“Off the ice, I struggle as you do, but off the ice you never see me... We are not heroes. We are hockey players.”
—Ken Dryden, The Game
There’s a story they like to tell about Gordie Howe. One summer, during a fishing trip in Alberta, he was driving with his tackle up to a lake north of Edmonton. Approaching an old man fishing off the side of a bridge, he slowed his car to a stop, rolled the window down and stuck his head out.
“How’re they bitin’, old-timer?” he called.
The stranger didn’t look up from his rod. “Pretty good, Gord,” he replied.
I’m reminded of that kind of public recognition when I finally get to Gordie on an evening in August 1993, nearly forty years after my friend and I argued passionately over him and the Rocket. I’m sitting across the table from Howe in a restaurant in Abbotsford, British Columbia. Beside him is Colleen Howe; beside me is publisher Rob Sanders. We’re there to discuss the possibility of collaborating on Gordie’s long-overdue autobiography.
But Howe can scarcely take part in the conversation. He’s too busy accommodating the steady stream of restaurant patrons, young and old, who keep stopping at our table and asking, some shyly, some boldly, for his autograph. As a result, the strongest impressions I retain from that evening are visual ones: the hugeness of Howe’s hands, the hands that administered the legendary wrist shot and the punishing beatings and that now shrink neighbouring objects by comparison, making our cups and saucers and cutlery resemble a dollhouse tea set; his fingernails as big as dollar coins; his wrists the girth of ankles; yet everything in perfect proportion. And pain. He seems a veritable mountain of pain, from his elongated, muscled neck and precipitously sloping shoulders to his long, thick, gnarled limbs gathered stiffly under the table, all aching so much that he’s constantly wincing and massaging his massive wrists and thighs and kneecaps to get some relief.
It is strange and regrettable that, so many years after his retirement, Howe still hasn’t published his autobiography. Not only has Gretzky already come out with his life story, but the list of former NHL players who have collaborated with co-authors is as long as Howe’s arm. Some, such as Gump Worsley and Johnny Bucyk, are close to him in age, but other retirees in print—Stan Mikita, Gerry Cheevers, Phil Esposito, Brad Park, Mike Bossy, Paul Henderson, Larry Robinson, Tiger Williams, to name a few—are considerably younger. Already two biographies of Mario Lemieux have appeared. Even Eric Lindros has told his story, at the ripe old age of eighteen, back before he’d played a single game in the NHL.
It seems wrong that hockey’s greatest living player still hasn’t recounted his career from start to finish; he is moving farther and farther away from the source of those personal memories and reflections that legions of fans would love to read about. And it’s not as if writers and publishers haven’t tried to collaborate with him. Trent Frayne and Roy MacGregor are two highly respected and experienced hockey writers Howe could have worked with over the years, but didn’t.
For whatever reason, I don’t have any better luck than they did. But later that evening, in the Hotel Vancouver, I come across a plexiglas showcase displaying a gilt-edged souvenir plate. The plate bears a hand-painted portrait of Wayne Gretzky in action, uniformed in the colours of the Los Angeles Kings. And hovering above Gretzky’s head, emerging from the heavens like some biblical vision, is none other than the weathered, hawk-nosed profile of the man I’ve just had dinner with. The portrait seems to be saying, “And Howe begat Gretzky...” It confirms my conviction that any man who becomes an icon in his own lifetime deserves a book to himself. Hence this unauthorized biography.
And yet I still hope Howe writes his own story some day. It could be more than just another variation on his “Mr. Hockey” persona, the public Gordie. It might reveal something of the private Gordie: the “big kid” Bob Baun enjoyed so much when he and his family were invited up to the Howes’ cottage for water-skiing and sailboating and trail-bike riding and Monopoly and card games from early morning until night, and Howe always had to lead the pack or win the race or be the best at whatever game it might be, and yet was so infused with excitement and enthusiasm for everything he did that Baun developed “a great feeling towards him.”
Or it might reveal the man Baun experienced on another occasion, which he calls “the best night I ever had with him,” at the Howe home in Detroit.
“Everybody else was at the cottage, and it was this beautiful warm summer night. He had a big pool in the backyard, and there was just Jean Beliveau, Gerry Patterson, Gord and I. We’d had a few beers, and we were like big porpoises in the pool, having the time of our lives swimming and diving. One of us would do a double flip and the others would have to do a double flip, all like big kids, and it was a wonderful insight into both Gord and Beliveau—the real Gord and the real Beliveau—and how much they admired each other. That evening, a writer would have got the story of a lifetime.”
Few of us have been privileged to share such intimate, unguarded moments with the real Gordie Howe. But sometimes, the kids he instructs at hockey clinics do receive a glimpse into what he’s all about.
First, he’ll offer them his philosophy about playing hockey: that if you give everything you have out on the ice, you’ll be able to sleep soundly at night—you’ll be able to say, “Whatever you saw me do out there, good or bad, that was the best I had.”
And then he’ll give them his reminder that “In between, there’s a little thing called fun. That’s why we call hockey a game.”