Dispatches From the Sporting Life

by Mordecai Richler

  In good writing, Hemingway once ventured, only the tip of the iceberg shows. Put another way, authentic art doesn’t advertise. Possibly that was the trouble with Gordie on ice. During his vintage years, you seldom noticed the flash of elbows, only the debris they left behind. He never seemed that fast, but somehow he got there first. He didn’t wind up to shoot, like so many of today’s golfers, but next time the goalie dared to peek, the puck was behind him.

  With hindsight, I’m prepared to allow that Gordie may not only have been a better all-round player than the Rocket but maybe the more complete artist as well. The problem could have been the fans, myself included, who not only wanted art to be done but wanted to see it being done. We also required it to look hard, not all just in a day’s work.

  A career of such magnitude as Gordie Howe’s has certain natural perimeters, obligatory tales that demand to be repeated here. The signing. The injury that all but killed him in his fourth season. The rivalry with the Rocket, already dealt with. The disenchantment with Detroit. Born-again Gordie, playing the WHA with his two sons. The return to the NHL with the Hartford Whalers. The last ceremonial season, culminating in his final goal.

  History is riddled with might-have-beens. Caesar, anticipating unfavourable winds, could have remained in bed on March 15. That most disgruntled of stringers, Karl Marx, might have gone from contributor to editor of the New York Tribune. Bobby Thomson could have struck out. Similarly, Gordie Howe might have been a New York Ranger. When he was fifteen, he was invited to the Rangers’ try-out camp in Winnipeg, but they intended to ship him to Regina, and he didn’t sign because he knew nobody from Saskatoon who would be playing there. The Red Wings wanted him to join their team in Windsor, Ontario. “They told me there would be carloads of kids I knew, so I signed. I didn’t want to be alone.”

  The following season, the Red Wings handed Gordie a $500 bonus and a $1,700 salary to play with their Omaha farm club. (“Twenty-two hundred dollars,” Gordie said. “I earn that much per diem now.”) A year later he was with the Red Wings, signed for a starting salary of $6,000. “After we signed him,” coach Jack Adams said, “he left the office. Later, when I went into the hall, he was still there, looking glum. ‘All right, Gordie, what’s bothering you?’

  “‘Well, you promised me a Red Wing jacket, but I don’t have it yet.’”

  He got the jacket, he scored a goal in his first game with the Red Wings, and he was soon playing three-, even four-minute shifts on right wing. A fast, effortless skater with a wrist shot said to travel at 110 miles per hour. Then, in a 1950 playoff game against the Toronto Maple Leafs, Howe collided with Leaf captain Teeder Kennedy and fell unconscious to the ice. Howe was rushed to a hospital for emergency surgery. “In the hospital,” Sid Abel recalled, “they opened up Gordie’s skull to relieve the pressure on his brain and the blood shot to the ceiling like a geyser.”

  The injury left Howe with a permanent facial tic, and on his return the following season, his teammates dubbed him “Blinky,” a nickname that stuck. Other injuries, over the years, have called for some four hundred stitches, mostly in his face. Howe can no longer count how many times his nose has been broken. There also have been broken ribs, a broken wrist, a detached retina, and operations on both knees. He retires with seven fewer teeth than he started with.

  The glory years with Detroit came to an end in 1971, Howe hanging up his skates after twenty-five seasons. Once a contender, the team had gone sour. Howe’s arthritic wrist meant that he was playing with constant pain. Hockey, he let it be known, was no longer fun. But, alas, the position he took in the Red Wings’ front office (“a pasture job,” his wife, Colleen, said) proved frustrating, even though it was his first $100,000 job. “They paid me to sit in that office, but they didn’t give me anything to do.”

  After two years of retirement, the then forty-five-year-old Howe bounced back. In 1973, he found true happiness, realizing what he said was a lifelong dream, a chance to play with two of his sons for the Houston Aeros of the WHA. The dream was sweetened by a $1 million contract, which called for Howe to play for one season followed by three in management. Furthermore, nineteen-year-old Marty and eighteen-year-old Mark were signed for a reputed $400,000 each for four years. A package put together by the formidable Colleen, business manager of the Howe family enterprises.

  Howe led the Aeros to the WHA championship; he scored one hundred points and was named the league’s most valuable player. Mark was voted rookie of the year. A third son, Murray, later shunned hockey to enter pre-med school at the University of Michigan. Murray, who was twenty years old in 1980, also wrote poetry:

  So you eat, and you sleep.

  So you walk, and you run.

  So you touch, and you hear.

  You lead, and you follow.

  you mate with the chosen.

  But do you live?

  Gordie went on to play three more seasons with the Aeros and two with the Whalers, finishing his WHA career with 174 goals and 334 assists. With the demise of that league and the acceptance of the Whalers by the NHL in 1979, Howe decided to play one more year so that the father-and-sons combination could make it into the NHL record books.

  It almost didn’t happen, what with Marty being sent down to Springfield. But they finally did play together on March 9 in Boston. And then, three nights later, out there in Detroit, his Detroit, Gordie finally got to take a shift in the NHL on a line with his two sons, Marty moving up from his natural position on defence. “After that game, Gordie could have just walked off,” Colleen said. “‘I’ve done all I’ve ever wanted,’ he told me.”

  I caught up with Gordie toward the end of the 1980 season, on March 22, when the Whalers came to the Montreal Forum for their last regular-season appearance. Before the game, Gordie Howe jokes abounded among the younger writers in the press box. Scanning the Hartford lineup, noting the presence of Bobby Hull and Dave Keon, both then in their forties, one wag ventured, “If only they’d put them together on the ice with Howe, we could call it the Geritol Line.”

  Another said, “When is he going to stop embarrassing himself out there and announce his retirement?”

  “If he’s that bad,” a Hartford writer cut in, “why do they allow him so much room out there?”

  “Because nobody wants to go into the record books as the kid who crippled old Gordie.”

  Going into the game, Hartford’s seventy-second of the season, Howe had fourteen goals and twenty-three assists, and there he sat on the bench, one of only six Whalers without a helmet.

  There were lots of empty seats in the Forum. It was not the usual Saturday-night crowd. Many a season ticket holder had yielded his coveted seat in the reds to a country cousin, a secretary, or an unlucky nephew. Kids were everywhere. Howe, who had scored his eight-hundredth goal a long twenty-three days earlier, jumped over the boards for his first shift at 1:27 of the first period, the Forum erupting in sentimental cheers. He did not come on again for another five minutes, this time joining a Hartford power play. Howe took to the ice again with four and a half minutes left in the period, kicking the puck to Jordy Douglas from behind the Montreal net, earning an assist on Douglas’s goal. Not the only listless forward out there, often trailing the play, pacing himself, but his passing still notably crisp, right on target each time, Howe came out six more times in the second period. On his very first shift in the first period, he had thrown a check at Réjean Houle, sending him flying. Hello, hello, I’m still here. But his second time out, Howe drew a tripping penalty, and the Canadiens scored on their power play. The game, a clinker, ended in a 5–5 tie.

  In the locker room, microphones were thrust at a weary Gordie. He was confronted by notebooks. Somebody asked, “Do you plan to retire at the end of the season, Gordie?”

  “Not that fucking question again,” Gordie replied.

  So somebody else said, “No, certainly not. But could you tell me what your plans are for next year?”

  Gordie grinned, appreciative.
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  A little more than two weeks later, on April 8, the Whalers were back, it having been ordained that these upstarts would be fed to the Canadiens in their first NHL playoff series. This time the Canadiens, in no mood to fiddle, beat the Whalers 6–1. Howe, who didn’t play until the first period was seven minutes old, took his first shift alongside his son Mark. He appeared only twice more in the first period, but in the second he came on again, filling in for the injured Blaine Stoughton on the Whalers’ big line. He was ineffectual, on for two goals against and hardly touching the puck during a Hartford power play. Consequently, in the third period, he was allowed but four brief shifts. There must have been some satisfaction for him, however, in the fact that Mark Howe was easily the best Whaler on ice, scoring the goal that cost Dennis Herron his shutout.

  The next night, with Montreal leading 8–3 midway in the third period, the only thing the crowd was still waiting for finally happened. Gordie Howe flipped in a backhander. It was his sixty-eighth NHL playoff goal—but his first in a decade. It wasn’t a pretty goal. Nor did it matter much. It was slipped in there by a fifty-two-year-old grandfather who had scored his first NHL goal in Toronto thirty-four years earlier when the Boston Red Sox left-fielder Carl Yastrzemski was only seven years old, pot was something you cooked the stew in, and Ronald Reagan was just another actor. “Hartford goal by Gordie Howe,” Michel Lacroix announced over the PA system. “Assist, Mark Howe.” The crowd gave Gordie a standing ovation.

  Later, in the Whalers’ dressing room, coach Don Blackburn was asked what his team might do differently in Hartford for the third game. “Show up,” he said.

  Though the Whalers played their best hockey of the series in the next game, they lost in overtime. In the dressing room, everybody wanted to know if this had been Gordie’s last game. “I haven’t made up my mind about when I’m going to retire yet,” he said.

  But earlier, in the press box, a Hartford reporter had assured everybody that this was a night in hockey history: April 11, 1980, Gordie Howe’s last game. He said Whaler director of hockey operations Jack Kelley had told him as much. “They’ve got a kid they want to bring up. Gordie’s holding him back. The problem is they don’t know what to do with him. I mean, shit, you can’t have Gordie Howe running the goddamn gift shop.”

  The triumphant Canadiens stayed overnight in Hartford, and I joined their poker game: Claude Mouton, Claude Ruel, the trainers, the team doctor, Floyd “Busher” Curry, Toe Blake. “Jack Adams always used him too much during the regular season,” Toe said, “so he had nothing left when the playoffs came round.”

  “Do you think he was really a dirtier player than most?” I asked.

  “Well, you saw the big guy yesterday. What did he tell you?”

  “He said his elbows never put anybody in the hospital, but he was there five times.”

  Suddenly everybody was laughing at me. Speak to Donnie Marshall, they said. Or John Ferguson. Or, still better, ask Lou Fontinato.

  When Donnie Marshall was with the Rangers, he was asked what it was like to play against Howe. In reply, he lifted his shirt to reveal a foot-long angry welt across his rib cage. “Second period,” he said.

  One night, when then Winnipeg general manager John Ferguson was still playing with the Canadiens, a frustrated Howe stuck the blade of his stick into his mouth and hooked his tongue for nine stitches.

  But Howe’s most notorious altercation was with Ranger defenceman Lou Fontinato in Madison Square Garden in 1959. Frank Udvari, who was the referee, recalled, “The puck had gone into the corner. Howe had collided with Eddie Shack behind the net and lost his balance. He was just getting to his feet when here’s Fontinato at my elbow, trying to get at him.

  “‘I want him,’ he said.

  “‘Leave him alone, use your head,’ I said.

  “‘I want him.’

  “‘Be my guest.’”

  Fontinato charged. Shedding his gloves, Howe seized Fontinato’s jersey at the neck and drove his right fist into his face. “Never in my life had I heard anything like it, except maybe the sound of somebody chopping wood,” Udvari said. “Thwack! And all of a sudden Louie’s breathing out of his cheekbone.”

  Howe broke Fontinato’s nose, fractured his cheekbone, and knocked out several teeth. Plastic surgeons had to reconstruct his face.

  The afternoon before what was to be Howe’s last game, I had taken a taxi to his house in the suburbs of Hartford. “You can’t be a pauper living out here,” the driver said. “I’ll bet he’s got racehorses and everything. There’s only money out here.”

  Appropriately enough, the venerable Howe, hockey’s very own King Arthur, lived down a secluded side road in a town called Glastonbury. Outside the large house, set on fifteen acres of land, a sign read Howe’s Corner. Inside, a secretary ushered me through the office of Howe Enterprises, a burgeoning concern that held personal-service contracts with Anheuser-Busch, Chrysler, and Colonial Bank. A bespectacled, wary Howe was waiting for me in the sun-filled living room. Prominently displayed on the coffee table was an enormous volume of Ben Shahn reproductions.

  “I had no idea,” I said, impressed, “that you were an admirer of Ben Shahn.”

  “Oh, that. The book. I spoke at a dinner. They presented it to me.”

  After all his years in the United States, Howe remained a Canadian citizen. “I can pay my taxes here and all the other good things, but I can’t vote.” He was one of nine children, he added, and the family was now spread out like manure. “It would be nice to get together again without having to go to another funeral.”

  Sitting with Howe, our dialogue stilted, not really getting anywhere, I remembered how A. J. Liebling was once sent a batch of how-to-write books for review by a literary editor and promptly bounced them back with a curt note: “The only way to write is well and how you do it is your own damn business.” Without being able to put it so succinctly, Howe possibly felt the same way about hockey. Furthermore, over the years, he had also heard all the questions and now greeted them with a flick of the conversational elbow. But for the record, Howe adjudged today’s hockey talent bigger and better than ever. Wayne Gretzky reminded him of Sid Abel. “He’s sneaky clever—the puck always seems to be coming back to him. Lafleur is something else. He stays on for two shifts. I don’t mind that, but he doesn’t even breathe heavy.” Sawchuk was the best goalie he ever saw, and he never knew a line to compare with Boston’s Kraut Line: Milt Schmidt, Woody Dumart, Bobby Bauer. Howe was still bitter about how his years in Detroit came to an end with that meaningless front-office job. “Hell, you’ve been on the ice for twenty-five years, there’s little else you learn. I was a pro at seventeen. Colleen used to answer my fan mail for me—I didn’t have the words. Now it’s better for the kids. They get their basic twelve years of school and then pick a college.”

  Determined to surface with fresh questions, I asked when he planned to retire.

  “I can’t say just yet exactly when I’m going to retire, but I’m the one who will make that decision.”

  The next morning, in the Whalers’ offices, Jack Kelley asked me, “Did he say that?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s retiring at the end of the season.”

  Almost two months later, on June 4, Howe made it official. “It’s not easy to retire,” he told reporters. “No one teaches you how. I found that out when I tried it the first time. I’m not a quitter. But I will now quit the game of hockey.”

  Howe had kept everybody waiting for half an hour after the scheduled start of his 10:00 a.m. press conference. “As it got close to ten-thirty I had the funny suspicion that he had changed his mind again,” Kelley said.

  But this time Howe left no doubt in anybody’s mind. “My last retirement was an unhappy one, because I knew I still had some years in me. This is a happy one, because I know it’s time.”

  An ice age had come to an end.

  “They ought to bottle Gordie Howe’s sweat,” King Clancy of the Maple Leafs once said.
“It would make a great liniment to rub on hockey players.”

  Yes, certainly. But I remember my afternoon at Howe’s Corner with a certain sadness. He knew what was coming, and before I left he insisted that I scan the awards mounted on a hall wall. The Victors Award. The American Academy of Achievement Golden Plate Award. The American Captain of Achievement Award. “I played in all eighty games this year, and I got my fifteenth goal in the last game of the season. Last year I suffered from dizzy spells. My doctor wanted me to quit. But I was determined to play with my boys in the NHL. I don’t think I have the temperament for coaching. I tried it a couple of times and I got so excited, watching the play, that I forgot all about the line changes.”

  That afternoon only one thing seemed to animate him. The large Amway flow chart that hung from a stand, dominating the living room. Gordie Howe—one of the greatest players the game had ever known, a Canadian institution at last—Blinky, the third-grade repeater who had become a millionaire—now distributed health-care items, cosmetics, jewellery, and gardening materials for Amway.

  Offering me a lift back to my hotel in Hartford, Howe led me into his garage. There were cartons, cartons, everywhere, ready for delivery. Cosmetics. Gardening materials. It looked like the back room of a prairie general store.

  “I understand you write novels,” Howe said.

  “Yes.”

  “There must be a very good market for them. You see them on racks in all the supermarkets now.”

  “Right. Tell me, Gordie, do you deliver this stuff yourself?”

  “You can earn a lot of money with Amway,” he said, “working out of your own home.”