Gordie Howe

The Full Biography

Gordie Howe. Right wing. The Floral, Saskatchewan, kid who made a generation of elbows into a standard, then played long enough to be a teammate to his own sons.

This is his story.

The image most people still carry is a Red Wing, a hooked nose that had been broken, a man who could score and then make you pay for the score. Mr. Hockey. What the still cannot show is Gordon Howe of Floral, a Depression farm, a Detroit that owned him for a quarter century, and a remaining life in the WHA with Mark and Marty, a 52-year-old NHL encore, and a death in 2016 after strokes had already taken the remaining ease.

He was born on March 31, 1928, in Floral, Saskatchewan, a speck on the prairie, to Albert and Katherine Howe. The family was poor in the way prairie families were poor. He grew up in Saskatoon. The ponds were the first rink. He went to Detroit as a teenager, after a failed look from the New York Rangers that is a footnote the Red Wings still enjoy. He debuted with Detroit in 1946, eighteen years old, a right wing with hands and a mean streak the league had not yet named. He did not leave, in any important sense, until 1971. Jack Adams ran the club. Sid Abel and Ted Lindsay skated the Production Line with him. The Olympia was the parish.

The Production Line with Lindsay and Abel is the first civic object. Howe was the right wing who could do the quiet thing and the corner thing in the same shift. Lindsay was the mouth. Abel was the center who became a coach. Detroit in those years was a Saturday religion. The Olympia’s smoke and the boards’ sound are the childhood of a generation that still says 9 as if it were weather. He signed for small money by the math that came after him. Colleen would, in time, make sure the math got less small. The ice was never small.

Four Stanley Cups: 1950, 1952, 1954, 1955. Six Hart Trophies as the league’s most valuable player. Six Art Ross Trophies as its scoring leader. The stat line is a pile that still looks like a typo: decades of 20-goal seasons, 801 NHL goals when he stopped, 1,850 points, 1,767 games across 26 NHL seasons. In the 1950 playoffs a collision put him in the hospital with a fractured skull; he came back the next year and took the scoring title. The Howe hat trick — a goal, an assist, a fight — is a coinage that fits him too well to retire. He was not only the elbows. He was the elbows and the touch. Younger men who only remember the legend of meanness miss the hands. He could shoot from either side. He could wait. He could make you pay for arriving late to the corner.

He retired in 1971 because the body, and the front office, said so. He hated it. He took a job in the Detroit organization that was not the ice. Colleen, his wife — “Mrs. Hockey” in the public shorthand — ran the business of being Mr. Hockey with a hardness the nickname does not quite catch. In 1973 he unretired into the World Hockey Association so he could play with his sons for the Houston Aeros. Mark and Marty were on the sheet. He was forty-five. The Aeros won the Avco World Trophy in 1974 and again in 1975. He won the WHA’s most valuable player award in 1974. That is the monument the NHL still has to share: a father on a line with his own boys, a championship, a man in his late forties who had not agreed to become a banquet. He played in Houston through 1977, then followed the franchise math to the New England Whalers.

In 1979 the WHA folded into the NHL. The Hartford Whalers came in. Howe came with them. He was fifty-one, then fifty-two. He played all 80 games of the 1979–80 season. The encore is not a cameo. It is a season. He put up 15 goals and 26 assists, skated with Mark, and let the league look at a man who had debuted when Harry Truman was in the White House. He finally stopped after that year. The number 9 is retired in Detroit as climate. Wayne Gretzky, who took 99 because 9 was already a religion, has said the obvious thing: the old man was the standard. Howe, when asked, would grin and mention the elbows.

You find you can do more when you have to. I had to for a long time.Gordie Howe

The turn is the WHA, not a farewell. A lot of greats leave and become a statue. He left, got bored, and made a family line. The NHL of the decades after still uses 99 as a different religion. Howe is 9. Colleen ran the firm of being Mr. Hockey until dementia took her. He followed her into a fog and died on June 10, 2016, in Toledo. He was eighty-eight.

Mark, in the Hall on his own, and Marty have had to share a nickname that is a country. Friends from the Detroit years describe a man who could be shy at a dinner and not shy in the corner. Howe, after the strokes, was a face people visited like a monument. The monument had already, in Hartford, written the last shift.

The later years

Between Houston and Hartford there was still the ordinary work of a man who would not sit down: New England Whalers seasons in the WHA, a body in its late forties that treated July as a rumor, a line with his sons that the highlight shows still run when they need a father-and-son proof. Mark was already a star. Marty was the other wing. The old man was the gravity. The NHL merger did not invent the encore. The encore was already a career.

Home, after Hartford, was the banquet circuit and a body that had been a factory. He signed autographs. He stood in hotel ballrooms and let the elbows become a story. Colleen booked the appearances and guarded the name. In 1997 he skated a single shift with the International Hockey League’s Detroit Vipers so he could say he had played in six decades, a stunt that is also a document: the old man still wanted a sheet of ice more than a podium. The Howe Foundation did the civic work. Detroit still treated 9 as weather. He appeared at Joe Louis Arena and then at Little Caesars Arena as the franchise’s living climate. He did not become only a statue in the concourse. He became a man who would still take a puck if you put one on his stick.

Detroit kept calling him back because the franchise is also a memory business. Banner nights. Old-Timers games. A handshake line that treated 9 as a climate. He signed until the hand could not. He told the elbow stories until the stories were the job. Colleen had been the one who priced the job. After her death the sons had to be the firm. That transfer is part of the remaining years: a nickname that is a country, and a family that had to run the country after the woman who had actually run it was gone.

Colleen’s dementia was the first long goodbye. She died in 2009. He had already begun to lose the remaining ease — small strokes, a body that had been hit for thirty professional seasons. In 2014 a major stroke put him in the kind of quiet the corners had never managed. The family took him to Mexico for an experimental stem-cell treatment; they said he improved. The medical file is their testimony, not a clinic’s press release. He spent his last stretch in Toledo, near Marty’s house, a prairie kid in an Ohio suburb, visitors coming as if to a monument that could still grin. Mark, already a Hall of Famer, had to be a son in a room. Marty had to be a son in a house. The nickname was a country. The man was a father who had skated on their line and now could not always find the sentence.

The 1997 Vipers shift still sits in the file as a curiosity and a devotion: one shift, six decades, a man who would rather take a faceoff than accept that the banquet was the rest of the life. Mark’s Hall of Fame night was a son’s night and a father’s weather. Marty kept the Toledo house. A third generation has had to learn that 9 is a public object. Howe, in the years between Hartford and the stroke, still took a stick in his hands at charity ice and at banner nights, a body that remembered the corner better than it remembered a banquet sentence. Visitors describe a grin that could still find you. Then the grin became harder to find. That fading is the last remaining chapter, and it is a long one.

He died on June 10, 2016. He was eighty-eight, which is a full remaining chapter. Detroit put the jersey back in the rafters’ weather. Floral is still a speck. Saskatoon still claims the ponds. Houston still has the Avco years the NHL record book used to skip. Hartford still has the 80-game season at fifty-two. Gretzky still arrives in the same sentence. The sentence is the right argument. The hat trick is the folk memory. The 80-game season is the file. The sons still have to answer for the elbows and the hands.

What the remaining years actually were, on the ground, was a long twilight of appearances, a wife who had been the firm, a stroke that took the grin in pieces, a controversial clinic in Mexico the family believed in, visitors in a Toledo room, and a death after the fog had already come. He had already, in Houston and Hartford, written the last real shift. The banquets were the aftertaste. The ice was the life. He did not have a short goodbye. He had a long one, which is what a body that played into its fifties owes the calendar, and what a prairie kid owes a league that had used him as a standard for half a century.

Saskatoon still puts his name on ice the way Detroit puts 9 in the rafters. The prairie claim and the Motor City claim do not cancel. They are the same life seen from two winters. Floral remains a speck. The speck is the point. A Depression house sent a right wing into a league that still uses his elbows as a grammar and his hands as the correction to the elbows.

The public still uses him as a measuring stick. Every power forward still pays him a tax. Every father-son story in the league still uses Houston as the proof it can be done. The Production Line is still a unit in a Detroit classroom. The skull fracture in 1950 is still the night the franchise almost lost the pile. The 1997 Vipers shift is still a curiosity and a devotion. He played so long that the encore became a career of its own. That encore is the remaining life, and it ended in a quiet room, not on a sheet of ice. The sheet of ice is what remains.

After he was gone

Every power forward still pays him a tax. Every father-son story in the league still uses Houston as the proof it can be done. Gretzky still arrives in the same sentence. The sentence is the right argument. The hat trick is the folk memory. The 80-game season at fifty-two is the file.

Detroit still treats 9 as weather. The Olympia is gone. The nickname is not. Mark’s Hall plaque is his own. Marty’s house was the last address. Colleen’s firm is a memory the family still runs. Floral is still a speck.

He came out of Floral, gave Detroit a quarter century, invented a kind of hat trick, unretired into his sons’ locker room, played eighty games as an old man, and died after the fog had already come. If you only remember the elbows, you have the nickname. If you remember Floral, Houston, and Hartford, you have him.

Portrait: Ralston-Purina Company · Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons

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