“Have you ever done something where you feel you’ve been there before?... The first time’s an accident, the second time you’re stupid. So the second time, I didn’t want to be stupid.”
—Gordie Howe, 1992, on fighting Lou Fontinato
With the Detroit dynasty decimated by trades and time and Jack Adams, Gordie Howe became the Red Wings. As the 1950s gave way to the 1960s, he represented, as no other player could, those Stanley Cup years of the past. He carried the fans’—and management’s—fond hope that their team could be rebuilt into a powerhouse once again: all it would take would be the right combination of talent to complement their aging yet seemingly ageless superstar.
It almost happened, but not quite. As Dave Keon, the Maple Leafs’ all-star centre, once remarked, the NHL had four strong teams in the early 1960s: Toronto, Montreal, Chicago and Howe. Although Howe continued to prove his astonishing productivity and durability year after year, placing among the top five scorers in every single season of the 1950s and 1960s, winning his sixth scoring title and sixth MVP trophy in 1963 at the advanced age of thirty-five, he had to carry on those sloping shoulders a team that had come to depend on him too much.
This didn’t change the fact that, by the early 1960s, Howe had proven beyond all reasonable doubt that he was the greatest all-round player in the history of hockey. As partisan a foe as Canadiens’ G.M. Frank Selke called him that, stating, “I don’t know what the Wings would do without him.” Selke added, “There isn’t another club in hockey that depends so much on one player.”
This wasn’t Howe’s doing, needless to say, but management’s. Whether it was Adams, Jimmy Skinner or Sid Abel, they all expected Howe to achieve more than any mortal could. At times, they seemed to forget he was mortal. At the start of the 1957−58 season, right after he’d traded Lindsay, Adams announced his Howe-centric strategy to the media, and he would repeat this refrain with variations over the next several seasons.
“Sure, we’re building this club around the Big Fellow,” Adams proclaimed. “And I think this season, his twelfth, could be his best. As a matter of fact, you could put Howe on any team in the NHL and know it would win the title.”
How wrong Adams was: life wasn’t that simple any more. The Red Wings not only failed to win the regular schedule that year, but finished just one point ahead of fourth-place Boston and were swept by the Canadiens in the semis.
The following season, 1958−59, when Red Kelly broke his foot, the team finished a miserable last. Sawchuk’s goals-against average had ballooned to three. It just wasn’t the same team any longer: how could it be? On top of his previous trades, on top of the animosity and discord he’d sown, Adams had now dealt off quality players like Dutch Reibel and Bill Dineen without getting much of value in return. For the time being, team morale had sunk far below the level of the Tommy Ivan years.
Howe couldn’t dispel the Red Wings’ malaise all by himself. As Kelly argues, hockey is a team game. Howe knew that: he often said so himself, and he played it as a team game. Yet the Detroit management seemed to expect miracles from him nonetheless. If he passed to his teammates because he thought they had a better chance to score than he did, Adams and the coaches would get on his back about not shooting enough. If he stick-handled to keep possession until he saw an opening, he’d get a similar lecture. Jimmy Skinner, before he was switched from coach to scout, said publicly, “Gordie is as close to perfection as we’ll ever see, but he’s been too unselfish lately. He’s passing sometimes when he might barrel in and shoot goals for himself” Howe was being expected to produce even more than his average of 35 to 40 goals a season—whereas for anyone else, a 20-goal year was considered to be excellent. And conversely, not enough was being expected of the rest of the team.
Adams insisted Howe have possession of the puck, and shoot it, as much as possible. This was Adams’s law, laid down at practice and in the dressing room. Murray Costello remembers hearing it time and time again.
“Adams would give us his pep talk and kick the oranges off the table—they’d be spread all over the room, and the trainers would hustle around to pick them up—and he’d say, ‘All right, for you young guys: if you’re on the ice with the Big Guy and you happen to get the puck, your job is to get it to the Big Guy as quickly as you can.’
“And this kid Cummy Burton says, ‘But Mr. Adams? What if the Big Guy just gave it to you?’
‘Well then,’ Adams shouted, ‘for Christ’s sake! You just give it back to him as fast as you can!’ ”
“When Gordie was on the ice, he carried the mail,” Costello remarks, “and that was it.”
Such heavy reliance on Howe resulted in other Detroit players failing to develop to their full potential. Either they’d be underutilized, or they’d be looking for Howe on the ice instead of trusting their own instincts about how to respond to the play. In addition, the club neglected new player development, with results that would show up increasingly as time went on.
Yet an overreliance on Howe was perhaps inevitable to a degree since, when he carried the mail, he so often delivered. His skills awed even the men he played against. Glenn Hall, who stands third in all-time NHL shutouts, backstopped Howe for two seasons before facing him for another fourteen at Chicago and St. Louis; he calls Howe “super-skilled” and “the ultimate player.” Still closely involved in pro hockey—for the past decade, he’s been goaltending coach with the Calgary Flames—Hall compares Howe to today’s NHLers: “It doesn’t matter who you put him up against, he’s the greatest. There are some tremendously skilled players today, but none of them can match him.”
After the Red Wings’ peak years had passed, Howe continued doing everything superbly, no matter how low his team sank in the standings. And he continued loving what he was doing. “The superstars always enjoy playing the game,” Hall observes. “If there’s a common denominator among them, it’s the desire to play, and play well. Gordie was like that—always tremendously easygoing, enjoying practice and every aspect of the game.”
Hall marvelled at how well Howe “saw the ice”: it was as if Gordie knew what was going to happen, and where, and when. “He was like Gretzky that way, and Lemieux, Orr, Lafleur, the Rocket—it’s a gift. The thinking mind can’t keep up with the action and relay the message in time to react. Those guys don’t think of the play they’re going to make, they instinctively take advantage of their opportunities.” And by trusting his instincts, Howe avoided signalling his intentions on a play, retaining the advantage of surprise over his opponents.
Another veteran of defending against Howe was Bob Baun, a pillar of the Toronto Maple Leafs’ tremendous blueline corps during their Stanley Cup years in the 1960s. Baun feels Howe’s physical equipment played a part in his success—and not only his strength and size: “He probably had the best athletic body I’ve ever seen. With the sloping shoulders and the big upper body, he had lots of movement.” Blessed with height and long legs, Howe had great flexibility and mobility, Baun says, whereas players like himself or Bobby Hull “were almost muscle-bound.”
Howe’s ability to coordinate all that equipment explains why he was exceptional at every sport, from golf to water-skiing to fishing. “He could pick the eyes out of a snake with a spinning rod at fifty paces,” Baun asserts, “and he had lightning-fast reflexes.” Like Hall, Baun comes back to that indefinable second sight, “that wonderful extra sense, like Gretzky, that very few athletes have, of always seeming to know where everybody was. Before you could anticipate, he’d be there.”
Usually there are two or three options on every play; the great hockey players somehow know to pick the right one. “Howe was tremendously smart that way,” Hall explains. “Whichever way the puck bounced, he’d play it right.” As a goalie, Hall both feared and admired Howe’s versatility. “He could beat you in a lot of ways. If you gave him a little spot, he’d take it.”
Hall gets no argument from Johnny Bower, who also tended goal against Howe throughout the 1960s. “I had all kinds of problems with him,” Bower admits cheerfully. “Forehand, backhand, left-hand shot, right-hand shot—he could shoot both ways, eh? He’d throw me off balance by switching hands. Nobody could take the puck off him, he was too strong.”
Howe had experimented with the newfangled slapshot (breaking Adams’s favourite wooden stool in the process). He soon decided not so much that the shot was too wild and inaccurate, but that it required the shooter to look down a split-second too long, breaking visual contact with the play swirling around him and leaving him no other option than shooting. “Gordie had a good slapshot,” Bower observes, “but he didn’t go all the way back with it. It was more of a snapshot, with the stick only a quarter of the way back. He had better control that way. That’s why he scored so much, eh? He knew exactly where he was.”
If Howe’s opponents were in awe of him, his teammates were often in the same state, especially new arrivals; they watched him closely and tried to emulate him. Howe led mostly by example, at least in the earlier part of his career. Although generally encouraging to rookies, he didn’t usurp the coach’s role. He’d become freer with tips and advice to young teammates later, in his elder-statesman years with the Wings in the late 1960s and then in the World Hockey Association. But in the 1950s, he was seldom vocal. Metro Prystai remembers him as still shy and quiet: “He didn’t say too much on the ice, and not even in the dressing room. I think where he was a leader was by what he did out there.”
Often, what he did out there was just too amazing, too difficult to replicate. Fellow players, coaches and spectators still talk about Gordie’s incredible one-handed goal against the Canadiens—all the more incredible because he beat not only Jacques Plante on the play but also the player who had emerged as the best defenseman in the league by that time, Doug Harvey.
Howe carried the puck into the Montreal zone, picking up speed with the long, loping stride that created the dangerous illusion he wasn’t moving very fast. Harvey, skating backwards, was the last man back. Howe faked him inside, then cut around him to the outside, and Harvey instantly knew he was beaten. In desperation, Harvey reached backwards with his stick and jammed it over Howe’s shoulder and down in front of his chest, between his legs, to try to slow him as he drove to the net. But Harvey could do little more than hang on. Moving in on Plante, Howe took his left hand from the upper shaft of his stick, raised his massive arm and lifted Harvey right up onto the toes of his skate blades to move him out of the way. Howe now had only one hand on his stick, halfway down the shaft. He threw a leg out, sweeping the puck, as if he were going to cut across in front of the net. This caused Plante to move sideways with him—but as soon as Plante moved away from his post, Howe, with that one hand, hoisted the puck into the opening, straight up into the mesh in the top of the net.
Howe’s teammates on the bench saw the net bulge upwards and looked at each other: “Holy Jesus, did you see that?” The next day at practice, several of the younger Red Wings—Johnny Bucyk, Bucky Hollingworth, Murray Costello and Cummy Burton among them—tried to see if they could duplicate what Howe had done. They placed pucks on the goalline and tried to hoist them, with one hand, up into the net. But they found they couldn’t even get them up off the ice. They just didn’t have the strength and power that resided in Howe’s big, meaty hands and wrists, or the manual dexterity.
Such superhuman feats fostered Howe’s aura of invincibility. So did his steady productivity, week in and week out, year in and year out. Prystai recalls: “When I first played for Chicago, everybody was always talking about Howe, Howe, Howe, and I’d wonder why. But when I went to Detroit and played with him and saw what he did game after game after game, then you wondered whether the guy was human. He killed penalties and was a threat out on the ice all the time and scored 40−45 goals, when there were only half a dozen guys who scored more than 25 a season.”
That productivity, even more than his deferential nature (Clarence Campbell once said approvingly, “His attitude was one of deference to authority or to anyone senior to himself”), practically guaranteed Howe would never be traded, even by trade-happy Adams. He was too much the franchise player.
It wasn’t only that Howe was the fans’ hero, either. Adams had risked offending the fans before, by disposing of such crowd favourites as Lindsay, Sawchuk and Pavelich. It was his dependability. “He was just so reliable,” Costello says. “The whole operation revolved around Gordie. He was productive, he could play defensively, he could kill penalties, he’d play fifty minutes a game if you wanted him to. He was just a bull—you couldn’t wear him down. And he didn’t get injured, he was that strong.”
Productivity, reliability, endurance, strength. In addition to these qualities, there was a darker quality that Howe consistently displayed. It blossomed most violently on the night of February 1, 1959, in the old Madison Square Garden.
Strangely, the Lou Fontinato fight sticks out in people’s minds more conspicuously than any single event in Howe’s career. All kinds of people remember that fight: far more people than could possibly have been there at the time, and even more, it seems, than remember his breaking Richard’s career goals record. And everyone seems to have his or her own (sometimes widely differing) version of how it happened.
That fact may be some kind of tribute to Life magazine, which covered the event as if it were a heavyweight championship bout, with a three-page photo spread. Or it may simply testify to the grip that hockey violence, like war, holds on our imaginations. For certain, the fight was more like a slaughter—although not of the innocent.
The storm between Howe and “Leapin’ Louie” Fontinato, the defenseman who had built a reputation as the premier battler of the New York Rangers, and perhaps the league, had been gathering for some time. Fontinato had taken on many of the other NHL heavyweights, such as Fern Flaman, at one time or another. The Rangers’ coach, Emile Francis, used to send Fontinato out to run at stars like Howe and Beliveau to throw them off their game. Sooner or later, a Howe-Fontinato set-to was inevitable. “It was coming,” Bob Baun says, “and all of us in the league knew it.”
In one warm-up to the incident, Fontinato split Howe’s lip with a high stick. Howe retaliated by lashing out unthinkingly and received a penalty. As he sat morosely on the bench with an ice pack over his mouth and nose, Fontinato skated by and taunted him, “What’s the matter with your nose, Gordie? What’s the matter with your lip?”
Never one to forget an insult, verbal or physical—and this was both—Howe settled in to wait for an opportunity to get his own back. It was a question of personal pride and honour. It was even, as he saw it, a kind of intelligence test.
“Have you ever done something where you feel you’ve been there before?” he asked June Callwood rhetorically. “Well, I was there before. The first time’s an accident, the second time you’re stupid. So the second time, I didn’t want to be stupid. When Louie came back at me, I got in there first and cut his ear. That was meanness, but it was a return favour. They put a turban on him, and I said, ‘What’s the matter with your ear, Louie?’ So this battle had been going on a long time.”
On the fateful night, the final showdown was triggered, ironically enough, by Red Kelly, whom everyone considered so mild-mannered and gentlemanly. But, as Howe reminds us, “Red was a Golden Glover.” Kelly was mixing it up in a serious way behind the New York net with his future teammate in Toronto, the Rangers’ Eddie (Clear the Track) Shack. Howe likes to portray himself as the innocent bystander to this merriment.
“So I’m leaning on the net, watching this lovely fight going on, and it finally dawned on me, ‘Louie’s out here.’ And when I turn around, sure enough, his gloves and stick are back at the blueline, and he’s ten feet away and coming in at me, obviously, to say hello. So when he swung the first one at me, I was ready for it. He missed. Then I got lucky on that one, because Louie’s a big kid, and a tough boy too.”
For the rest of the story, we must turn to franker, less euphemistic accounts. According to New York hockey writer Stan Fischler, who was perched in the Garden press box practically right above the fracas, Howe had already intervened to help out Kelly and was “disposing of the irritant [Shack] with consummate ease.” So Fontinato was actually charging to Shack’s rescue, as a policeman should. Other observers, such as Lefty Wilson and NHL historian Charles L. Coleman, confirm this. In fact, Howe had clobbered Shack on the ear with his stick. But Fontinato would rue his bravado.
With one hamlike fist, Howe got a good tight grip on the neck of Fontinato’s sweater. With the other, he began pounding Fontinato in the face, over and over—“whop, whop, whop, just like someone chopping wood,” according to a Red Wing player quoted in the Life story. With one of those punches, Fontinato’s nose was broken for the fifth time.
Over at the Detroit bench, Lefty Wilson heard the fight, as well as seeing it: “With every blow, you could hear something break—squish, squish. Finally Andy Bathgate jumped in and stopped it.”
The officials had decided to let the two players go at it. One published account claims the savagery lasted a full minute, although that seems hard to credit—Fontinato is, after all, still alive. Howe suffered a black eye and a few stitches, so Fontinato was hardly defenseless, but Leapin’ Louie was by far the worse for wear. “Fontinato was a mess,” Fischler wrote. “His nose was smashed and his ego was demolished.” So was his reputation as a tough guy.
New York coach Phil Watson later said the bloody beating Howe administered to Fontinato broke the Rangers’ collective spirit that season. They lost their bid for a playoff berth, while Fontinato wound up in the hospital, bandaged like an Egyptian mummy. This was the image that appeared in Life, shocking gentle American readers by portraying the vicious side of hockey; on the facing page, the magazine ran a photo of Howe in the Detroit dressing room, shirt off and muscles rippling.
The irony of it all, as Lefty Wilson points out, was that, before the game, he’d taped Howe all around the rib cage: “He had a muscle that had rolled over a rib, and he was hurting pretty good. If Fontinato had come up under Howe [instead of going for his head], he’d have dropped him. But Fontinato didn’t know that.”
The fight was Howe’s last major bout—not because he lost the stomach for it, but because it put the word around the league that challenging him face-to-face was not an intelligent move. It also led to descriptions such as this, from the twenty-fifth-anniversary program issued by the Red Wings on Howe’s final season with the club: “He is everything you’d expect the ideal athlete to be,” an unidentified opponent was quoted on the subject of Howe. “He is soft-spoken, [self-]deprecating and thoughtful. He is also one of the most vicious, cruel and mean men I’ve ever met in a hockey game.”
Howe declined the honour. “Hockey is a man’s game,” he replied unapologetically at the time. “You have to take care of yourself.” He always insisted his treatment of Fontinato was self-defense—his father’s edict, “never take any dirt from nobody,” in action yet again. Howe himself once phrased the concept with more elegance: “Unless a player keeps asserting himself, the other players take it as a sign of weakness and start to climb all over you.” But he also admitted, after twenty-five seasons, that he’d done some things on the ice he wasn’t proud of.
In a more relaxed and candid vein in 1989, Howe revealed in After the Applause that he’d known perfectly well what he was doing all along. “You’ve also got to remember that I was crazy,” he is quoted as saying. “I was never afraid of getting hurt... It’s one thing to be rough, but to be rough and crazy means the other guy is never going to get the last hit... I’d play with him, tease him, but he knew that sooner or later he’d pay.”
All the same, brawling toe-to-toe wasn’t normally Howe’s style. He himself was subjected to endless nasty harassment and chippy play and cheap shots. “They look me up,” as he once put it, especially players new to the league, who hadn’t learned to behave themselves. So, like some stern school principal, he developed a consistent and time-honoured method of disciplining them. He’d note their numbers, bide his time. A period or a few games or even a year later, when the offender had forgotten the incident and wasn’t expecting anything, Howe’s elephant-like memory would kick in and he’d level the guy with an invisible elbow or lightning thrust of his stick to some tender part of the anatomy. More often than not, the retribution would occur behind the play, when the officials were distracted elsewhere. For the young upstart, it was always a learning experience, administered by “a recognized master,” as Toronto Star sportswriter Jim Hunt once wrote, “of the art of high sticking.”
Howe’s artistry with his stick was witnessed from the stands by a young Bob Baun during a game against Boston. While Howe was carrying the puck, Bruin defenseman Larry Hillman took a run at him: “Gordie let the puck drop right at his feet, brought his stick up, and put a perfect Z on Larry’s forehead, like the mark of Zorro. Next thing you knew, he was back stick-handling. He never lost control of the puck, and it happened so fast the ref didn’t notice.”
Alex Delvecchio, who continued to centre Howe through much of the 1960s, had a nicer way of putting it. “If you got Gordie really mad, he’d give you a little wood, but only if you got him mad. Yes, he was dirty, but in a clean sort of way.”
Of course, Delvecchio didn’t have to play against him. Pierre Pilote, the Chicago Black Hawks’ all-star defenseman, did. “Nobody takes a chance with Gordie,” Pilote stated, “because you never know what he can do to you. He plays the game for keeps. He doesn’t expect you to take it easy on him, and he doesn’t take it easy on you.”
Players who forgot that hard-earned knowledge could get a surprise. Baun’s defense partner, the equally rugged Carl Brewer, once fell on top of Howe after a struggle behind the net. Tempted to get in one last shot while he had the chance, Brewer resisted when he heard Howe say, “Okay, Carl, the play’s over.” There was another pile-up later in the game, and this time it was Howe on top. Assuming they had a sportsmanlike understanding, Brewer relaxed, waiting for Howe to get off him, and suddenly had the wind knocked out of him with a hard blow to the ribs.
“Cute,” as Red Kelly would say.
On March 3, 1959, just over a month after the Fontinato fight, the Red Wings paid their franchise player the singular honour of holding a Gordie Howe Night. Between the first and second periods of a game against Boston, the club presented him with a treasure trove of gifts worth an estimated $10,000—more than the average NHL salary in those days—ranging from clothing, luggage and a Miami vacation to toys for the kids and a 130-piece layette (Colleen was pregnant with their fourth and last child, Murray).
The biggest and most expensive gift was a new station wagon, built there in Detroit, and bearing Michigan licence plate GH-9000. It came rolling out onto the ice wrapped in cellophane. When the wrapping was removed from the front windows, Howe literally doubled over in shock and clutched his head: Ab and Katherine Howe were sitting in the front seat.
It was the very first time Ab had come to Detroit, the first game he’d witnessed his son play in the NHL. And it was the first time for Katherine since coming to watch over him after the 1950 head injury. Gordie’s eyes filled with tears. Overcome with emotion, he watched his parents step out of the car and broke down completely as his mother put her arms around his neck and hugged him in front of the packed, cheering house.
The fans screamed for a speech. Howe, unaccustomed as he was, gave it his best shot.
“Don’t mind the odd tear,” he said, after a long pause. “It’s a long way from Saskatoon. I want to thank you for the biggest thrill in my life. Things have been like this ever since I hit Detroit. I want to thank the late James Norris, Bruce Norris, Jack Adams and Sid Abel.”
“And Ted Lindsay!” someone in the crowd yelled.
“Yes, of course, Ted Lindsay,” Howe replied.
Indeed, Lindsay was there too, flown in from Chicago.
With his mother and father in the stands, Howe was too wrought up to score during the next two periods. Recounting the event many years later, he said it had never dawned on him that his parents might actually be there for Gordie Howe Night. “Maybe I was a little slow at thinking, but when I got to the rink, I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if Mom and Dad were here.’ And they were there—they were in the car when it rolled out on the ice. And you’re supposed to be a big tough guy, and it broke me up, it just broke me up.”
That recollection ties in with another story of Howe’s about Ab. Reminded once by interviewer June Callwood that Doug and Max Bentley’s mother used to say her daughters were better hockey players than her sons, Howe responded, “I had trouble with my dad that way. He insisted that [brother] Vic was a better hockey player. Vic played about sixty games in the NHL—I played more years than he did games! But Dad watched Vic a lot playing for the Saskatoon Quakers.”
In fact, Vic was brought up from the minors for a total of only thirty-three games with the New York Rangers between the 1951 and ’55 seasons; finally, finding it too difficult to play in his famous brother’s shadow, he retired from hockey and moved to Moncton, New Brunswick, to become a railway policeman. But Howe’s telling of that anecdote is a reminder that praise and affirmation from Ab seldom came easily, even—and perhaps especially—after thirteen seasons of NHL stardom.
To lesser players, a night in their honour would signal the twilight of their careers, an expectation that they would soon be gone. Howe continued to carry the mail and the Red Wings all through the team’s ups and downs of the 1960s. He wasn’t completely isolated in his glory. He had other fine players for teammates (Sawchuk, Marcel Pronovost, Bill Gadsby, Doug Barkley) and in some cases linemates (Delvecchio, Norm Ullman, Vic Stasiuk, Parker MacDonald); and for the first half of the decade, the Wings rallied to become serious contenders once more. There was even the splendid 1964−65 season when Howe was reunited with Ted Lindsay, who came out of retirement to help his old team recapture the league title.
There was another reunion: Howe’s coach throughout that decade was the third man from the original Production Line, Sid Abel. Under Abel’s tutelage, the Wings rebounded from last place in 1959 to finish fourth and earn a playoff berth in both of the next two seasons. In 1961, they succeeded in going all the way to the Stanley Cup finals against a new powerhouse, the Black Hawks of Bobby Hull, Stan Mikita, Pilote and Hall, extending Chicago to six games before losing.
But to some observers that year, Howe finally seemed to be slowing down, feeling his age. In an era when the average NHL career lasted six seasons, and ten was considered a good run, he’d now completed fifteen. The 1960−61 season was his poorest for goal production since 1949—23—and, interestingly, his lowest in penalty minutes, too—30. Was there a linkage here between scoring and mischief? Sportswriters short of copy speculated that Howe was tired and washed up, and started writing his obituary.
The obituaries were premature. He was hardly senile: only the season before, he’d won his fifth Hart trophy, a league record—surpassing Eddie Shore, who won four. And even in this supposedly slumping season, he had 49 assists and placed fifth in scoring, with 72 points. He also shared the lead in playoff scoring with Pilote. For any other player, it would have been considered a terrific year.
Perhaps Howe was missing the stimulus of his ancient rivalry with the Rocket, who had retired, at thirty-nine, at the beginning of the 1960−61 season. No longer could Howe’s competitive nature take gleeful delight in tweaking the Rocket’s pride, as when he’d scored his 100th goal on Maurice Richard Night in 1951; or his 400th on December 13, 1958, when the Rocket unintentionally assisted him, lifting his stick to deflect the puck into the net. Howe had called the Rocket his pacemaker, “the man who led the way for the rest of us.” Now all Howe had to look forward to was breaking Richard’s records: previously, they’d been moving targets; from now on, they were sitting ducks.
It was true Howe had been temporarily slowed by a bloody collision with Eddie Shack in a game in January 1961 at Maple Leaf Gardens. Knocked out cold, Howe suffered a concussion and a gash in his forehead requiring twelve stitches. Shack received a major penalty for high sticking. But although Howe missed three games because of the injury, he insisted Shack shouldn’t be blamed for intent to injure.
There was one other factor detracting from Howe’s performance in the 1960−61 season. Bernie Geoffrion did what Howe was unable to do throughout his entire career: equal Richard’s 50-goal record. The next season, Bobby Hull too would tie it, but like Geoffrion he would not break it. So the record, shared by the three players, would continue to stand like some seemingly impregnable fortress refusing to fall to its besiegers, until finally Hull went over the top in 1966.
In the 1961−62 season, Howe regained his momentum, bouncing back as he had eleven years earlier after his life-threatening head injury. He confounded the obit-writers by collecting 33 goals and tying young Stan Mikita for third in scoring, behind Hull and Andy Bathgate. Late that season, on March 14, 1962, Howe reached a major milestone of his career: his 500th goal.
He scored it at Madison Square Garden against Gump Worsley, a frequent victim of his big markers, who was in his last season with New York before being traded to Montreal (and who once, when asked which team gave him the most trouble while he was with the Rangers, replied “the Rangers”). Howe and Delvecchio were out killing a penalty when Delvecchio broke Howe loose with a quick pass up the right side. Doug Harvey, traded to New York as delayed punishment for his involvement with the players’ association, was once again the last man back. Howe faked Harvey to the right, went to his left, lost control of the puck momentarily, then kicked it ahead. Catching up to the puck, Howe bore in on Worsley, who had come out to cut off the angle, and fired it under the goalie to become the second player in NHL history to reach 500 goals.
Howe was now within clear sight of Richard’s all-time record of 544. The only question was whether he would take one season or two to demolish it. Barring a comeback, Richard would have the bitter experience of sitting helplessly by and watching his career landmark fall—just as Howe would, with Gretzky, three decades later.
A remarkable thing happened to the Detroit Red Wings before the 1962−63 season: they were relieved of the burden of Jack Adams. After their spirited performance against Chicago in the 1961 finals, the team had fallen out of contention once again in 1962, finishing fifth, behind the Rangers. President Bruce Norris was persuaded the fault lay with Adams’s failing judgement and outdated approach to the game. Needing a younger G.M. with a surer touch, Norris appointed Abel to succeed his former mentor while continuing as coach. Adams was retired at full pay and put out to pasture as president of the Central Professional League, where his experience would be useful—and where he couldn’t do any more harm to the club that, in earlier days, he’d moulded and guided to so many victories.
At that point, Howe still had tender filial feelings for his old boss. He approached Norris to satisfy himself that Adams was being properly taken care of. Then he proceeded to have one of his last truly great years of the Original Six era. That year was 1963, and Howe’s achievements spanned two different hockey seasons.
The 1962−63 season was dramatic for the tightness of the league standings—by the end of the regular schedule, only five points separated fourth-place Detroit from first-place Toronto—and the excitement of the individual scoring race.
Against many of the most brilliant offensive stars ever to compete in the NHL, all of them younger than he, Howe scored 38 goals and 48 assists for 86 points, to win his sixth and final scoring championship—5 points ahead of second-place Bathgate, 10 ahead of third-place Mikita, 13 ahead of Frank Mahovlich and Henri Richard, 19 ahead of Beliveau, 20 ahead of Bucyk, 22 ahead of Delvecchio, a full 24 ahead of Hull and Murray Oliver. On the eve of his thirty-fifth birthday, Howe had played all seventy games of the season and had far outdistanced most other players in penalties, compiling 100 minutes (which was still considerably less than the 273 racked up by his wild-man teammate, defenseman Howie Young). And he was now a mere four goals short of equalling the Rocket’s career record.
But Howe’s season wasn’t finished. He led the Red Wings to an impressive upset in the Stanley Cup semifinals and a highly creditable performance in the finals. After spotting second-place Chicago the first two games of their opening round, Detroit surprised the odds-makers by winning the next four straight to advance against the Leafs, who had eliminated Montreal.
In the finals, it was the late 1940s all over again: Punch Imlach’s team played basic, hard-hitting, positional hockey, nothing fancy, and had too much defense and too much depth for the Red Wings, as well as tremendous goaltending from Bower. But the Wings kept it close; while they won only one game, they never lost by more than two goals. And Howe and Ullman ended the series tied for the lead in playoff points. Deservedly, Howe was accorded his sixth Hart trophy as the league’s MVP.
His next season, 1963−64, would be superlative for different reasons. With 540 career goals, Howe was staring Richard’s record in the face and trying not to blink (not easy for him). He got off to a blazing start, with two goals against Glenn Hall in the first period of the season’s first game, and another in the next game against Boston, putting him within one of the record. Then he was struck by a severe case of self-consciousness. Exactly as ten years earlier, when he’d been chasing the Rocket’s 50 goals in a season, Howe’s teammates continually tried to set him up; but the media and crowd attention, and the self-generated daily pressure, made him nervous, throwing him off his game. For the next four outings, he was held scoreless. But that was just as well: his next chance to match his career rival would be at home—on October 27, 1963, against the Canadiens.
One of the photographs of Howe’s record-tying goal shows Montreal’s Gilles Tremblay making a grim, all-out, teeth-gritting effort to ride Howe off the puck right in front of (as fate would have it) Gump Worsley. Tremblay is just a little too late, and Howe, who has taken a relay in the slot from Bruce MacGregor after a pass from Gadsby, is just a little too strong. In the foreground, Worsely is flopping to his left as the puck enters the net. In the background, Henri Richard is standing in the open gate at the Montreal bench. He’s staring in dismay—and not only because his older brother’s record has just been equalled. The Canadiens’ John Ferguson was in the penalty box at the time, and Richard was supposed to stay on the ice until the penalty was over; but somehow, there had been a mixup of signals at the Canadiens’ bench, and Henri had gone off before he was supposed to, giving Detroit the two-man advantage that helped set up Howe’s goal.
The partisan crowd of 14,749 went wild in a five-minute standing ovation. Programs fell from the Olympia’s upper tier like propaganda leaflets. But for Howe, the pressure wasn’t over: now he had to score number 545 to overtake the Rocket.
As Wayne Gretzky found in pursuit of number 802 in March 1994, it wouldn’t be quick or easy. From October 27 to November 10, 1963, Howe played five games without scoring—an unusual slump by his standards, and all because he was on the spot once more. The stress on the team, on the Howe household and inside Howe himself became almost unbearable. But, on November 10, the Canadiens came back to the Olympia, recreating the conditions under which Gordie had tied the record. the only difference was that Charlie Hodge would be in goal instead of Worsley, who had the relatively good fortune to be injured this time around.
In the second period, Detroit was short-handed, and Howe was out killing the penalty with Gadsby and Billy McNeill. As the three broke quickly out of their own end, the Montreal attackers were trapped behind the play, and only Jacques Laperriere and Dave Balon remained back. McNeill scooted up the right side with the puck, cutting to the middle and crossing the blueline. He passed to Howe on his right, who immediately snapped a wrist shot from the top of the face-off circle, aiming for Hodge’s short side. The goaltender lunged to his left, but too late—the puck whistled by between him and the post, hip high. The all-time goals record had a new owner.
Above the crowd’s unremitting roar, Howe told Sid Abel, “I feel ten pounds lighter.” This time, the standing ovation continued for ten minutes as debris rained down. After slamming the post with his stick in disgust, Hodge went to the Montreal bench to wait out the uproar, while Canadiens’ captain Jean Beliveau skated over to congratulate Howe. After the game, Beliveau presented Howe with an oil portrait painted by former Montreal Alouettes’ football lineman Tex Coulter. “Am I glad you finally scored,” Beliveau told Howe. “I’ve been carrying this around for days.”
No one was gladder or more relieved than Howe. Although he enjoyed the tumult, and the tributes and telegrams that poured in from all over the league and the continent, he had hated the process of getting there. One reporter phoned Ab Howe in Saskatoon to ask what he thought of his son’s breakthrough: “What took him so long?” Ab chortled.
But from now on, every NHL goal Howe scored would be golden, embellishing his record and putting it father and farther beyond the reach of others—for the time being, at least. The time being would last thirty-one years. In an interesting parallel, both Richard and Howe were in their eighteenth seasons when they reached goal number 544. The Rocket took 978 games, Howe 1,126.
It’s less often remembered that another NHL record was reached that night. Detroit won the game 3−0, and the shutout was Terry Sawchuk’s 94th, tying the career record set by George Hainsworth with Montreal and Toronto in the 1930s. By the time he died on active NHL service in 1970, Sawchuk would boost his record to 103, where it still stands today, untouched.
In a postscript to Howe’s triumphant year, Canadian sportswriters voted him Canada’s outstanding male athlete of 1963—making him, surprisingly enough, only the third hockey player to receive the honour to that point. In Toronto, however, curmudgeonly Gordon Sinclair, the Jack Adams of journalists, demanded to know on radio CFRB why the honour had gone to an American. Howe (unlike Adams) had made a point of keeping his Canadian citizenship after settling in Detroit, even though his wife and children were American: it was the reason he gave for turning down requests to campaign on behalf of vice-presidential candidates Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey. But Sinclair’s fulminations, incorrect as they were, took the edge off Howe’s award from his home and native land just a little.
In the 1964 playoffs, the Red Wings duplicated the previous year’s pattern: having finished fourth, they again defeated second-place Chicago and advanced to the finals against Toronto. Howe scored a total of 5 goals against the Black Hawks, as Detroit came from behind to win the semifinals in seven games. In the process, he toppled yet another of Richard’s records: his second goal gave him the lead in career playoff points, with 127.
The Leafs-Wings final also went to seven games, and seldom has such a vivid contrast in coaching philosophies existed as the one between Punch Imlach and Sid Abel. Imlach was the puritanical, punitive, unforgiving slave driver who got his charges up early for a gruelling practice, even if they’d played the night before, and especially if they’d lost. Abel, free to run things his way now that Adams was gone, believed his players played better after a little R & R, and took them to the racetrack.
Abel’s relaxed approach was almost proved right. By the sixth game, his Wings were leading three games to two and could almost taste the champagne from their first Stanley Cup in nine years. “For the first time in the series I really feel we can beat them,” Abel told Bruce Norris.
Late in the third period, however, with the score tied at 3−3, and Detroit just a goal away from victory, Bob Baun took a low, heavy shot from Delvecchio on his ankle. “My leg just turned to cream cheese,” Baun said later; he had to be carried off on a stretcher. The ankle was broken, but Baun, injected with Novocain, leaped back out onto the ice in the overtime period and fired the celebrated goal that sent the series into a seventh game in Toronto. The Leafs, many of their best players wounded, taped, trussed and frozen, but playing over their injuries as Imlach fully expected them to, triumphed 4−0, equalling the three consecutive Stanley Cups of their predecessors in the late 1940s. The leader in playoff points was thirty-six-year-old Howe, who totalled 9 goals and 10 assists: a great individual performance, but not quite enough for the Cup.
In 1964−65, the Red Wings won their first league championship since 1957. With a fine new goaltender, Roger Crozier, in place of Sawchuk (who was now in Toronto), and a stirring comeback by a player who had starred on that 1957 team, thirty-nine-year-old Ted Lindsay, they seemed for one season more like the Red Wings of old.
Even while playing three seasons with the Black Hawks, Lindsay says, he’d still been a Red Wing at heart: “I was just existing in Chicago, not living.” After retiring in 1960, he returned to Detroit to help run the business he owned with Marty Pavelich. During four years away from the NHL, Lindsay kept in shape by playing hockey three times a week with Pavelich and some college players. Then, in spring 1964, he participated in a charity game between Detroit and the Red Wing Oldtimers. Howe was lent to the Oldtimers so the Production Line could be reunited. “Taking Gordie off their team was like taking a leg off some of those Red Wing players,” Lindsay says. The Oldtimers shocked the younger men by nearly beating them, and Lindsay began to get ideas.
“In the summer I went to see Sid, and said I wanted to end up associated with the Red Wings in some capacity. He said, ‘Why don’t you come back and play? I think you could help us.’ I thought he was joking. But he was serious, and after a couple of days I said yes, I’d give it a try.”
At training camp, Lindsay practised on the early shift, between 8:00 A.M. and 10:00 A.M., so that he could get into the office for a full day’s work. “People thought I was just trying to stay in shape. Sid told the media, ‘A young rookie’s going to make his debut tomorrow night.’ ”
For the season opener against Toronto, Lindsay emerged onto the ice at the Olympia to a tumultuous standing ovation: “It was very emotional. And it was a great year, lots of fun. I had the young legs of [linemates] Bruce MacGregor and Pit Martin to keep me going.”
But it was Lindsay who got himself going—dropping Tim Horton with one punch in the opener and, along with a 10-minute misconduct for that one, and 173 penalty minutes for the full season, scoring a decent 14 goals and 14 assists as Detroit finished first, four points ahead of Montreal. Lindsay scored 3 more goals in the semifinals against Chicago, while Howe got 4. But Hull, Hall and company were too fired up for the Red Wings to handle, and the Black Hawks edged the Wings out in seven games.
Lindsay would have played another season for Detroit if he could, but Abel didn’t put him on the protected list, and Toronto wouldn’t pass him on waivers. Since he didn’t want to leave his business behind again, Lindsay decided to retire. “Maybe I was lucky,” he says now, with a deep chuckle. “I wasn’t hurt, and I got out of it with all my faculties.”
But by missing the next season, he did miss one last crack at the Cup. Dropping to fourth in the standings, Howe and the Red Wings nonetheless revenged themselves on the Black Hawks in the first round of the 1966 playoffs, then held a reunion with first-place Montreal in the finals, just as in the old days. They even beat the Canadiens for the first two games at the Forum, with Crozier brilliant in goal. But Montreal won the next four—two of them by only one goal—and Detroit waved good-bye to the Stanley Cup yet again. It was the Red Wings’ last appearance in the Cup finals to this day, nearly thirty years later.
The team now began a long slide in the general direction of oblivion. In Howe’s final five seasons with the club, 1966−67 to 1970−71, Detroit would finish last twice, and second-last twice. In the meantime, he himself would soldier on, continuing his long, lonesome march into the NHL record book.