Mr. Hockey My Story

by Gordie Howe

  On the road in the spring, Mr. Adams could be a decent enough guy, but his bullying nature would reemerge once he returned to his desk at the Olympia. He chose to rule his team with an iron fist, which was just fine with the team’s owner. Since taking over the club in the 1930s, James Norris, who was known as Pops, had solidified himself as the league’s most influential owner. His authority was backed by his great wealth, as well as by the direct or indirect stakes he held in three of the league’s six clubs: the Wings, the Rangers, and the Black Hawks. Such a conflict of interest wouldn’t pass muster these days, but at the time the league’s dealings often happened in the shadows. When it came to matters of hockey, Norris trusted Mr. Adams, which gave Jack free rein with the club. In return for the owner’s faith and deep pockets, Mr. Adams managed to put a winning team on the ice more often than not.

  When Pops died in late 1952, few people took it harder than Mr. Adams, who saw him as something of a father figure. They’d talked on the phone after every game, with Mr. Adams either reporting the good news of a victory or breaking the bad news if we’d lost. With Norris gone, control of the Red Wings passed to his daughter, Marguerite. Her role with the team has been relegated to a footnote in sports history, but I think she was the first woman to ever run a professional team. I don’t know how Mr. Adams felt about his new team president, but I’m sure he wasn’t thrilled about a woman in her twenties handing down his marching orders. Regardless, since her brothers Jimmy and Bruce owned shares in the Black Hawks, the family needed to put someone in the role and the job fell to her. In the time I spent around Marguerite, I found her to be both smart and capable. Others I talked to felt the same way. She was good for the club, but unfortunately she didn’t stick around for as long as anyone would have liked. A few years into the job, she was ousted by her older brother, Bruce. She became the club’s executive vice president, but her involvement didn’t last much longer. In retrospect, it’s easy to see how bad the family infighting was for the team. Marguerite was a much more thoughtful owner than her brother, who could be something of a bully.

  I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Marguerite’s time in charge coincided with some of the greatest years in franchise history. As president, she had enough juice to check Trader Jack’s instincts to upset the apple cart. It’s hard to say how many Stanley Cups we might have won if she had stuck around longer. In my mind, the ingredients were in place to form one of the greatest dynasties in hockey history. Sadly, we weren’t left alone for long enough to find out what might have been. Bruce’s hockey acumen was no match for his sister’s, which was good for Mr. Adams but bad for the rest of us. Despite winning seven consecutive league championships and two straight Stanley Cups, Trader Jack decided to spend the 1955 off-season dismantling the team.

  To this day, his reasons for blowing up our championship squad defy explanation. First, he sent Tony Leswick, Johnny Wilson, Glen Skov, and Benny Woit to the Black Hawks for Bucky Hollingworth, Dave Creighton, Jerry Toppazzini, and John McCormack. The deal was a real Norris brothers special. Bruce gift-wrapped four top-tier players and sent them to his brother Jimmy’s team in Chicago. What’s worse, Mr. Adams wasn’t done. A week later he dealt Terry Sawchuk, Vic Stasiuk, Marcel Bonin, and Lorne Davis to the Bruins for Warren Godfrey, Ed Sandford, Réal Chevrefils, and a couple of rookies. In the newspapers, Mr. Adams said he needed to make room on the roster for young players like Johnny Bucyk and Norm Ullman. He also had Glenn Hall parked in Edmonton waiting to take over in net. Hall was a terrific goaltender, no question, but trading Sawchuk, who was coming off another Vezina Trophy, was hard to swallow. Most general managers spent their entire career waiting for a goalie like Sawchuk, who they could build a team around, to come along. Not Mr. Adams. When Terry was on his game, it’s hard to think of anyone better. He also always seemed to save his best for when the stakes were the highest. An NHL team can’t ask for much more than having a goalie who heats up every spring.

  By the time the smoke cleared, Trader Jack had dealt away half of our team. Only nine of us remained from a squad that had raised the Stanley Cup a few short months earlier. Looking back, I’d say the ball started rolling downhill when we lost Sid Abel and Tommy Ivan. It picked up speed when Bruce Norris pushed out Marguerite, which paved the way for Trader Jack’s maniacal 1955 off-season. Those trades turned out to be the final straw. I have a hard time thinking about what might have been. I think a lot of my old teammates feel the same way. For the rest of the league, the opposite is probably true. The upheaval in our roster was good news for everyone else. No one took more advantage of the new power vacuum on top of the league than the Canadiens. The dismantling of the Red Wings juggernaut cleared the way for Montreal, who went on to win five Cups in a row. Without the trades, would we have beaten them in any of those years? No one can say for sure, but our track record until that point suggests we would have at least given them a run for their money. We were still competitive, but it’s easy now to see how those trades sapped us of the firepower we needed to win another championship.

  • • •

  Some sports fans are turned off by the multimillion-dollar contracts signed by today’s athletes. The sharp escalation in salaries certainly has put many players out of touch with the average Joe, but—be that as it may—I’m here to tell you that the good old days weren’t as good as you might think. Fans may see the rise of so-called super agents and management companies as being bad for the game, but before they showed up, players didn’t have anyone looking out for their best interests. The playing field was tilted, and that’s exactly the way the league liked it. Most of us had quit high school to play junior hockey, which turned us into good players but didn’t do much for us at the negotiating table. And the owners didn’t miss a trick when it came to maintaining the status quo. Players were kept in the dark about the business side of the game, which allowed clubs to peddle whatever story they wanted about their financial situation. Most of them claimed they were just scraping by and that we were all lucky to have jobs. Of course, they never showed us any proof, and even if they had cracked open the books, the numbers wouldn’t have made much sense to most of us. It wasn’t until years later that we learned how much money the league was really making, but by then it was too late to do much about it.

  When it came time to negotiate a new contract, players didn’t have much of a frame of reference. Contractually, we were obliged to stay quiet about our salaries, even when talking to our teammates. This gave the owners a big leg up and they knew it. They turned it into such an ingrained part of the league’s culture that players just accepted the idea that discussing salaries was off-limits. I probably have less to complain about than most. Since I was one of the better players in the game, Mr. Adams had a vested interest in keeping me happy. I wish I’d made it harder for him, but at my core, I was still just grateful to be playing hockey for a living. Talking about money is also uncomfortable for a lot of people, and I was no exception. I think Mr. Adams was aware of that little piece of social psychology and used it to his advantage. If I was happy to get out of his office as quickly as possible, he wasn’t going to stop me.

  The owners, unlike their players, understood the power of information. When I sat down at the table with Mr. Adams, he had all of it and I had none. When he assured me I’d be the best-paid player on the Red Wings and probably the highest-paid player in the NHL, I didn’t have any reason not to believe him. He didn’t know exactly what other teams paid their players, he claimed, but he promised he would always do his best to ensure that my salary reflected my stature in the league. It seemed fair to me. Multiyear contracts didn’t exist at that point, so at the end of training camp every year I’d sit down in his office and we’d come up with a new one-year deal. Most seasons, he’d offer me $1000 more than my previous salary and I’d sign. He also included bonus incentives, which made sense to my way of thinking. I figured that if I had a good season, it meant the team would succeed as well. One year—I think it was 1
952—I basically doubled my salary through bonuses. I took home the Hart Trophy and the scoring title, I was named to the All-Star Team, and we won the Stanley Cup. The total haul came to an additional $9000 or so.

  To my dismay, I’ve since realized that I was far too trusting of management in those days. When Mr. Adams assured me I was the league’s highest-paid player, I was inclined to believe him. If I was naive, then management certainly did its part to keep me that way. The clubs did everything they could to keep salaries in check. If they didn’t like the cut of your jib, there was always another farm boy from the Prairies just waiting for the call to the big leagues. Even for the top guys in the game, it felt like you were never more than one loose comment or one unlucky injury away from being out of the league. In retrospect, I should have been more of a hard case, but if I’m being completely honest with myself, I know that being an agitator isn’t in my nature. I guess I also bought into all of the talk of the Red Wings being a family. If I put in an honest day’s work, I thought Mr. Adams could be trusted to pay an honest day’s wage. That’s what he promised, anyway. Other players, like Ted Lindsay, were much less willing to take his word at face value.

  • • •

  In professional sports today, collective bargaining agreements and players’ unions are par for the course. The world was entirely different in the 1950s. It was a time of McCarthyism, the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and the Hollywood blacklist. Among the general public, the mere mention of the word “union” wasn’t going to win you many friends. Although few players realized it, the owners were taking such great advantage of us that a union was exactly what we needed. Whether we were ready to join one was another matter. Ted Lindsay’s first taste of league business came in 1955, when he and Doug Harvey were selected to represent the players on the board of the National Hockey League Pension Society. Regardless of how many times they asked, the league wouldn’t furnish any information about the size of the pension fund or how its investments were performing. The league assured the players that its pension plan was the gold standard in professional sports, which we were counting on, since the $900 a year we paid into it represented a significant portion of our take-home pay. Getting stonewalled when he tried to verify those claims didn’t sit well with Lindsay. He developed a suspicion about the owners that wouldn’t go away.

  In the 1956 off-season, Lindsay bumped into Cleveland Indians pitcher Bob Feller, who was also the president of the Major League Baseball Players Association. The chance encounter tipped off Lindsay to the contract that baseball players had just received from their owners. Wanting to learn more, Lindsay met with the lawyers who had negotiated that deal. Over the course of several meetings, they concocted a plan. At the All-Star Game that next season, Lindsay approached Harvey and they came up with the seeds of what would become the NHL’s first players’ association. A select group of veteran players quietly signed up nearly every player in the league. When they were finally ready, Lindsay held a press conference to tell the world—and the owners—about the new association. It went poorly right off the bat. The owners were furious. In Detroit, Jack Adams was apoplectic. At a hastily convened team meeting he spat words like “loyalty,” “family,” and “betrayal” at us. He wanted to bully us into feeling guilty about turning our backs on the league’s benevolent ownership. In reality, the owners felt threatened by the new association. It wasn’t until years later that we learned how intent they had been to break it up.

  The league launched a coordinated campaign to feed misleading information to the press, the public, and even the players. Teams in each city cracked down on anyone who was perceived to be sympathetic to the cause. In our dressing room, that started with Lindsay. In the summer of 1957, he was shipped to the Black Hawks along with Glenn Hall. On paper, the deal didn’t make any sense. Both players had been First Team All-Stars the year before and Ted had been the league’s second-leading scorer with 85 points. Of course, on-ice performance wasn’t the point. Over time, nearly everyone considered to be a ringleader in the new players’ association was either traded or drummed out of the league. Not even Marty Pavelich, who wasn’t particularly active in the players’ association, was spared. Mr. Adams made Marty, who was Ted’s good friend and business partner, into an example by demoting him to the minor leagues. Marty wasn’t having any of it. With Ted in Chicago, no one would be around to look after their business interests if he left Detroit. He refused to accept the unjust transfer and instead, at only twenty-nine years old, went into a forced retirement. It was dirty pool by Mr. Adams, but he didn’t care. The owners were playing hardball. Rumor had it that Marguerite tried to oppose the trades, but she was railroaded by her brother into standing pat. She gave up her executive duties shortly after and that was the last we saw of her around the Red Wings.

  Around the league, other teams were doing their part to break up the players’ solidarity. The players’ association eventually fought back by filing an antitrust suit against the owners. Our locker room wasn’t sure that was the best move. A lawsuit seemed like a precursor to a strike, and we believed that further negotiations were in order before we went that far. Before choosing to support the antitrust suit, we wanted to know more about its potential consequences. After a team vote, we decided not to strike. Without a mandate from one of the league’s six teams, the players’ association was put in a tough spot. The solidarity didn’t last much longer and the association disbanded after the owners made a few face-saving concessions and some vague promises to treat us better in the future. Looking back, it’s easy to say now that we should have shown more resolve when the owners tried to crack us. I also accept that the situation might have turned out differently if I had taken on a larger leadership role. To be honest, though, I know that my heart wasn’t in organizing my teammates and fighting the owners. I just wanted to play hockey. Today, players are willing to stand up for what’s right, and I admire that. The waters were much murkier in the 1950s. Strikes were considered to be almost a communist activity. That was a tough perception to overcome. As someone who played in that era, I can also say that we weren’t nearly as well equipped to understand the bigger picture. It makes me happy to see how much things have changed.

  As a footnote to all of this, I should probably add a word about my relationship with Ted Lindsay. Before he was traded to Chicago, our friendship had been deteriorating for some time. In our early days with the Red Wings, we were as thick as thieves. Not only did we room together at Ma Shaw’s, but he was also in my wedding party and I even lived in his house after he married Pat. I have some remorse about how things turned out, but I also know that nothing lasts forever. Not even friendships. The cracks in ours probably started when we went into business together. Ted said some things about me to our partners that were hard for me to get past. I’m sure I did some things he didn’t like too much, either. After his trade to Chicago and the whole rigmarole with the players’ association, mending fences became that much harder. Our relationship deteriorated further when I was in talks to return to the Red Wings shortly after he took over as the team’s general manager in the 1970s. We’re civil enough when we run into each other but, given the number of differences we’ve had over the years, our contact is limited to a handshake. That doesn’t stop me from smiling when I think about the good times we shared, but they were long ago. In the years since, I’ve had plenty of time to consider the nature of friendship. These days, I think of Ted as someone I once played with on a line and not much more.

  • • •

  As time went on, the success that the Wings had long enjoyed became frustratingly elusive. The other teams in the league were too good for us to be able to overcome the string of lopsided trades and mismanagement. No matter how tough things got at the arena, though, I could always take solace in coming home to our growing family. I really didn’t get to know my father, who worked all the time when I was a kid, until I was much older. I knew I wanted to have a different relationship with my chi
ldren. I like to think I managed fairly well for the most part, even if it wasn’t always as easy to pull off as I would have liked. If I had one quibble with playing professional hockey, it was the amount of traveling. I didn’t mind being on the road, per se, but leaving Colleen and the kids so often was hard. I missed more track meets, hockey games, and recitals than I would have liked, but I always got the play-by-play as soon as I came home. By and large, though, I don’t mind sounding boastful when I say that I think Colleen and I did a pretty fine job when it came to parenting.

  Since our first two kids still had all their fingers and toes, we figured the family could survive another addition or two. In the spring of 1959, we introduced Marty and Mark to their new baby sister, Cathy. A year and a half later, we welcomed their little brother, Murray, to the family. Growing up, it was only natural that our kids found themselves around a lot of hockey. They would scamper around the Olympia like it was their second home. I remember toting Mark into the dressing room with me once after a game. We’d had a few losses in a row, which made Mr. Adams miserable. He came storming into the room, hollering and screaming and chucking pieces of orange at us. When he paused for breath, the room was so quiet you could hear a pin drop. With the impeccable timing that comes only with being five years old, Mark picked that moment to ask, “Hey, Dad, who’s that big fat guy?” My teammates deserve a medal for holding back their laughter. Mr. Adams didn’t say anything; he just tied up his rant and left the room. As soon as the door closed behind him, everyone nearly busted a gut. About a week later, Mr. Adams informed us that kids would no longer be allowed in the dressing room on game days. The team called it the Mark Howe rule.