Mr. Hockey My Story (23 page)

While the endorsement deals and our other business interests helped our family’s bottom line, my main source of income was always hockey. Even after Jack Adams left, the club continued to assure me that I was among the highest-paid players in the game. It took until the late 1960s before I found out otherwise. By that time, not only was my body starting to fray around the edges but my relationship with the Wings was showing some wear and tear as well.

The credit for opening my eyes to what was happening around the league belongs to Bobby Baun. He’s best remembered as a
Maple Leaf, but when Toronto didn’t protect him ahead of the 1967 expansion draft he was selected by the Oakland Seals and spent a miserable year playing on the west coast. After finishing dead last overall, Oakland accommodated Bobby’s trade request and dealt him to Detroit before the 1968–69 season. As it happened, Bobby was one of the first presidents of the new NHL Players’ Association that started in the late 1960s. He was also one of the few players to flout the owners’ rules about sharing details of his salary. His straight talk with players on every team gave him a good idea of what everyone was making and what we were worth.

In those years, Detroit held its training camp in Port Huron. We were out for dinner one night when Bobby looked over and called me a stupid SOB. I told him I had reasons enough of my own to agree with that statement, but I wanted to know his. He told me I’d been undervaluing my services for years. Even
his
salary, he said, was bigger than mine. I didn’t think he knew what he was talking about, so I asked him how much he thought I was making. My salary was around $45,000 at the time and he pegged it nearly exactly. Not only were other guys in the league making more money than me, but I wasn’t even the highest-paid player on my own team. I later found out that Carl Brewer, another of our defensemen, had also signed a much bigger deal than mine. That made me steaming mad. Clearly, this had been going on for years, meaning I’d left Lord only knows how much money on the table. I talked to Bruce Norris and asked that my salary be raised to $100,000. When he agreed to it straightaway, I immediately knew that everything Bobby was telling me was on the mark. In retrospect, I should have asked for $150,000. I don’t like to think about how much my family lost out on over the years because of the trust I put in management. It was more than just the money, however; I felt betrayed. The team
liked to talk about how the organization was like a family, but in that moment it sure didn’t feel like it.

As the 1960s were coming to a close, the Red Wings were struggling through a series of tough seasons. After losing to the Canadiens in the Stanley Cup finals in 1966, we hit a drought that would have been unthinkable during the glory years of the 1950s. In the five seasons between 1966 and 1971, we only made the playoffs once, in 1970. Even that was a short trip, with Chicago sweeping us in the quarterfinals. The next season we were back in the gutter, managing a paltry 22 wins and 11 ties. Our seventh-place finish once again put us out of the playoffs.

At forty-three years old, I was starting to feel my age on the ice for the first time in my life. My injuries were taking longer to heal and my legs didn’t have their usual jump. In twenty-five years with the Red Wings, hardly a day had gone by that I hadn’t looked forward to coming to the arena. That season, the fire that I had always taken for granted started to burn lower. By then, my time in the league had been a long haul any way you wanted to slice it. In the 1950s, I’d missed a total of twelve games due to injury, six in 1954–55 and another six in 1957–58. I’d missed even fewer games in the 1960s. My body had seen a lot of hockey over two decades in the NHL and it was starting to talk to me pretty loudly. Even carrying my stick was becoming tough, due to the chronic arthritis in my wrists. I had surgery to clean up some bone fragments, but it only helped so much. The 1970–71 season counts among the worst of my career. I lost ten games to a rib injury and was hampered by one injury or another for the rest of the year. I just couldn’t seem to get on track. I ended up with 23 goals and 29 assists for 52 points, my lowest total since my injury-shortened season in 1948–49.

By the time the off-season came around, retirement had become a serious consideration. When Guy Lafleur hung up his skates in the 1980s, I remember talking to him about a comeback. I advised him not to quit as long as he had some music left in him. If he knew he was done, then fine, but if he had any doubts he owed it to himself to get back on the ice. Well, in 1971, I was having a hard time hearing the music. The organization was in shambles, the team was losing, and our prospects for the next season weren’t looking any better. A few years earlier I would have had a lot to say about that, but injuries and age had me wondering how much I could still help the club. According to Colleen, if my performance was up to my own standards and I thought I was still doing right by the fans, then I should keep playing. She just didn’t want to see me suffer through another year of being disappointed in myself. Hockey was all I’d ever wanted to do and all I’d ever known, but when I looked at myself in the mirror that summer, I realized it might be time for a change. After several long months of deliberation, I announced my retirement in early September. It was a difficult moment. For the first time in a quarter-century, when the puck dropped to start the next season, I wouldn’t be a part of it.

Eleven

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EADING
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OUSTON

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obody teaches an athlete how to retire. I wish I could say that adjusting to civilian life was easy, but it wasn’t. Every job comes with its own rhythms—when you wake up, what you eat, where you go to work, who you see there—and the NHL is no different. For twenty-five years, my life was regulated by the changing seasons. Training camp in the fall became the regular season during the winter, which melted into springtime and the playoffs. A summer of family and rest followed (with a lake nearby if we were lucky). As the 1971–72 NHL season began, all sorts of changes were coming my way, but at the very least I still had hockey in my life. The Red Wings had assured me I’d always have a job with the club and they made good on those promises, announcing after my retirement that I’d joined the front office. There was also talk of learning the insurance game and stepping into an executive
role at one of the Norris family’s companies. It was a new world, but it seemed promising. At forty-three, I was old for a hockey player, but I figured I was just entering my prime by most other standards. I planned to treat my new job the same as I had my old one. I might have traded skates and shoulder pads for a shirt and tie, but when I stepped into the Olympia I was still ready to put in a hard day’s work. Unfortunately, not everyone got the memo.

After our early discussions about the job, I came away assuming I’d have a role in shaping the on-ice product. It only made sense, given my knowledge of the game and my experience with the team, but it didn’t turn out to be the case. The Red Wings, it seemed, didn’t know what to do with me. Instead of involving me in team decisions, they parked me in a tiny office and dusted me off only when it was time to make a public appearance. Officially, I was eventually given the title of vice president of public relations. In practice, I was more like vice president of an empty desk. The team was paying me $50,000 a year to sit around. For someone who’d been working since he was a kid, it was the first time in my life I didn’t feel like I was earning my paycheck. As much as I tried to change things, it felt like the club only wanted me around as a hood ornament. It wasn’t a good feeling.

My duties were largely limited to representing the Red Wings at banquets and functions. I don’t mind eating a rubber-chicken dinner every now and then, but I knew I had more to offer. However, my attempts to get something going often led to a promise that someone would get back to me in a couple of days. Of course, when the time came, nothing ever materialized. In hindsight, the writing on the wall was pretty clear. The club didn’t have a real place for me and neither did anyone in the insurance business. Regardless of the lip service, no one on either side was interested in taking the
time to carve out a space for me. One time, I went to a banquet in suburban Detroit, where I was told I’d be joining other members of the club. I arrived to a packed house but found myself alone at a ten-person table designated for the Red Wings. I waited around for a while, until it became clear that no one else was going to show. I was about to leave when one of the organizers stopped me and said I was getting an award that night. The team hadn’t even bothered to let me know that I was one of the guests of honor. The poor guy had to round up eight other people to sit at the table with me. On the drive home, I thought about how the lack of consideration was pretty typical of my new job. (At one of those banquets, in Brantford, I did get the chance to meet an eleven-year-old Wayne Gretzky. He was just a skinny little guy with a big smile, but he was already a phenom. We bonded right away. Little did I know that a few years later I’d be looking up at him in the record books.)

It was a frustrating time made all the worse by a tremendous personal loss that my family had just suffered. The summer before, as I was contemplating my retirement, my mother passed away after falling at our cabin in northern Michigan. Colleen and I were at an event in Toronto when it happened. We’d left the kids with Mum and Dad at the cabin for a few days. My mother was a kind, generous, warmhearted person, and I loved her dearly. I still miss her to this day. I announced my retirement a few weeks later.

As much as I would have liked to throw myself into something as a distraction, my new career didn’t turn out to be the thing. I don’t doubt that the club had good intentions, at least in the beginning. Bruce Norris definitely seemed to want me to be part of the organization, but his people were another matter. If someone doesn’t consider you essential, they’ll find ways to put you on the sidelines. I call it the mushroom treatment. You’re kept in the dark
and every now and then they come in and throw a little manure on you. The office they stuck me in told the whole story. It was so shabby that the club moved me to better digs when it needed to take a promotional picture. When I showed up in front-office shots, Colleen and I would always laugh because the pictures in the background were of someone else’s family.

•   •   •

W
ith so much time on my hands, I started thinking about an old dream I had of staying in the game long enough to play with my kids. I’d had a little taste of it during a charity match in my final year with the Red Wings, and I’d loved how good it made me feel. Years earlier, Colleen had become involved with the Junior Red Wings program, a successful junior rep team that played out of the Olympia. In 1971, Marty, at sixteen, and Mark, at fifteen, were both playing for the squad when Colleen organized a fund-raiser for the March of Dimes that pitted the junior team against the parent club. I suited up for the young guys along with my older brother Vern, who’d played a few games for the Rangers in the 1950s. The Olympia was packed and the fans were having a great time. It was a real Howe family affair. With the score tied 10–10, we even got Murray into the action. He was only about ten years old at the time, but he was already a good little player. We cut a deal with the opposing goalie and, with about five seconds left in the game, Murray walked in and scored. The crowd loved it. My favorite part of the night was hearing the announcer tell the crowd that the goal had been scored by “Howe from Howe and Howe.” I thought it would be the only time I’d get the chance to hear that line uttered. I couldn’t know how wrong I’d turn out to be.

By 1972–73, Marty and Mark had both moved on from the Junior Red Wings to play for the Toronto Marlboros of the Ontario Hockey League. Marty had arrived there a year earlier and was excited for his brother to join him. At that point, both of my sons were considered solid prospects. Mark was even picked to play on the U.S. Olympic team that won a silver medal in the 1972 Winter Games in Sapporo, Japan. At sixteen, I think he’s still the youngest player to ever win an Olympic medal in hockey. The following year, he was named MVP of the Memorial Cup when he and Marty helped lead the Marlies to Canada’s junior hockey national championship. I felt proud that both of my sons appeared to have a legitimate future in professional hockey. The rules at the time, though, meant they’d have to wait. The NHL didn’t allow junior players to be drafted until after they turned twenty. That meant Marty would have to spend one more year in Toronto before he could be drafted and Mark would have to wait another two. At that point, fate intervened in a way we hadn’t expected.

Colleen and I, dressed to the nines, were on our way out the door to an art auction to benefit the Arthritis Foundation when the phone rang. When I picked it up, Doug Harvey, of all people, was on the other end of the line. My old adversary from the Montreal Canadiens was now an assistant coach with the Houston Aeros, a new team in the World Hockey Association, an upstart league that was becoming a big thorn in the side of the NHL. Doug told me the Aeros were getting ready to walk into the WHA meetings and draft Mark with their first-round pick. He wanted to give me a heads-up, because when it happened he knew all hell would break loose and the press was sure to be calling. Not long after that, Bill Dineen, the head coach of the Aeros and a former teammate in Detroit, stood
up and said, “Houston drafts Mark Howe,” a sentence that sent a shock wave through the entire hockey world.

Mark was still only eighteen, and the other teams in the WHA had assumed that their league would abide by the same rules as the NHL. Houston was ready to gamble that an age restriction was illegal and wouldn’t hold up against a court challenge. I suspect the other teams were upset only because they hadn’t thought of it first. It was a bold stroke by the Aeros, and perfectly in line with the spirit of the league. When the WHA started in 1972–73, it was the first direct competitor the NHL had seen in decades. It was born out of the idea that North America’s appetite for hockey had room for more than just the NHL. The twelve-team WHA included cities without an NHL franchise, such as Winnipeg, Ottawa, and Cleveland, as well as bigger centers with populations that could support multiple teams, such as New York and Los Angeles.