“Away from the ice he is a typical teenage youngster. He enjoys swing music and malted milks. He is shy and afraid of the opposite sex.”
—Detroit Red Wings’ press guide on Gordie Howe, 1946
Gordie Howe was seventeen when he turned professional in the only profession he would ever really practise. Under today’s rules, he’d have been too young even to sign with an NHL team; in addition, he’d have been subject to the amateur draft eventually, and so might have played anywhere in the league, depending on the vagaries of the drafting process. But things were a lot cozier in the 1940s. The Detroit Red Wings had held the inside track on Gordie Howe ever since Fred Pinkney had slipped Ab Howe $100.
At just over six feet, and still 18 pounds below his eventual playing weight of 205, young Howe was already exceptionally big for a hockey player in that era. He was unquestionably an adult on the ice, a man to be reckoned with. Off the ice, he was a nice, gullible, socially unsophisticated kid. It was a contrast that would persist for a considerable time to come.
At the Wings’ 1945 training camp in Windsor, Jack Adams and Tommy Ivan studied the improvements their promising recruit had made during his low-key season of practices and exhibition games in Galt. Despite Gordie’s lack of game experience, they saw he’d worked hard at developing his natural talents, and after watching him score two goals in an exhibition game in Akron, Ohio, they decided he was ready—if not for the big team, at least for tougher challenges than he’d face playing in the junior ranks. They summoned him to Adams’s suite in Windsor’s Norton Palmer Hotel to give him a contract and settle the formalities of turning him pro with their number-two farm club, the Omaha Knights of the old United States Hockey League.
Adams’s opening offer to the prodigy who would become hockey’s greatest star was $2,200 for the season, plus $500 as a signing bonus. As an incentive, the bonus fell a little short of the $2 million that the Ottawa Senators would pay eighteen-year-old Alexandre Daigle as part of a five-year, $12-million deal in 1993. There couldn’t be a better illustration of the grotesque disparity in the NHL pay scale between then and now. Still, the world was a different place in 1945, and Howe (like Daigle) had yet to prove how much he could do.
The Red Wings’ offer was pretty standard for a rookie in those days. Although Jack Adams would later claim that “Howe was beginning to show signs of greatness, even at seventeen,” the offer certainly represented no particular risk-taking or clairvoyance on Adams’s part, no prophetic leap of faith.
But to Gordie, $2,700 was a lot of money to mention all in one breath. It promised, at least in the short term—which is long enough for most teen-agers—more financial security than Ab Howe had known back in Floral or during the early years in Saskatoon.
There was just one outstanding matter Howe wanted to clear up with “Mr. Adams,” as he’d always call his boss in public (and does to this day), before he put ink on the contract. Adams recalled it years later:
“He looked at [the contract] but didn’t sign it. So I asked him what was wrong, wasn’t it enough money? He just looked at me and said, ‘I’m not sure I want to sign with your organization, Mr. Adams. You don’t keep your word.’
“Naturally, I was flabbergasted, and I asked him what he meant. ’Well,’ he said, ‘you promised me a windbreaker and you never gave it to me.’ You can imagine how quickly I got that windbreaker. But that’s how close I came to losing him.”
Adams was exaggerating his anxiety for dramatic effect. Howe was no shrewd, hard-headed negotiator, then or later, as he’s the first to admit; and he’d come too far up the ladder this time to bolt, as he had from the Rangers’ camp in Winnipeg. It was simply an incredibly cheap price for the Detroit coach and G.M. to pay for the player he’d go on to build his franchise around.
In fact, this first bargain-basement deal would set the tone for two decades of Howe’s salary negotiations. The Red Wings would grow into one of North America’s wealthiest sports franchises, at least in part from Howe’s playing, while he himself earned only modest increases every year. As David Cruise and Alison Griffiths observed about the windbreaker incident in their book Net Worth, “That one act of defiance was to last Howe 20 years.”
That season, the Wings moved into the Olympia to finish their training. Howe recalls that Adams, who had served in the Canadian Army during the First World War, ran the show like a boot camp. The arena was turned into one big dormitory, with camp cots in the corridors below the stands. Adams gave the excuse that accommodation for the players was scarce in Detroit, which was booming and overcrowded because of the war, but the military-style setup perfectly suited his tightfisted and controlling style. The players were locked in at night; there were curfews and bed checks. There were also rats—not rink rats, in the old Canadian sense, but rodents.
The Olympia wasn’t even twenty years old at that time, but since management wouldn’t spend the money to maintain it properly, the rats proliferated. They lived on the popcorn that the fans dropped under the seats. At night, while Howe and his teammates slept, the rats came out on the prowl, so the players kept their hockey sticks handy beside their cots, just in case. “We were always killing them,” Howe said later. “Sometimes we used them for pucks.” It was a novel variation on the frozen horse droppings of his boyhood.
Opened in 1927 at the corner of Grand River Avenue and McGraw, the Olympia was one of a generation of big-city arenas constructed during the 1920s. Others were New York’s Madison Square Garden, Chicago Stadium and Boston Garden, all built to present boxing and wrestling when those sports were at the height of their popularity. The seating rose in steep tiers—two tiers in the Olympia, three in Chicago Stadium—as perpendicularly as possible, allowing spectators a good clear view down onto the ring or rink. So even though the arenas weren’t built primarily for hockey, their sight lines were excellent for hockey fans, too. If you tripped in the aisle at the Olympia, it felt as if you were going to land down at centre ice.
Although its official seating capacity was 14,200, the Olympia was often filled to bursting with standing-room spectators and fans hunkering down in the aisles, swelling attendance to well over 15,000. The place was routinely condemned by the Detroit fire marshalls as a hazard to public safety, but somehow nothing was ever done to close it; some whispered of payoffs in high places.
One who remembers the Olympia well is a man who toiled in its dank bowels for over thirty years, the Red Wings’ former trainer and back-up goalie Ross (Lefty) Wilson. “Left” to his friends, Wilson was a colourful hockey character from the Original Six era to the early 1980s. He was a notorious heckler of opposition stars and referees from behind the Detroit bench, and for three decades his blaring cries could be heard throughout NHL arenas around the continent.
Now seventy-five, Lefty lives in retirement in the Detroit suburb of West Bloomfield with Lil, his live-wire wife of fifty-three years. On the floor of the Wilsons’ rec room, surrounded by hockey trophies and live-action photographs and surmounted by a coat rack constructed entirely of hockey sticks autographed by NHL stars, lies an unusual souvenir: a big, circular, thick-piled red carpet emblazoned with a huge white number nine. It’s the carpet that was rolled out onto the Olympia ice for Gordie Howe’s retirement ceremonies in 1972, a gift Lefty later received from Number Nine himself.
But back when Lefty Wilson first met Howe, both were rookies at that 1945 training camp, battling rats and trying to impress their coaches. One day, Wilson was in the Olympia’s carpentry shop when he felt something large hit his ankle. “It ran up inside my pant leg,” he recounts. “For a second I didn’t know what the hell it was, but I undid my belt and covered my privates. Well, it scratched me on the ass. Of course it was a rat, so I knocked it back down my leg and killed it with a broom handle.”
Wilson got on the phone to the team doctor: “ ‘Doc, I’ve been either scratched or bitten by a rat,’ and I gave him the story. He started laughing, then two seconds later he said, ‘You get your bucket up here in a hurry for a rabies shot.’ ”
Wilson was nine years older than Howe, but unlike the seventeen-year-old he was struggling desperately at training camp; he began to despair of ever making it as a pro goaltender. He’d played minor-league baseball in Roanoke, Virginia, and Savannah, Georgia, done war work for General Motors in St. Catharines, Ontario, and served in the Royal Canadian Navy, but at the Wings’ camp, “I couldn’t stop a balloon.”
He was about to quit when Adams said, “Kid, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do—I’m going to send you to Omaha, Nebraska, as spare goaltender and trainer.”
“I knew little about either job,” Wilson recalls, “except that I’d be making more money than I’d made at General Motors. So Howe signed for $2,200 and I signed for $2,100, and we both went down to Omaha.”
Arriving there with young Howe, team captain Jimmy Skinner (later a Detroit coach and scout) and the rest of the team, the Wilsons liked Omaha, a manufacturing and railway centre on the Missouri River. Lil Wilson remembers it then as “a clean, beautiful city, with very little crime.” The Knights were starting their first season as a Detroit farm club, competing in the United States Hockey League against such cities as Dallas, Fort Worth, Tulsa, Minneapolis and St. Paul. They played their home games in the Aksarben (Nebraska spelled backwards) Arena and were known locally as the Omaha Aksarben Knights—hence the logo on the team sweaters, the letters AK inside the letter O.
Jack Adams also sent Tommy Ivan down to Omaha as coach. Ivan told Lefty Wilson he now had a third responsibility as well: to be a big brother watching over the younger players, especially the youngest, greenest and least worldly rookie on the team. It turned out to be a more time-consuming job than Wilson had expected.
“Gordie was a big, shy kid,” he remembers, “and in Omaha they wouldn’t let him into the bars. After the games Lil and I wanted to go for a beer with the boys, but we always had to take him home first.”
“Somebody had to be with him,” Lil chimes in. “You didn’t want him to go home by himself. We had to baby-sit him.”
“Yeah, but first he had to eat.”
“And boy, could he eat! We coulda killed him! We’d take him to a coffee shop and he’d have a great big hamburger and a shake, then he’d say, ‘I think I’ll have another hamburger,’ and I’d be kicking Lefty under the table, thinking, ‘There goes our night out. I’m gonna kill this kid!’ ”
On the ice, Howe was a different story; he had no trouble looking after himself. Tommy Ivan discovered this early in the season, when he participated in an intra-squad game. The coach divided his players into two sides, East and West, with Winnipeg as the dividing line, and filled in personally for an injured player on the East side. Determined to show what he could do, Howe gave no quarter to his teammates or his coach: he rode Ivan, a diminutive man who stood only five-foot-five and hadn’t played beyond the senior amateur level, out of the play and into the boards, inflicting a cut under his chin that required eight stitches. “I never knew whether it was a stick or an elbow!” Ivan said later.
Ivan had been brought into the organization as a scout in 1938. After coaching the Wings’ junior teams in Galt and Guelph and serving in the Canadian Army, he was promoted quickly by Jack Adams and would eventually become his successor behind the bench. As Howe’s first professional coach, who would also coach him later for seven seasons in Detroit, Ivan had more influence on Howe’s playing than any other coach, including Adams—although most who filled that role later said Howe required no coaching at all.
In Omaha, Ivan paced young Howe, waiting until he’d adjusted to the rugged, competitive level of the USHL before playing him regularly. Soon Ivan decided Howe was up for it: “Gordie was a hard-nosed kid. He used to get some foolish penalties, but appeared determined to prove early he was no patsy.”
Howe recalls the game in Dallas when he made that point for keeps. It was more than twenty games into the season, and Ivan still hadn’t been playing him very much. A big fight broke out while Gordie was sitting on the bench, and he decided to get involved: “Somebody was beating up my roommate. I didn’t like it, so I jumped over the boards and nailed him.” The victim was a player Howe knew from Saskatoon. “He was big, but he wasn’t the toughest guy in the world.”
When Howe returned to the bench after serving a penalty for fighting, Ivan asked him, “What’s the matter with you, young man? Don’t you like that guy?”
Howe replied, “I don’t like anyone out there.” He didn’t miss another shift for the rest of the season.
As far as the seventeen-year-old could see, it was his father’s dictum—“Never take any dirt from nobody”—proving itself. Like any lesson he learned, Howe learned it well, taking it deeply to heart. People used to ask why he fought so much during his early years in pro hockey: “It’s because that’s how I thought I’d made the league.”
But his offensive skills were also attracting notice. Jack Adams used to relate the story of an encounter between Howe and Ott Heller, the veteran New York Rangers defenseman of the 1930s and ’40s, who by then was a playing coach for St. Paul in the USHL. In one game, Howe came straight at Heller with the puck; he deked him and skated by him but didn’t score. Heller made a mental note of Howe’s manoeuvre and thought, “He won’t get away with that next time.” But next time, the ambidextrous Howe switched hands on Heller, gave him a head shift and skated around him again. “When I looked around,” Heller said, “the red light was on.”
Pretty soon, other NHL teams were checking out the big kid. Toronto coach Hap Day and his chief scout, Squib Walker, visited Omaha and tried to make a deal for Howe’s rights. But their interest only made Ivan and Adams more intent on keeping the young player. By the season’s end, he’d collected 22 goals and 26 assists, not bad against professional competition for a teen-ager who could have been playing junior.
On the road, Howe still acted “backward,” as if he didn’t really belong or didn’t deserve the privileges that older players took for granted. During one swing around the league, the team was installed in a Minneapolis hotel before a night game. In the late afternoon, Howe went downstairs to eat dinner in the hotel restaurant. “Several of the guys were there,” he recalled, “but I looked at that big dining room and it looked so nice that I didn’t want to go in. So I went around the corner and had a milkshake.” Somehow the low-calorie dinner was enough for him: “I scored two goals on that milkshake and we beat them 3−1.”
Like the other Omaha players, Howe spent the season living in the home of a local family. His first roommate was another young westerner, George Homoniuk, with whom he got along well. Later he roomed with an older player, a defenseman named Gunner Malone—so-called because of his hard shot, not his wartime occupation—who was inordinately fond of both clothes and booze. According to then-captain Jimmy Skinner, “Malone would check into camp with a new wardrobe. But as his thirst increased and his money decreased, he would sell his suits to Gordie at cut rate prices.”
While Howe was improving his standard of dress, Lefty and Lil Wilson worried more and more about Gunner’s drinking. Lefty used to tell the rookies not to try to prove their manhood by keeping up with the veterans’ capacity for alcohol. “You’ll kill yourselves,” he warned them. But Malone was too old to be lectured, and probably beyond redemption already. He resisted Lefty’s attempts to help him, dying only a few years later of alcohol-related causes.
As the only Knight who couldn’t get served in a bar, Howe was able to save his money. By the end of the season in Omaha, he still held onto $1,700 out of his $2,700 total earnings. But he was a frugal lad by upbringing and would never become much of a drinker anyway. Certainly he hadn’t inherited his father’s taste for a pint; the night he’d gone out on the town to celebrate turning pro, he’d drunk exactly one beer—his first. Religiously looking after himself, physically and mentally, would become the main secret of Howe’s longevity as a player.
Between seasons in the summer of 1946, Ivan sat down with Adams to assess the current prospects in their richly endowed farm system. The last stop for a rising player before making the Red Wings, or the first stop on the way back down, was the farm team in Indianapolis: the Capitals of the American Hockey League.
When Ivan jotted down the players he felt should make the jump from Omaha to Indianapolis, Adams was surprised not to see Howe’s name on the list: “What about that big kid? You’ve been talking about him all winter.”
“I don’t think Howe should play in Indianapolis.”
“Why not?”
“He should play with the Wings.”
Adams agreed. They signed Howe to a one-year contract with Detroit, doubling his salary to around $5,000. The contract contained the usual minor-league clause, stipulating that if he didn’t make the club, he’d be sent down to Indianapolis and earn only $3,500.
Howe said years later he was “terrified” when he saw that clause: “That alone was enough to make me determined to stay up with the Wings.”
Detroit has changed considerably from the city where Gordie Howe arrived in the autumn of 1946 to spend the next twenty-seven years of his life. Today, the megalopolis of nearly five million sprawls over five thousand square miles. Its endless suburbs and satellite cities are the logical extension of the automobile culture that Detroit spawned and that in turn reshaped Detroit.
Most residents of the metropolitan area live in one of those outlying communities and not in the City of Detroit at all. They spend large portions of their lives driving from one suburb to another along the ubiquitous freeways, so that the place resembles Los Angeles without the Pacific or the palm trees—but with similar levels of crime and racial tension. Visitors are warned by cabbies and other locals to stay out of the “armed camp” downtown.
Islands of affluence do exist downtown—Renaissance Centre, Civic Centre, Greek Town—but their patrons are loath to wander the streets beyond into the poverty-ridden surrounding areas, with their high incidence of violent crime. The Red Wings now play in the modern Joe Louis Sports Arena, down by the harbour; fans drive to the games, park in the big, secure parking garage and drive home again. The old Olympia has been demolished, commemorated only by a plaque erected in 1993.
When Howe started playing for Detroit, the city had just two million people but had already experienced serious outbreaks of racial violence. It was an enormous, bewildering place to the Saskatoon teen-ager, even after Omaha. Accordingly, he devised a simple strategy for finding his way around: no matter where he had to go in Detroit, he’d always start out from the Olympia. That way, he was sure to find his way back, keeping his bearings in the forbidding urban landscape.
This was unfamiliar soil for hockey to take root in. Yet it did take root, and today Detroit is perhaps the most committed and knowledgeable hockey city in the U.S., although Bostonians might argue the point. For many years the Detroit area has had a vigorous minor-hockey program, as well as its own junior A team, currently competing in the Ontario Hockey League. Much of the credit for all this must go to the success of the Red Wings franchise and especially to its prime builder, Jack Adams.
Adams was an irascible, conniving, narrow-minded, paternalistic, hysterical old tyrant; he was also one of the most authentic and experienced all-round hockey men of his era. He did as much as any Canadian to win the sport an American audience and thereby to skew the NHL’s future development irrevocably towards the U.S. market. Adams once declared, “I think the smartest thing I’ve done in my life is to take out American papers. This country has been good to me and I’ve never missed voting in any election... I am proud of my citizenship.”
And, as we’ve already seen, Adams played a decisive role—partly through good judgement, partly through luck—in introducing Gordie Howe to the NHL. Howe would eventually call Adams “my second father”: sincerely meant, no doubt, but with a certain undertone, given Ab Howe’s prickly nature.
Adams came by his position in Detroit honestly. As a young hockey player out of Fort William, Ontario (now Thunder Bay), he began playing with the Toronto Arenas in the NHL’s very first season, 1917−18, when the Arenas won the Stanley Cup. He went on to star with the Vancouver Millionaires of the Pacific Coast Hockey Association, where they played the old seven-man game. In Vancouver, Adams was a teammate of the legendary Fred (Cyclone) Taylor and was no slouch himself: gutsy, pugnacious and fiercely competitive, he led the league in both penalty minutes and goals (twenty-five in twenty-four games during 1921−22), was named an all-star and competed twice for the Stanley Cup. One man who played against him for many years termed Adams “an awful slasher.” Hired back by the NHL, Adams spent four seasons with the Toronto St. Pats and one more as assistant playing coach with the Ottawa Senators the year they won their last Stanley Cup in 1927.
Thus Adams was a battle-scarred, ten-year veteran of pro hockey’s earliest wars when he moved to Detroit to coach a new franchise during its second season, 1927−28, in a new building, the Olympia. The team was called the Cougars then; the Detroit owners had bought the Victoria Cougars the year before, when the Pacific Coast league folded.
Adams and the team both struggled for several seasons. After the Depression hit, the Cougars went into receivership and became the Detroit Falcons, and Adams found himself putting his own money down to help meet the payroll: “I hope we don’t break any more of our sticks,” he once wisecracked, “because we can’t afford to buy new ones.” He also said that if Howie Morenz had been put on the block for $1.98, he couldn’t have afforded him.
Adams’s fortunes rose rapidly after another Canadian-turned-American, Chicago-based grain and shipping magnate James Norris Sr., bought the Detroit team in 1932. Remembering his long-ago playing days with the Winged Wheelers of the Montreal Amateur Athletic Association, Norris gave his hockey team a new logo—a winged automobile tire, based on the old Montreal A.A.A. symbol—and a new name, the Red Wings. And he gave Jack Adams a decent salary budget and one year in which to produce a winning team.
The Norris-Adams collaboration succeeded. Adams kept his job by making the playoffs that season, boosting fan interest and filling the Olympia. Noted for their roughhouse style, the Red Wings won their first Stanley Cup in 1936, repeating the following year and in 1943. Adams not only served as both coach and general manager but also handled the club’s promotion and publicity and even wrote a regular newspaper column, “Following the Puck,” to educate Detroit sports fans about hockey.
Initially, the team’s biggest spectator interest came from the other side of the river. But the Windsor fans infuriated Adams by insisting on being Canadians and cheering for Toronto and Montreal, so he became bent on indoctrinating Detroit citizens about the delights of having their very own team playing this wild, violent, alien sport. In the course of selling hockey in Detroit over the years, his relationship with the local media became so cozy that he could plant stories at will, in the process manipulating his players and stifling criticism of his own actions. His news-management tactics reached the point where the hockey writers for the Detroit dailies, John Walter at the Detroit News and his brother Lew Walter at the Detroit Times, would actually write a story on the Red Wings, punch it up by inventing some colourful Adams quotes, then show it to Adams for approval before publication.
Howe’s first season with the Wings was Adams’s last as coach. By that time, Adams was fifty-one and courting heart trouble. He’d ballooned far beyond his playing weight to become a porker in a three-piece suit, his vest buttons popping over his broad paunch, his bow tie engulfed by a bulging bull neck. His trademark look featured little spectacles perched on a pug nose and a wide-brimmed fedora pulled low over his sweating forehead. Red-faced, his lower lip protruding moistly from his jowls, Adams threw tantrums when his team lost. He’d kick the team oranges across the dressing room and hurl anything he could lay his hands on at the players, reaming them out with withering insults and threats as if they were ten-year-olds.
In the 1946−47 season, Adams was rebuilding the Red Wings, moulding a team with the legs and spirit of youth around a small nucleus of veterans. He always sought a judicious balance of experience and inexperience; his maxim was to juggle his line-up every season, even after winning a Stanley Cup.
Adams liked to say he’d learned the hard way about the necessity of doing this: after winning the Cup twice in the 1930s, he’d kept his team intact, and it had immediately fallen to last place. “I decided,” he later declared, “we’d never stand pat again.”
The year before Howe’s arrival, the Wings had finished fourth and been eliminated by Boston in the semifinals, so there was plenty of room for improvement. Their top scorer had been Joe Carveth, who had finished eighteenth in the league; characteristically, Adams traded him to Boston for Roy Conacher, the younger brother of the renowned Charlie and Lionel. Happily for Adams, two outstanding players had returned from the war during the previous season: centre Sid Abel and defenseman Black Jack Stewart. He also had a star defenseman in Bill Quackenbush and two strong young performers, both beginning their third seasons, in goaltender Harry Lumley and bellicose left wing Ted Lindsay. Adams added high-scoring Billy Taylor, obtained from Toronto in a trade for veteran Harry Watson, and had three young hopefuls from Saskatoon: Gerry (Doc) Couture, Pat Lundy and Gordie Howe.
In the home opener against Toronto on October 16, 1946, Adams started the game with a new line. He put Abel at centre; Adam Brown, a 20-goal scorer the previous year, at left wing; and the total unknown, Gordie Howe, at right wing. That night at least, the line distinguished itself.
Brown scored the first goal from Abel. Then, in the fourteenth minute of the second period, forty seconds after the Maple Leafs had tied the score 1−1, Abel passed the puck to Brown. Brown head-manned it to Howe at the Leaf blueline, and the rookie broke through the defense and found himself alone in front of Toronto’s famed goalie, Turk Broda. “The puck was lying loose, ten feet from the net,” Howe remembered. “And I just slapped it in.” Broda went sprawling, the first of Howe’s 801 regular-season victims in the NHL.
(Eons later, Broda commented, “You know, I’m damn proud of that goal. Think of it, I was the first guy he scored on.”)
Howe also threw his big body around with abandon. In the third period, he checked Toronto captain Syl Apps so hard that Apps had to leave the game with a twisted knee. With only eleven seconds left, Toronto now leading 3−2 and Lumley pulled for a sixth attacker, Abel—a clutch player if ever there was one—beat Broda for a tie. The Detroit fans went home happy, and Gordie Howe had made an auspicious debut. The next day, the Detroit News said, “Gordon Howe is the squad’s baby, 18 years old. But he was one of Detroit’s most valuable men last night. In his first major-league game, he scored a goal, skated tirelessly and had perfect poise.”
Unfortunately, the rest of the season didn’t follow that pattern. It would be nine games before Howe scored his second goal, another eleven before his third. Far from burning up the league in his rookie year, as Gretzky, Mario Lemieux, Pavel Bure or Teemu Selanne would in theirs, Howe still suffered from on-ice awkwardness, inexperience and self-doubt. One NHL trophy he’d never win was the Calder; the rookie of the year for 1946−47 would be the Maple Leafs’ hustling Howie Meeker, with 27 goals.
Young Howe’s chosen remedy for shoring up his flagging confidence was fighting. That year, he logged a lot of bench time in the fifty-eight games he dressed for, often seeing no action at all; but in the early part of the season, he fought with somebody in almost every game in which he got on the ice.
He didn’t pick the easy marks, either. One night in Toronto, it was Maple Leaf tough guy Bill Ezinicki. Another night in Montreal, it was none other than Maurice Richard. Howe managed to knock the Rocket, who was nearly as big as he was, to the ice. The linesmen were separating the two when Abel skated up to Richard and foolishly taunted him, “That’ll teach you, Frenchie—” but got no further; Richard broke Abel’s nose with a solid right.
Howe’s teammate and fellow Saskatonian Gerry Couture, who had made the team in 1945, remembers Howe’s early belligerence: “He loved to play hockey, and he loved to fight. In fact we weren’t sure, in the first year or two, whether he was going to stay with hockey or whether Nick Lund, who was the fight promoter in Detroit at the time, was going to sign him up for a bout at the Olympia.”
Howe’s conviction that he had to fight to prove he belonged in the NHL—indeed, that fighting was expected of him, after his experience in Omaha—finally landed him in trouble with the boss. Adams called him upstairs to his office at the Olympia and read the riot act: “What are you trying to do, my boy? Beat up the entire league one man at a time? You’ve proved you can fight, now prove you can play hockey! From here in, the handcuffs are on.”
Adams’s reprimand gave Howe permission to concentrate on his game. He had some good teachers in Detroit, if only by example, and he was a careful study, if not a quick one. He acted all his life on some advice he received from the team’s chief scout, Carson (Shovelshot) Cooper, who had starred for Detroit in the late 1920s and early 1930s. As Howe recounted it, Cooper told him, “Kid, draw an imaginary line, twenty feet out from the side boards, and stay there. That’s your territory.”
“I’ve never forgotten that,” Howe said.
He also remembered some encouraging words a year earlier from the departed Joe Carveth, who had warned him not to be too surprised if the first half of his rookie season didn’t go well, because things would settle down in the second half. That proved true in Omaha, and to some extent in Howe’s rookie year in Detroit also. Although he scored only 7 goals all season, he eventually collected a respectable 15 assists, for 22 points—a total he’d double the following year.
During that first season, Howe also received the Adams treatment on occasion. Perhaps because he played him so little, Adams would forget Howe’s name in the heat of battle.
“Get out there, Syd!” he bellowed at Howe once, confusing him with the star of old, now retired. “Go on, Syd!” Adams roared impatiently, and Howe looked around, up and down the bench, wondering what was taking Abel so long. “It’s you, Syd, it’s you!” Adams screamed, running over behind Howe, utterly beside himself.
“Oh, but sir,” Howe began earnestly, “my name isn’t...”
Indignantly Adams cut him off, cuffing him across the back of the head: “For the love of God, never mind that! Get out there!”
One man who did remember Howe, and taught him a lesson in NHL etiquette, was the Maple Leafs’ forward, former Red Wing Harry Watson. A few years earlier, back in Saskatoon, Howe had played against Watson, who had been stationed at RCAF No. 4 airbase. “He must have seen something in me, because he talked to me a lot,” Howe remembered. “So when the Wings played Toronto, who was I checking? Big Harry. We were down at the far end together, and he yelled, ‘Look out, kid!’ And I thought, gee, that’s very nice of him, because I hadn’t seen him coming and he could have nailed me pretty good. So we came down to the other end and he had his back to the play too, and I yelled, ‘Look out, Mr. Watson!’ He looked at me and said, ’We’re going to get along just fine.’ ”
Later in his long career, Howe would develop a well-deserved reputation for not giving an easy ride to obnoxious rookies out to make a name for themselves by nailing Number Nine. But he always reserved his most generous and gentle treatment for any kid from Saskatoon.
That season, Detroit failed to improve on its fourth-place finish of the year before, losing this time to second-place Toronto—the eventual Cup winners—in the semifinals. In Howe’s first playoff experience, he distinguished himself chiefly by getting into a brawl. He and the Maple Leafs’ Gus Mortson began fighting while sharing the penalty box at the Olympia. Their squabble spilled over into the aisle and almost started a riot involving some Detroit fans, one of whom threw a chair at Mortson. Finally, the police had to step in to restore order.
In fact, Howe had simply been responding to Mortson in typical fashion by loyally rallying to the defence of a friend. Moments earlier, Mortson had been mixing it up with Ted Lindsay. During the course of that season, Howe had become fast friends with Lindsay, forging an alliance that would make an enduring impact on both his hockey career and his life.