by Gordie Howe
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The more obvious sacrifice made by every NHL player stares back at you every time you look in the mirror. Your body takes a beating in the big leagues; there’s no way around it. I know that today’s game is rough on players, but I’m not sure it’s rough to the same degree that it was in my day. Modern equipment is light-years ahead of what we strapped on. Our pads were basically glorified cardboard, as opposed to the full-body Kevlar armor that players have now. I actually used to take steps to modify my gear to have it work better. I didn’t like anything pulling at my shoulders, so I didn’t wear suspenders. Instead, I put on my shoulder pads and just let them lie there. I also used to run a lace through a pair of holes I cut in my pants. I’d tighten it up and then just let my hips hold my pants in position. Pants didn’t offer nearly the same protection as they do now. Quick movements would cause you to swivel inside them, which would shift the pads. It exposed your thighs to a lot of charley horses. The manufacturers eventually figured out the problem and started making pants and pads that move with your legs. The innovation has saved players from countless bruises.
Regardless of the advances made with equipment, injuries are still unavoidable. Relatively speaking, though, I don’t have much cause to complain. Throughout my career, I was definitely luckier than most when it came to avoiding the big injury. The most time I ever missed in one stretch was in 1948–49, when I sat out twenty games after undergoing knee surgery. Of course, when I do an inventory of my injuries, I can’t say that “lucky” is the first word that comes to mind. When a doctor hands me a chart and asks me to mark the places I’ve been injured, I just draw a line from the top right to the lower left and write in: “All of the above.” I can’t think of a body part that hasn’t been dinged up at some point.
Where to start? I’ve had teeth knocked out and I’ve broken all of the usual suspects when it comes to bones: fingers, toes, wrists, feet, and collarbone. The hole they drilled in my skull after the encounter with Teeder Kennedy in 1950—which accompanied a damaged eyeball, broken nose, and fractured cheekbone—is certainly memorable. Not to be left out, my torso has also suffered its share of trauma. One night in Boston, somebody left a gate open and it caught me right on the vulnerable part of the ribs. I had a big lump where the cartilage holds the ribs together. I was so sore that it took a pair of ushers to load me into the cab that took me to the hospital. After getting something to numb the pain, I started to think I could fly home with the guys later that night. That thought lasted only until the freezing wore off and the whole world started to spin. When I made it back on the ice, I had to play with the lump in my ribs for weeks. The other side of my rib cage was spared that time but, just for good measure, I managed to tear it up in a different game. Relative to the gate I hit in Boston, it didn’t hurt as much, so I tried to take that as a positive.
I have to admit that often I only had myself to blame for my injuries. I was playing in an exhibition game in Sarnia once when I ran a guy through the double gates of the boards behind the net. One of the gates opened and he went flying out of the rink, but the other side was more stubborn. It stayed shut and caught me right on the collarbone. I was in a lot of pain, but the doctors assured me it was just a sprain. In a different game later on, I took a hit to the same spot and I knew something was off. I went for an X-ray and the doctor told me I’d been playing with a broken collarbone. It was still weak and had become badly bruised after the latest hit. I couldn’t believe the doctors in Sarnia saw fit to send me out there with just a pat on the back.
Over my career, I figure I’ve taken more than 300 stitches to my face alone. Colleen wondered if that might qualify me for a Guinness world record, but I told her I knew some goalies that definitely had me beat. For what it’s worth, as a connoisseur on the subject I can tell you that not all stitches are created equal. I labeled the area that ran from my nose to below my mouth as the triangle of pain. Taking stitches there was no kind of fun. Getting sewn up in a place with fewer nerve endings, like the forehead, is a breeze in comparison.
My nose, as you might guess, has also taken a beating over the years. At last count I think it’d been broken fourteen times. Joe Garagiola, the former big league catcher-turned-commentator, once looked at my schnoz and asked how many times I’d broken it. I told him never. “You never did?” he said. “Nope,” I replied, “I had fourteen other guys do it for me.” It was a line that I like to think would have made Henny Youngman proud.
My poor body also took the business end of a Bobby Hull slap shot more times than I would have liked. He could really shoot the puck. There’s an old joke about Bobby and his brother Dennis, whose shot was also heavy but not nearly as accurate as his brother’s. The setup went something like this: “Bobby can shoot the puck so hard and fast, he can put it through the entire length of a car wash without getting it wet.” Well, went the punch line, “Dennis could do the same thing if he could only hit the car wash.” Corny, yes, but it still makes me chuckle. Of course, that joke seemed considerably less funny on the night I took one of Bobby’s slap shots to the shin. A few shifts later, I noticed my skate had started to feel sloppy. I thought that too much sweat had run down my leg, so I asked for a change of socks. I also wanted to put the blower into my boot to dry it out. When I peeled off my skate, a half-inch of blood was pooled in it. The famous Hull slap shot had put the puck through my pad and split the skin on my shin right down to the bone. I needed stitches on both the inside and outside of my leg to stop the bleeding.
Another time, I was standing about ten feet to the left of where Bobby should have been aiming when he wound up and let one go. He seemed embarrassed when the puck hit me, putting his hand to his mouth as if to apologize. He wasn’t nearly as sorry as I was. The shot was so hard it broke the blade of my skate and the puck fired up into a toe. It hurt like hell. I hobbled over to the bench and pleaded with the trainer, Joe Alcott, to cut off my skate so I could check on my toe, which I knew had to be broken. He told me not to worry since my toe was a long way from my heart. Accepted wisdom of the day suggested that the only injuries considered urgent were ones that involved the heart. I let Joe know exactly what I thought about his medical advice: “My fist is only a foot from your damn nose if you don’t start cutting.” Naturally, Bobby’s errant slap shot had shattered my toe. Joe, of course, was also right. Not much could be done for a broken toe, so I just had to suffer.
Often, the scariest injuries are the ones you can’t see. Near the end of my career with Detroit, I ended up suffering a partially detached retina that went undiagnosed. My eyes began to burn and itch and I started to see little spots running through my vision. When I went to see a doctor about it, he told me it was a partial detachment that had started to heal itself. If it started to bleed or I took a good knock to the head, he said I could end up losing my sight. In the course of an average month I took any number of hard hits or collisions, so it was difficult to know the exact cause of this injury. My best guess was an accidental hit I suffered in practice one day. Ned Harkness was our coach at the time and he had us doing a drill where we crisscrossed at the blue line. I thought it was a dumb drill to begin with, since it goes against pretty much everything you’re ever taught in hockey, but he was the coach. Partway through the drill, I found myself on a collision course with one of my teammates, so I went to the ice and he tried to jump over me. Of course, he didn’t have much of a vertical and he wound up kicking me in the temple. I was immediately woozy. I knew where to find the bench, but when I wobbled over there my eyes couldn’t focus. I missed the gate by about three feet and banged into the boards. Lefty Wilson, our trainer, had to come over and help me sit down. After running more tests, the doctor settled on giving me phone numbers for hospitals and specialists in all of the cities we visited on our road trips. If anything funny happened to my vision, I was to call someone immediately. I carried those numbers around with me for a whole year, but thankfully I never had to use them.
As can b
e expected, playing hockey for a living is also tough on your joints. I banged up my knee so badly one year that I couldn’t flex it. They had to go in surgically and scrape off part of my bursa sac to bring down the swelling. My pain tolerance is pretty fair, but that one hurt like a son of a gun. It wasn’t the only time I went under the knife for my knees, either. Unfortunately, medicine wasn’t as sophisticated as it is now. At the time, if your cartilage was damaged, the surgeon didn’t repair it—he just yanked it out. After a few surgeries early in my career, I ended up playing for more than thirty years with no cartilage in either knee. The only thing that saved me was being on the ice instead of on the ground. Skating stresses your knees differently than walking or running does. Playing football or baseball would have worn them out, but hockey kept them somewhat preserved. My original knees actually lasted me until deep into my retirement. I finally went in for some artificial ones when I was around seventy or so, which marked the end of my skating career. The doctors told me if I fell wrong I’d need to have them replaced, and since I’d rather be shot than have to go through that again, I decided it was time to hang up my blades for good. I would have liked to have been able to get on the ice with my great-grandchildren, but I figure my knees granted me enough miles in my life that I owe them the break.
Another injury that stands out was a broken foot I suffered toward the end of my second season in Houston. The pain was manageable, so I kept playing on it until I scored my hundredth point. As soon as that puck went in, I headed off the ice and had a cast put on my foot to get it ready for playoffs. My foot had the last laugh, though. When the season was over, I was told the scorers had made a mistake and I was stuck at 99 points. I figured it was my foot’s way of getting back at my ego for having made it suffer. Other injuries, though, are just too painful to play through. I was slashed on the wrists so many times over the years that the bones there were basically reduced to fragments. My radiologist son, Murray, says the X-ray looks like nothing he’s ever seen before. He can’t believe my wrists let me keep playing hockey for as long as I did. Eventually, though, they didn’t. Toward the end of my NHL career, my wrists played a central role in my decision to retire. I was having trouble even gripping the stick with both hands, which basically turned me into a one-handed player. After retiring, my wrists kept hurting so badly I eventually had to give up golf. It’s been a real shame. I’d looked forward to playing until a ripe old age, but my hands won’t allow me to grip a club well enough to swing it. I can roll some balls on the putting green, but I can’t get out for a round.
Oddly enough, the worst pain I ever felt didn’t come from playing hockey. We were on the road when I woke up with an attack of kidney stones. The pain was agonizing. By the next morning, I looked like a dead horse. I managed to endure the trip back to Detroit, but once I got home the pain became so severe it scared me. Our daughter, Cathy, heard me moaning and ran to our room to see what was wrong. She saw me lying in the fetal position in my bathrobe and started to cry. My legs were curled up and she thought they’d fallen off. Poor girl. Colleen managed to bundle me into the car and we headed for the hospital. Of course, Murphy’s Law kicked in and it was rush hour. Colleen ducked out of gridlock and picked her way through side streets all the way to the hospital. Once we arrived, they gave me something for the pain, which knocked me out, gratefully. I ended up passing the stone during the night. It had to be the size of a golf ball. The next morning Colleen showed up with pajamas and my shaving kit, figuring I’d need them over the next few days in the hospital. With the kidney stone gone, I not only felt well enough to go home but also didn’t see any reason why I shouldn’t play in our game that night. Colleen thought the decision was asinine. She always had a way with words when we argued. I won out, though, and made it onto the ice that night with my teammates. I actually played pretty well, notching a goal and an assist through two periods. Eventually, the pain and exhaustion of the previous few days caught up with me, and I sat down for the third period. I figured it was a good compromise.
In the NHL, playing through pain should be part of the job description. If you can’t do it, you’ll barely ever make it onto the ice. A reporter once asked me how many times I’d been hurt in my career. I told him that I’d been hurt in some way or another in every game I’d ever played. As a professional athlete, it’s critical to be able to distinguish between being hurt and being injured. Hurt you can play through, but if you’re injured you’d better sit down or risk making it worse. I always tried to be honest with myself, but if I had any say in the matter I wanted to be there for my teammates. I knew that I couldn’t do anything to help them in street clothes, so if I could pull on my gear I wanted to give it a shot. Teammates aside, players in my era didn’t need much of a push to play. A lack of job security did wonders for our collective pain tolerance. Whether it was a broken bone or a 102-degree fever, thoughts of next season’s salary acted as a pretty effective tonic. You didn’t feel too good about sitting down, knowing that your spot in the league depended on you being on the ice and not on the bench.
• • •
Although my career lasted for thirty-two years, my laundry list of injuries offered a constant reminder that I couldn’t play forever. In the late 1950s, our family was lucky enough to take some big steps toward securing our finances away from the game. Oddly enough, it was someone’s business decision to reject me as a client that opened a lot of other doors. After an offer to do some promotional work came in from the T. Eaton Company, the biggest retailer in Canada at the time, we went looking for a manager to handle the deal. Someone suggested a bright young guy named Mark McCormack, who went on to found IMG, one of the world’s biggest management companies. At the time, he was just starting out and had only one client. He was a biggie, though: Arnold Palmer. With Arnie in the fold, McCormack said he was too busy to take me on as well. He ended up doing us a favor. After his rejection, we wondered who could do a better job of looking out for the family’s business interests than Colleen? She turned out to be a natural. Muhammad Ali, of all people, even nicknamed her “The Boss.” Her appointment calendar, which she treated like another child, helped us keep a lot of balls in the air over the years. Along with Eaton’s, we were lucky enough to establish good relationships with companies such as Lincoln-Mercury, Emery Worldwide, Neilson Chocolate, Zellers, Rayovac, Bank of Nova Scotia, and Quaker State. We also teamed up with some friends to open Gordie Howe Hockeyland, a big indoor ice-skating complex in St. Clair Shores, a town just northeast of Detroit. In the 1960s, kids came from all over Michigan and Canada to skate there twelve months a year. It still makes me proud to think that we helped to bring the game to a generation of kids who grew up playing there.
While the endorsement deals and our other business interests helped our family’s bottom line, my main source of income was always hockey. Even after Jack Adams left, the club continued to assure me that I was among the highest-paid players in the game. It took until the late 1960s before I found out otherwise. By that time, not only was my body starting to fray around the edges but my relationship with the Wings was showing some wear and tear as well.
The credit for opening my eyes to what was happening around the league belongs to Bobby Baun. He’s best remembered as a Maple Leaf, but when Toronto didn’t protect him ahead of the 1967 expansion draft he was selected by the Oakland Seals and spent a miserable year playing on the west coast. After finishing dead last overall, Oakland accommodated Bobby’s trade request and dealt him to Detroit before the 1968–69 season. As it happened, Bobby was one of the first presidents of the new NHL Players’ Association that started in the late 1960s. He was also one of the few players to flout the owners’ rules about sharing details of his salary. His straight talk with players on every team gave him a good idea of what everyone was making and what we were worth.
In those years, Detroit held its training camp in Port Huron. We were out for dinner one night when Bobby looked over and called me a stupid SOB. I told him I h
ad reasons enough of my own to agree with that statement, but I wanted to know his. He told me I’d been undervaluing my services for years. Even his salary, he said, was bigger than mine. I didn’t think he knew what he was talking about, so I asked him how much he thought I was making. My salary was around $45,000 at the time and he pegged it nearly exactly. Not only were other guys in the league making more money than me, but I wasn’t even the highest-paid player on my own team. I later found out that Carl Brewer, another of our defensemen, had also signed a much bigger deal than mine. That made me steaming mad. Clearly, this had been going on for years, meaning I’d left Lord only knows how much money on the table. I talked to Bruce Norris and asked that my salary be raised to $100,000. When he agreed to it straightaway, I immediately knew that everything Bobby was telling me was on the mark. In retrospect, I should have asked for $150,000. I don’t like to think about how much my family lost out on over the years because of the trust I put in management. It was more than just the money, however; I felt betrayed. The team liked to talk about how the organization was like a family, but in that moment it sure didn’t feel like it.