmidt, Woody Dumart, and Bobby Bauer all grew up together in Kitchener, Ontario, and all ended up playing for the Bruins. In 1939–40, the three buddies finished 1-2-3 in the NHL scoring race. In 1942, all three then did something that shows that as important as our game is, other things are more important. They took a train to Montreal, and enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force.
They had time to return to Boston before reporting for duty and were back in their Bruins uniforms on February 10 for their final game as a line. Boston thumped Montreal 8–1, and the Kraut Line ended up with eleven points. They were carried off the ice like heroes. They all survived the war and were back playing for the Bruins in 1945.
Regular-season overtime was canceled during the war because trains had to run on schedule. It didn’t return until the 1983–84 NHL season. Still, the schedule was hard. A team like the Montreal Canadiens would leave home after a game on a Saturday night, travel to Chicago, and get there so close to game time that a police escort would accompany them with sirens to the Chicago Stadium. After the game, they’d get back on the train and head home to Montreal. Forty-eight hours to play one hockey game. After tying a game one night, Dick Irvin said, “It’s a long way to go for one point.” But that’s what it was like, and all the teams went through it.
Because the teams played each other so regularly and there were so few players on each team and they competed against each other fourteen times a year (seven times at home and seven times on the road), fans knew the players. They would follow their stories almost like a drama.
The biggest rivalries were just about everybody versus the Canadiens. Toe Blake, who won three Stanley Cups as a player (one with the Maroons and two with the Canadiens and eight more as coach of the Canadiens), was once asked if he liked Gordie Howe as a person when he played against him. Blake said that the only time he and Gordie spoke was on the ice and it was to tell each other off.
Nobody wanted to beat Montreal more than the Bruins. If you look at old newspapers back in the 30s and 40s, you really get a sense of what the games were like. There is an article in The Boston Globe from February 5, 1941 about a game the night before. It said, “It was the roughest free-swinging engagement presented at the Garden in years . . .” The referee di
dn’t call any minor penalties for charging, slashing, or high-sticking because if he did the game would never have ended. A couple of guys were cut, another was knocked out. Montreal’s coach, Dick Irvin, came out on the ice and held the game up while he argued with referee Bill Stewart. Montreal rookie Elmer Lach was taken off for stitches when his teammate Murph Chamberlain charged Milt Schmidt, sending him head over heels over the boards and into the Canadiens’ bench where Lach was peacefully watching the game when Schmidt’s skate sliced him open.
That same year, Lach skated around Chicago defenseman Earl Seibert, the same guy who fell over Howie Morenz’s leg in 1937 and broke it. Seibert was twenty-nine and Lach was twenty-three. As he went by, Elmer said to Seibert, “You old bastard, you’re too old to catch me.” That was the first of seven times Elmer would have his nose broken. A few years later Elmer Lach would win the Hart Trophy playing on the Punch Line with Rocket Richard and Toe Blake. Elmer Lach died in April 2015, at ninety-seven years of age.
Conn Smythe always said hockey was war, and those Original Six teams battled hard. It wasn’t about money. Most guys took home very modest salaries and had second jobs to feed their families. And it wasn’t just about a hundred guys doing everything they could to keep their jobs. It was about heart.
That’s just the way it works when you play against the same guys game after game. Hockey players remember everything. It’s in the nature of the game that someone is going to get a stick up on you, or give you a little cross-check in the back as you look for position in the slot, or someone is going to chirp at you. Or maybe someone just beats you fair and square and you don’t like it. No one likes to be beaten. You don’t retaliate in the moment. You just remember the guy’s number, and sort it out later, usually when the referee isn’t nearby. (The one exception to this is the big hit. If guys think a hit is uncalled for or could lead to injury, someone is going to straighten it out right there and then so it doesn’t happen again.) If you play the same guys fourteen times a season, plus playoffs, pretty soon every number on that team is going to mean something to you. And probably every guy on that team feels he owes you one too. It makes for an intense game.
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