An estimated 15,000 hockey fans visited Joe Louis Arena in Detroit on Tuesday to pay respects to one of Canada’s great sons, Gordie Howe, who died June 10 at the age of 88. On Wednesday, Howe received the NHL equivalent of a state funeral. In the eulogy, Mark Howe said his father asked him to say on his behalf, “I hope there’s a good hockey team in heaven.”
The request sums up the innocence and playfulness of a time long past, when Gordie Howe and the Detroit Red Wings were the hottest stuff on ice. To the fans, Howe was Mr. Hockey. To the players, he was Mr. Elbow.
Howe grew up in Saskatoon and developed his legendary strength through hard physical labour. As a player, he was violent. Jean Beliveau suggested Howe’s aggressive style was a form of self-defence: “People kind of forget that in his second year, he had some kind of a skull fracture in a game against Toronto. After that, he kept everybody away from him,” Beliveau said.
When it came to hitting, Howe maintained it was “better to give than receive,” and he gave a little extra if young opponents failed to show him proper respect.
Phil Esposito remembered that in his second NHL game he was backing up Bobby Hull during a face-off: “I’m standing on the left wing next to Gordie, and Hull says to me, ‘You got that old son-of-a-bitch?’ Gordie just looks at me and smiles. The puck drops and I go in to get it and suddenly, wham! He gives me an elbow right beneath the nose in the upper lip. I still have the scar where I got six stitches.”
Stan Mikita, who described himself as a “young punk” when he started his NHL career in 1958, told our favourite Howe story, capturing the essence of his pride and toughness.
“We played the Red Wings in our third or so game of the season,” Mikita recalled in 2007. “I went over to check Gordie Howe, and I think I went to lift his stick, and caught him on his cheekbone. It looked like there was just a little scratch or something, but there was a whistle on the play. He looks down and sees a little blood on the ice. He looked at me, and I’m kind of smiling, I guess, and he points his finger at me. When he did that, I said, ‘Ah, get out of here you old bastard, you should of retired years ago. You’re too old for this game anyway.’
“We’re in the dressing room between periods, and Ted Lindsay is sitting next to me and says, ‘Stanley, you shouldn’t have talked to Gordie the way you did.’ I said, ‘Well, he is old. He shouldn’t be out here.’ And he said, ‘What you just said, he’ll never forget. Watch yourself.’
“We get to a game in Detroit, about five, six or seven games after the incident, and I had kind of forgotten about it. Gordie came skating back after we had shot the puck in the end zone, and I’m going in to fore-check. I cut across the middle and the next thing I know, I’ve got an awfully sore jaw. I’m rolling around and don’t know where the hell I am. I see a bunch of guys sitting on the bench, so I literally started crawling over there. I get on the bench and in about two seconds I feel somebody lifting me up under the armpits. The next thing I know they’re throwing me over the boards onto the ice. I ended up on the Red Wings’ bench. That’s how goofy I was.”
Moral of the story: You just didn’t mess with Gordie Howe.
Goodbye, Gordie.
