by Gordie Howe
The NHL used to be limited to Canadian and American players, but now it includes the best players from around the world. I thought about that at the alumni game while watching Mark take a shift with Slava Fetisov, his old defense partner. Slava was there along with the other members of the so-called Russian Five—Igor Larionov, Slava Kozlov, Sergei Fedorov, and Vladimir Konstantinov—who played together in Detroit in the 1990s. Seeing Russians and Europeans in the NHL is commonplace now, but it still feels relatively new to players of my generation. It’s made the game better.
When I’m asked to compare players from different eras, my answer is always the same. I’m convinced that great players would fare well no matter when they played. If Sidney Crosby had been around in the 1950s, he’d have been as good then as he is now. Likewise, Maurice Richard, Bobby Orr, and Wayne Gretzky would be standouts in any era. As for Gordie Howe? Well, my sons figure I’d do well in today’s game provided I could figure out how to stay on the ice. I was fortunate enough to win a number of awards during my career, but the Lady Byng Trophy wasn’t one of them. That wasn’t an accident.
To my way of thinking, the two most important things you need to survive in pro hockey are time and space. I found that a surefire way to earn a wider berth the next time I came around was to give someone a good crack. If his teammates took away a message as well, then so much the better. I’m aware that not everyone approved of how I played, but I don’t think any apologies are in order. Early in my career I decided that it was worth it to do whatever was necessary to earn the extra split second it takes to make a pass or shoot the puck. The way I saw it, everyone in the league was getting paid to do a job. Mine was to help my team win games. There were lines I wouldn’t cross, but as long as I did everything in my power up to that point, I didn’t have any problem sleeping at night.
These days, officials might see things differently. Back then, we had more leeway to police ourselves, and I think the game was more civilized as a result. Everyone knew the rules, both written and unwritten, as well as the consequences for breaking them. It bred a lot of respect into the game. The referees still blew their whistles, but the play wasn’t stopped as often as it is now. Of course, today’s game also has its advantages. In my day, there was too much hooking and holding by players who couldn’t keep up. It was terrible. The league has done a good job of cutting down on much of that nonsense. I enjoyed the style of hockey played in my era, but I suppose there will always be trade-offs no matter when you play.
Since retiring, I’m sometimes asked how I managed to play into my fifties. My answer is simple: I loved playing the game. That’s all there is to it. It’s the one thing I have in common with every great player I’ve ever known. It doesn’t matter who you ask—Maurice Richard, Jean Béliveau, Bobby Hull, or Bobby Orr—the answer is always the same. I remember being at a banquet in Brampton in the early 1970s and meeting an eleven-year-old Wayne Gretzky, who was already making a name for himself by that point. When I shook his hand, I saw a look in his eye that I recognized straight away. Years later, I wasn’t the least surprised when his name started going into the record books.
If I learned one thing by playing professional hockey for thirty-two years, it’s that you have to love what you do. And that’s not just true for sports. Not long ago, I was talking to our son Murray, who’s a doctor, and told him the same thing. If a day comes when he wakes up and doesn’t love medicine, then he’ll know it’s time to hang up his lab coat and do something else. It wasn’t the first time we’ve had that conversation and it probably won’t be the last. I figure life’s too short to live any other way.
I was lucky enough to find hockey when I was six years old. It’s been eighty years since then, and I still love the game just as much as I ever did. I don’t have to scratch very far beneath the surface to find the shy kid who was raised in Saskatoon in the Dust Bowl years. Looking back at where I’ve been still makes me shake my head in disbelief. I couldn’t have been any more fortunate. I wish everyone my kind of luck.
One
EARLY DAYS
How do I even begin to tell the story of my whole life?
Like so many folks, I’ve been a father, a son, a friend, and a husband. I’ve done things I’m proud of and some I wish I could take back. And, of course, there’s hockey. For the Howe family there’s always hockey. I love the game. It was good to me, and when I stop to think about it, I like to believe I gave a little back to it as well. One thing is for certain: I never got tired of lacing up my skates. If I could take a few turns around a sheet of ice right now, I would.
As much as I’m known for playing hockey, the game isn’t where my story starts. In fact, it doesn’t even begin with me. The whole thing was set in motion long before I even showed up. It’s humbling when you stop to think about it. If you make it anywhere in life, you owe that success to the people along the way who stuck up for you, or made sacrifices for you, and gave you a push when you needed it. In my case, those people were my family.
• • •
In any case, to tell the story right, I need to go all the way back to the beginning—to a little farmhouse with a dirt wall in Floral, Saskatchewan. People often assume that I come from Floral, but that’s not exactly right. I was born there on March 31, 1928, but nine days later the family moved down the road to Saskatoon. There wasn’t much to Floral back then. Just a small collection of houses huddled around a grain elevator. I went back to see our farmhouse once. It was a few miles from the elevator, tiny, made of wood, and built into a hill. I thought about my parents living in such a dingy place, raising a bunch of kids. The high plains of Saskatchewan can get pretty bleak, especially during winter. Their lives weren’t easy; I know that.
My father, Albert, or Ab, came to Canada from Minnesota, lured by the promise of a homestead under the Dominion Lands Act. He did his best as a farmer, but growing crops on the Canadian prairies at the start of the Great Depression wasn’t a guaranteed way to feed a family. To help make ends meet, he would pick up work as a mechanic at a local service station or on construction sites. That’s where he was when I was born. He’d taken his horse team into Saskatoon, about nine miles west, to work as an excavator.
My mother, born Katherine Schultz in Stuttgart, Germany, was the strongest woman I’ve ever known. When she was young, she was separated from her parents and was passed from family to family until her grandfather found her. He was a coffin maker and often buried victims of cholera, typhus, and influenza. People would knock on his door and hand their dead children to my mother, who was little more than a child herself at the time. My mother came from tough stock, to say the least. She eventually reunited with her family and later immigrated with them to Canada. They ended up in Windsor, of all places, right across the river from Detroit. Mum took a job there as a housekeeper until her family decided to move farther west. That’s how she ended up in Saskatchewan, which is where she met my dad. On the day I was born she was outside chopping wood when her labor pains set in. At that time, pioneers often had to take care of themselves. I was the sixth of nine children, so she knew what to do. With only a couple of kids around for company, she put some buckets of water on the stove and got into bed. After I was born, she cut the umbilical cord herself and waited for my father to come home. As I said, Mum was tough.
She wasn’t doing so well when Dad finally arrived, so he hurried over to my Aunt Mary’s place and brought her back to look after Mum. She’d been hemorrhaging from the birth, but she healed up pretty quickly after she got some proper care. In the meantime, Dad, who’d given up on trying to scrape out a living off the land, packed up the house in Floral and moved the rest of us into a place on the outskirts of Saskatoon.
In those days, we didn’t have a lot; no one really did. Dad was always hustling around for work, picking up this job or that one. Eventually he was hired as a foreman with the city and he ended up working there for as long as I can remember. To make ends meet, Dad used to do some hunting. The governm
ent would pay a one-cent bounty for gopher tails and you could get up to $15 or $20 for a coyote pelt.
My father was a real outdoorsman and he could ride a horse with the best of them. He used to talk about a roan he had once. It was known as a killer horse—it would kill a man if given the chance—but it could really run. Its owners wanted to put it down because it was too dangerous, but Dad stepped in and said he’d take it instead.
One time, before I was born, he was out in the countryside on that horse looking for work and saw a coyote. The way he told the story, he couldn’t shoot it because he couldn’t afford any cartridges for his rifle, but the coyote was too valuable to let go. He spurred that horse and they took off after the coyote. After a long chase, they ran the thing down. Since his gun was useless, my father took out his hunting knife, leaned over in the saddle, snagged the coyote’s back leg, and slashed its tendon. Then he dismounted and finished it off. He took the coyote to the factor, got paid, and had enough to buy more ammunition. That was the type of guy Dad was. He did what had to be done to get by.
There were eleven of us in that little house in Saskatoon: my parents and nine kids, four boys and five girls. I was pretty much in the middle: Gladys, Vernon, Norman, Violet, Edna, me, Victor, Joan, and my little sister Helen.
When we were kids, we didn’t have a lot. I guess we were poor, but we never really thought about ourselves that way. It was just the way things were. Of course, they were that way for a lot of families. I won’t go into the history of the Great Depression, but those were tough times. Between low grain prices and terrible harvests, farmers were taking a beating. Farms were abandoned all over the Prairies, and there was a steady stream of people leaving in the hopes of finding work somewhere else. Sometimes we’d eat oatmeal two or three times a day because that’s all my parents could afford. For milk, my dad used to buy Carnation powder and we’d add about a gallon of water to it. If you’ve never tried watered-down powdered milk before, I don’t recommend you start now.
The lack of proper nutrition eventually caught up with me. When I was just a kid, the doctor told my mother that my back wasn’t strong enough and I was developing spinal problems. He said that if I fell down or took the wrong kind of hit, a hard enough blow to my back might break it. He put me on some vitamin supplements, as well as on my first physical training program. It was sort of like a homemade version of the physiotherapy we have today. He had me hang like a monkey from the top of a doorway and swing my hips from side to side. The idea was to strengthen my back muscles and straighten my spine. It was pretty crude but it must have worked. My old back held up through more than thirty years of professional hockey, so I guess that doctor knew what he was doing.
• • •
From a certain perspective, I suppose I could say that I have the Great Depression to thank for jump-starting my hockey career. It was 1933 and we weren’t the only family in Saskatoon that needed a few extra dollars. One day, a neighbor whose husband was sick came to the door with a gunnysack full of her used things and asked my mother if she would buy it to help the woman get milk for her family. Mum didn’t have much, but she was able to scrape together a few dollars. That’s the way things were then. When the going got tough, sometimes it was neighbors looking out for each other that allowed everyone to get by. Like so many things in my life, I have my mother’s kindness to thank for what came next.
We dumped out the sack on the floor and, along with some old clothes, out came a pair of skates. I spied them immediately, but so did my sister Edna. She grabbed one, I grabbed the other, and we ran outside to try them out. They were a men’s size 6, so we pulled on a bunch of woolen socks to get them to fit. We had patches of ice in the garden out back where the snow would melt and then freeze. Edna and I started pushing ourselves across this ice on one skate each. We’d run like hell, pick up our socked foot, and glide across the ice.
When we talked about it years later, my mother and I recalled what happened next differently. She told me my sister kept her skate for a week. I wanted it badly, but she wouldn’t let it go. Eventually I broke down and offered her a dime for it, which Mum loaned me, and Edna finally let me have it. What I remember is my sister getting cold after a few nights of skating and going inside to warm up. Once she took off that skate, I snatched it up and that was the last she ever saw of it. Whichever way it happened, I know that putting on those skates was the moment I fell in love with hockey.
From that day on I skated for as long as I could, whenever I could. I don’t know if it was because I thought I could do well at hockey or whether I just loved to skate. I do know that whenever I jumped on the ice, I felt like a million bucks. Later on, when I got a bit bigger, skating was the thing that really opened up my little world.
Back then, if we had heavy rains or an early snowfall, the water would collect in the gullies and sloughs and ponds. When winter came and the water froze, we would get great patches of ice all over the place. The Hudson Bay Slough was about three blocks from my house. We’d walk over there, jump on it, and skate forever. It ran for about four miles, nearly out to the airport, and we’d skate the whole thing.
We also knew where to find all the best skating ponds. All you’d need to do was look for the bluffs on the landscape. Most of them had ponds in between them, so we’d go up into the hills, look down, and there’d be a nice sheet of ice just waiting for us. We’d play until we cut it up; if the ice was thin, it might get a little rubbery and the water would start to follow your tracks. Then we’d take off our skates and move on to the next pond.
When winter really set in and the river froze, we’d play on it as well. The Prairies can get pretty windy, which isn’t much fun most of the time, but it did clear the snow off the South Saskatchewan, the big river that flows through Saskatoon. It felt like we could skate on it all the way to the next city if we wanted to. Mostly, though, we’d make our way up to the Grand Trunk Bridge, a big steel trestle railway bridge that’s still there. The ice was good under that bridge, as a rule, and we used to play hockey in between the piers.
When I first started out, my dad used to sharpen our skates with a file. After a while that became a lot of work, so he came up with a pretty ingenious invention. He was always handy as a mechanic and he built a contraption that hooked on to the washing machine. Then he attached a belt to the flywheel of the washer that turned a grinding stone. After that he was able to sharpen our skates all the time without much fuss.
The ice we used to skate on really put Dad’s homemade sharpener through its paces. The gravel roads in Saskatoon at the time had four ruts in them for car tires. During the day the snow that covered the roads would melt slightly, and then at night it would refreeze, which created ribbons of ice that were just made for skating. I even had street shoes with blades on them. The odd time that I’d get a new pair of shoes, my dad would take the old ones and attach metal straight blades to their soles. They made great skates. As soon as he put the blades on, I’d be off. The whole city was like our backyard. We could go anywhere we wanted, and we did. We’d even get behind a bus, grab on to the bumper, and go for a free ride. We called it “trailing.” The drivers weren’t too happy about it. Every now and then they’d stop and chase us, but it wasn’t much of a deterrent. We could skate faster than they could run, so it wasn’t like getting caught was a big worry.
Most of the time, we were just looking to get somewhere to play more hockey. We’d play every day after school, and on the weekends we’d go from early morning until late at night. Imagine a game that lasted for twelve hours with kids coming and going. I’d play for hours, then when I got cold or hungry I’d skate back home. It’s been said that, while growing up, I ate meals with my skates on. It’s true. Mum would spread newspapers over the linoleum floor in our house, so my brothers and friends and I could come inside on our skates. After we warmed up and had something to eat, we’d head right back outside. It was as if we hadn’t left the game. We’d just ask someone the score and start playi
ng again.
Anyone who’s ever gone to a rink and stepped onto a sheet of freshly Zambonied ice knows it’s something special. It’s so smooth and perfect, it’s like a canvas. And that’s what you get just at a local arena. Move up to the NHL and skating onto a fresh sheet of ice is like being in a cathedral. Playing outside is something different altogether. The ice isn’t pristine like it is indoors. It’ll be uneven in spots and have ripples and ridges and bumps in others. I’ve always been strong on my skates, and I give some of the credit to spending my childhood skating outside on different kinds of ice in all types of conditions. Once I got to proper rinks, the ice was so nice it was like cheating. It really let you fly.
Nowadays it seems that kids don’t play much hockey unless it’s organized. I understand that times have changed, but I always figured that the way to get better at something is to do it as much as possible. Maybe I was too single-minded at times, but that’s the way I was with hockey.
A number of years ago I remember asking some young guys if they ever played hockey with a tennis ball. They said it was pucks for them, mostly. I think that’s a shame. When I was a kid we would play ball hockey on the road or in driveways all the time. With a tennis ball, you’re basically playing with a bouncing puck. You can’t force a tennis ball; you need to be light of hand to control it, so playing with one really helps to develop your touch. Plus, if you play it against a wall, when it comes back your way either you learn how to trap it with your stick blade or you end up spending your time chasing it down the street. I didn’t like chasing tennis balls too much, so I became pretty good at trapping them out of the air. I told these youngsters that was how I practiced as a kid. Whenever I went anywhere, I was stickhandling a ball down the road.
Years later I read a story about Steve Nash, the basketball player. When he was in college, he used to dribble a tennis ball around campus on his way to class. He won a couple of MVP awards in the NBA, so I guess a tennis ball helped him out, too.