Gordie Howe tribute dinner: The stories and highlights

SASKATOON – The stories. There were so many stories about Gordie Howe before and during the Kinsmen Sports Celebrity Dinner on Friday night. Wayne Gretzky and Bobby Hull spoke of Howe as their idol and competitor. Mark and Marty Howe spoke of him as their father and teammate. Everyone spoke of his skill, toughness, kindness and humor.

The highlights:

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Bobby Hull was 10 when he first saw Gordie Howe. It was 1949. He and his parents took the train from Belleville, Ontario, to Toronto, and they waited in sleet and rain outside Maple Leaf Gardens so they could rush through the turnstiles and claim standing room behind the blues.

Following his dad’s directions, Hull went first and grabbed a spot. He held out his arms to reserve spots for his parents.

“I was in Maple Leaf Gardens all by myself other than the ushers,” Hull recalled. “Everything was so pristine.”

Toward the end of the first period, Howe stepped over the blue line and snapped those thick wrists, and Leafs goaltender Al Rollins fished the puck out of the net behind him.

“Robert,” Hull’s father told him, “when you can shoot the puck like that, you can play in this league.”

After the game, Hull got Howe’s autograph on a pack of his father’s cigarettes.

* * * * *

Only eight years later, Hull was in the NHL. One night in his second season, he went to the penalty box with Howe, who opened the door for him. He thought Howe was a gentleman as they sat together.

“I knew as soon as the penalty was up why he let me in first,” Hull said. “Because when the door opened, he went out, and then he slammed the door on me. I knew then that he was all business.”

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Mark came home from middle school one day in the 1960s and found Marty at the kitchen table. The Red Wings had been struggling. A kid had been heckling Marty in school, telling him his dad stunk. Marty had punched the kid and gotten suspended.

When Gordie came home from practice, his wife gave him an earful.

“All that stuff you do,” Colleen said. “You see what you taught your kids?”

Colleen stormed upstairs. Gordie asked Marty what was going on. After Marty told him, Gordie looked around and made sure Colleen wasn’t within earshot. He had a couple of words for his son.

“Good job,” he said.

* * * * *

Gretzky met his idol in 1972, when he was an 11-year-old phenom in Brantford, Ontario. He wore a new suit his mother had bought him the day before. He went to see Howe at a hotel in the afternoon before a banquet that night.

A photographer from Gretzky’s hometown paper, the Brantford Expositor, asked for a picture. Howe took a stick and put the blade around Gretzky’s neck. The picture became a classic – one of the pictures Gretzky has been asked to autograph most often in the years since.

Athletes have good days and bad days. Sometimes kids meet their idols and walk away let down or disappointed. Not Gretzky.

“He was nicer and better and bigger when I met him than what I thought he was going to be,” Gretzky said. “For me, every time I look at the picture or sign the picture, it’s nothing but great memories.”

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Gordie came out of a two-year retirement at age 45 in 1973-74 to play with Mark and Marty with the WHA’s Houston Aeros. He had played with the Red Wings alumni. He had worked out in the summer. Still, he huffed and puffed so badly through the first few days of training camp, Mark and Marty pulled Colleen aside.

“We said, ‘We don’t think Dad’s going to be able to make it,’ ” Mark said. “He was turning 15 shades of purple. We thought he was going to have a heart attack.”

About a week later, Mark couldn’t keep up with his old man.

“I was 18 years of age, and I could skate as well as most anybody I knew at that time,” Mark said. “His endurance, to this day, it’s the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”

“The special part was seeing Gordie evolve from the different kinds of purple to all of a sudden bodies flying around him, going, ‘Oh, my god. Stay out of his way’,” Marty said. “He was just as bad in practice as the game. When he put those skates on, he was all business. He had certain rules, and you learned them pretty fast or you were getting stitches, and it didn’t matter if you were on his team or not or you were his son or not. I know I almost got scalped a couple times. Good thing I was fast.”

* * * * *

The Howes believed in puck possession long before the analytics era.

“We rarely if ever dumped the puck in,” said Mark, who played left wing on Gordie’s line in those days. “Dad did not enjoy it. I didn’t enjoy it. If you’ve got the puck, the theory is, keep it on your stick. The other team is not going to score.”

But there were times when they had to dump it in. Mark would get to the puck first and take a hit from an opponent.

“Maybe two seconds later, whoa, someone knocked the wind out of me,” Mark said. “I kept turning around, and every time, it was Dad hitting the guy who hit me. It’s pretty hard to speak up to your father, and it’s hard to speak up to your father when he’s Gordie Howe on the ice, too. So it took me about two, three weeks, and I finally went over. I said, ‘Dad, I can take a hit from just about anybody, but you’re killing me. Just wait two or three more seconds, let me get out of there and then come and do your dirty work’. ”

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The first time Gretzky played against Howe, it was 1978 in the WHA. He was with the Indianapolis Racers, Howe with the New England Whalers. In warm-up, he thought Howe was winking at him, wishing him luck.

“No, no,” one of Gretzky’s teammates told him. “He blinks a lot.”

Howe blinked so often that he was nicknamed “Blinky.” He was not wishing anyone luck.

Gretzky stole the puck from Howe in the first period. He was going the other way when – whack! – Howe hit him on the thumb with is stick and stole the puck back.

“Don’t ever take the puck from me,” Howe said.

“All right,” Gretzky said. “That’ll never happen again.”

* * * * *

Howe retired in 1980 at age 52, after returning to the NHL and putting up 15 goals and 41 points in 80 games with the Hartford Whalers. To put that in perspective, Brett Hull is 50 today.

“I retired when I was 42,” Hull said. “I couldn’t play anymore. There’s not a chance.”

Howe, a right winger most of his career, actually was a fourth-line center that season. Nick Fotiu scored a career-high 10 goals on his left wing. Fotiu had 50 goals total the rest of his 13-year NHL career.

“That’s how good Gordie Howe was,” Mark said.

* * * * *

“I wasn’t very smart in my career, because I played right wing,” Howe once told Gretzky. “I should have been a center.”

“Well, why is that?” said Gretzky, a center.

“Well, I learned playing center that the rink is about 20 feet shorter. You go to the top of the slot and the top of the slot in your zone. I could have played another 20 years.”

* * * * *

The 1982 All-Star Game was at the Capital Centre in Landover, Maryland. Gretzky, Howe, Chicago Blackhawks owner Bill Wirtz and NHL president John Ziegler had lunch with U.S. president Ronald Reagan at the White House.

Gretzky was 21. He was nervous. He looked at all the forks at the fancy place settings.

“Gordie, what fork do I grab?”

“I’m going to follow the president, and you follow me.”

* * * * *

Brett Hull played for the Red Wings from 2001-02 to ’03-04. He liked to get to the rink early, grab a coffee and talk hockey. Sometimes Howe would come into the dressing room.

“Fortunately enough for me because of my dad, I was able to understand who I was talking to and how special it was,” Hull said. “I wish … young players had a better grasp of what really paved the way for them, allowed them to have them playing now. It’s people and players like my dad and like Mr. Howe. The reason you’re here is because of what they did and how they pioneered the game.”

* * * * *

Kelly Chase was an undrafted 18-year-old from Porcupine Plain, Saskatchewan, and the Saskatoon Blades. He was at the airport in Toronto, headed from Saskatoon to Hartford for his first NHL training camp, when he saw Howe at the gate. He summoned the courage to approach Howe to say thank you for everything he had done for their hometown and hockey.

The flight was canceled. Chase went up to the gate agent to get a hotel voucher. She asked if he and Howe were together – and Howe told her they were. They went for a beer in the hotel lobby.

“You should make sure they know who you are out there,” Howe told Chase. “No scouts drafted you, so when they sit in those meetings, they’re not going to say, ‘That’s the kid we’re going to bat for’. ”

Long story short: Chase got in a fight. He got in another – and got pummeled and embarrassed. Thinking about what Howe had told him, he went to make up for it by smacking somebody with his stick. He showered. He went to the bus. He saw Howe.

“Kid,” Howe said, “they freaking know who you are.”

* * * * *

Howe followed Gretzky’s Los Angeles Kings while Gretzky chased Howe’s NHL scoring record in October 1989.

“What was really fortunate was, Wayne took his time breaking Gordie’s record,” said Marty McSorley, a King then. “We used to tease him that Gordie’s traveling more now following Wayne around than when he played. But it gave us as a team a great opportunity to know the man.”

McSorley was standing on the bench at a morning skate, watching the opposing team, when he got an elbow in the ribs. He looked to his right, and there was Howe, snickering.

“He loved to be around the guys,” McSorley said. “He loved to be in the locker room. He was one of us, but somebody that we put on such a pedestal. It was phenomenal. It was really great. It was almost like we were sad when Wayne eventually broke the record because we knew Gordie was going to go home.”

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