Mr. Hockey My Story (17 page)

I love you, Colleen

September 23, 1955

Hello darling—

Looks as though you fellows might be ushering between periods this season since the Olympia maintenance crew has voted to strike when their contract is up October 1st. They want 50 cents per hour more per shift. Wonder if they’ll get it.

. . . Sure sad because I missed your call tonight . . . Stevie [Carr] said I missed you by about 10 minutes. Darn it anyway. I love talking to you so much.

Received your two letters today and it’s so refreshing to know you miss and love me (and the boys) but mostly me. It’s sure tough to be alone when you’re in love. I should have a long discussion with J.A. [Jack Adams] some day about the importance of wives at Training Camp. That’s a good idea you and Marty have of having us meet you up north. Pretty sneaky, eh what?

. . . Carol [Carlin] called and wants me to go to dinner tomorrow evening with her and Pat. We called Jake too but you can tell Marty he’s got a real conservative wife ’cause she said the budget won’t allow her to go. Besides she’s tired of driving all over because everyone is on the west side and she’s so far away. I think I’ll go though, since I haven’t spent any money since you left and don’t want to break any records.

Am kind of anxious to meet some of the new wives this year. If the fellows are all nice, I’m sure the gals will be, too. It’ll be kind of nice to see some new faces.

Weeded out the garden today and have two huge brush piles to burn when you get home to help me. I don’t want to light it when I’m here alone. Also transplanted one of Stevie’s rose bushes on the fence on to our fence by the garage. Hope it takes because it’s such a pretty one. That Stevie is one of the best! Got down and weeded your patio, too. There were quite a few little weeds sneaking in there to give us some trouble next spring so I gave them the blade. That back corner will be a good place for swings next year. We can get a small load of sand for it so we won’t need a sandbox, either. By the way, I watered your grass that’s coming up where you tore up the old sandbox.

So you guys are going up to Edmonton now! Fine thing! You save those goals for season games, honey the —— with those exhibition deals. Those aren’t money-makers anyway.

. . . Before I close, honey, I want you to know that although I act kind of goofy sometimes, this gal is still as much or more in love with you as the first night we went out together—and that’s really a lot. Hurry home, dear.

My love, Colleen

(Colleen sent this during the first series of the Stanley Cup playoffs.)

[To Gordie Howe, c/o Red Wing Hockey Club, Hamilton, Ontario]

March 25, 1956

Dear honey, baby sugar doll—

I haven’t written you a letter in so long that I thought you might enjoy hearing from your lonely little wifey.

After you left on the bus, Teresa, Bev, Marlene, Irene, Bibs and I went to Harrison’s for a sandwich. Just living it up all the time! Then we all went home to our lonely individual abodes to think of our sweet husbands and to wish they were with us instead of being so far away.

. . . It was a riot this morning—you should have seen it. I got up with the little angels (?) and got them breakfast. Then your sleepy wife tried to grab a little catnap. I slept about 15 minutes and during that time, Marty opened all the jello and pudding packages and poured them all over Mark, who was sitting there eating all he could cram into his mouth. It took me over an hour to undo what took them a matter of minutes. Then they both went into the tub for a complete shampoo and bath. Wish we would have had some flashbulbs here so I could have taken a shot of the picture that stood before me when I poked my head into the kitchen. The three of us just looked at each other and laughed. (My laughter was a bit on the hysterical side.) All the joys of motherhood!

I don’t know how the weather is in Toronto, but right this minute Hal is shoveling eight inches of snow off your sidewalk. What a snow we’ve had today! I went out twice to knock some of the weight off the shrubs. There was so much snow on the branches, they were breaking and bending right to the ground. I’m going to the grocery store tomorrow on dogsled.

Well, dear, things here are pretty horrible without you. I’m really looking forward to going on our vacation together and as far as I’m concerned, it will be more than a second honeymoon, and much nicer than our first. No arguments! Maybe I can make it up to you for all the little bitching I do sometimes. Also maybe we can make up for some lost time on our love life (you’d go for that, eh?).

Anyway, I’ll be very happy to have you home, dear, because I love you more than you’ll ever know.

All my love, Colleen

P.S. What do you want for your birthday?

•   •   •

I
n that era, NHL clubs didn’t give much consideration to a player’s home life. For Jack Adams, especially, wives and winning just didn’t mix. During the playoffs, he was so fixated on eliminating any distractions that our wives became temporary widows. For home playoff games, the club would pack us off to Toledo, which is about an hour’s drive from Detroit. We’d stay cloistered there until shortly before game time, when we’d climb on a bus and head straight to the Olympia. Afterward we’d have a few minutes to sign autographs and, if we were lucky, say a quick hello to our wives before being hurried back on board the waiting bus. Colleen despised the arrangement. Why, she wondered, did we have to live like monks during the playoffs when we won games all year long while staying at home? It was a fair point. A good playoff run
could stretch on for six weeks, which meant I’d practically have to reintroduce myself to our kids when I got home.

One year, when we opened the playoffs against Toronto, Colleen crafted a plan to deke out Mr. Adams. The club was keeping us stashed in a motel in Hamilton, which happened to be near some friends of ours, Ed and Agnes Taube. They invited Colleen and Pat Lindsay to visit. With some help from the Taubes, the wives booked themselves into a motel not far from ours. After the game, Ted and I managed to sneak away and rendezvous with our sweethearts. If Mr. Adams had caught us, we would have been in hot water, but it was worth the risk. Colleen got a real kick out of the whole illicit undertaking. She felt like we were a couple of teenagers running around behind our parents’ backs. When we all left the next morning, I’m pretty sure the desk clerk recognized the pair of Red Wings skulking through the lobby. He probably assumed there was some hanky-panky going on. I think it would have disappointed him to learn that everything was so aboveboard. As we walked out, I leaned over to Colleen and whispered, “If you ever get an anonymous letter about my sleeping with some girl in a Hamilton hotel, you’ll know it was you.”

•   •   •

I
n the off-season before the start of the 1954–55 season, the team saw the beginning of changes that would affect us for years to come. In those days, the NHL, still largely unregulated, had arrangements that wouldn’t fly today. Among them, the owners had a gentlemen’s agreement to help bolster the lineups of the league’s bottom feeders. It had cost us Sid Abel two years earlier and this time around we lost our coach, who became Chicago’s new general manager. To make matters worse, not only did we lose Tommy
Ivan, but Metro Prystai was sent out the door along with him. To take over behind the bench, Mr. Adams called up Jimmy Skinner, who’d played under Tommy in Omaha before moving into Detroit’s farm system as a coach, making stops in Windsor and Hamilton. I never thought Jimmy’s understanding of the game was close to what Tommy brought to the table. It wasn’t just Xs and Os, either. Tommy had also worked hard to insulate his players from the mood swings of their general manager. We lost that buffer once he left. From the start, we could tell that Jimmy Skinner was no Tommy Ivan. If a choice needed to be made between his players and his general manager, he was definitely going to be his boss’s man in the dressing room.

The 1954–55 season is probably remembered better for what happened off the ice than on it. Hockey fans know all about the Richard Riot that broke out in Montreal, but they may not recall all of the events that led up to it. The roots of that crazy night can be traced back earlier in the season, to a game that had nothing to do with the Canadiens. We were playing in Maple Leaf Gardens when somehow I became mixed up with a fan who decided to lunge over the boards and take a swing at me. Ted, being Ted, wasn’t about to let anybody—fan or otherwise—touch his linemate, so he skated over and cracked the guy with his stick. The league didn’t like seeing a player hit a paying customer and suspended Ted for ten days, which cost him four games. As much as we didn’t like the decision, the team moved past it in the best way we knew how and just kept piling up wins. By mid-March we found ourselves in a tight battle with Montreal for top spot in the standings. Finishing first would give us home-ice advantage in the playoffs, which is something we desperately wanted, given how well Montreal played at the Forum and how good we were at the Olympia.

With only a few games left in the regular season, the Canadiens made a fateful trip to Boston. During a game against the Bruins, the Rocket got into it with Hal Laycoe. After exchanging some pleasantries, Laycoe split open the Rocket’s head with his stick. By all accounts, Maurice went a little nuts after that. He started chopping at Laycoe with his stick and Hal fought back with his own. A linesman managed to grab hold of the Rocket, but when he did, Laycoe took that as an opportunity to land a few free shots. Doug Harvey pulled the linesman off his teammate and that’s when things really went downhill. Richard turned around and slugged the linesman, which, of course, is a serious no-no. Big star or not, the league threw the book at the Rocket. Detroit’s management was especially adamant that the punishment fit the crime. Since Ted Lindsay had received a ten-day suspension for hitting a fan, Mr. Adams argued that the sanctions against Montreal’s right winger needed to be even more punitive. It was hardly Richard’s first offense. Earlier in the season, he’d cuffed a linesman, but come away with only a slap on the wrist. League president Clarence Campbell decided to send a message and suspended the Rocket for the final three games of the regular season and all of the playoffs. Around the league, players were stunned. Meanwhile, fans in Montreal weren’t just shocked, they were angry.

The suspension came down on St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, 1955. That same night, we were in Montreal to play the Habs. We were tied in the standings and both teams had been looking forward to this showdown for weeks. None of us could have guessed that the Rocket would be wearing street clothes. During warm-ups, the fans at the Forum seemed restless. Their agitation wasn’t helped when we jumped out to a quick 4–1 lead. During the first period intermission, a fan approached league president Clarence Campbell
with his hand outstretched as if to say hello. When Campbell went to shake it, the guy slapped him across the face. Someone punched the slapper and that’s when all hell broke loose. A canister of tear gas was set off, which cleared the stands. Thousands of angry fans poured out of the Forum and into the streets, and the elegant city of Montreal had itself a proper riot—broken windows, overturned cars, gunfire, the whole nine yards. Of course, I heard about all of this secondhand. When the tear gas went off we were in our dressing room, busily stuffing wet towels under the door to keep out the smoke. A note was passed into the room telling us that the game was being forfeited and we’d get the win. We didn’t ask any questions; we just dressed and got the hell out of town as quickly as possible. After all of that, the rest of the season felt like a formality. Our final game of the year was against the Canadiens at the Olympia. Back on home ice, we pounded them 6–0, which put us 2 points ahead of them in the standings. With that, we not only locked up our seventh straight league championship but also secured home-ice advantage throughout the playoffs.

In the semifinal round we swept Toronto in four games and Montreal took care of Boston in five. For the second year in a row we were facing off against the Canadiens for the Stanley Cup, and once again it was a series that would go seven games. This time around, however, they wouldn’t have the Rocket. I like to think the result would have been the same whether he’d played or not. I’m equally sure that Montreal die-hards would tell me I’m wrong. If I had my way, we’d be able to find out, but in reality it’s just one of those things in sports that we won’t ever be able to know. At home at the Olympia for game seven, in front of a packed house of screaming fans, we ended up beating our rivals by a score of 3–1. The home-ice advantage we’d worked to secure all year long turned
out to be crucial. Every game in that series was won by the home team. The victory marked our second consecutive Stanley Cup and our fourth in the last six years. We couldn’t have been riding any higher, and we were already starting to think about our chances for three in a row. As it turned out, that idea turned out to be far too premature. Whoever said that you should treasure the moment, because no one knows what tomorrow will bring, knew a lot about life. I didn’t know it at the time, but the 1955 Stanley Cup would be my last. Trader Jack was about to make some changes that put the organization into a hole so deep we couldn’t find our way out of
it.

Eight

L
IFE
IN
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NHL