Mr. Hockey My Story (5 page)

My memories are filled with people who went out of their way to help me, when the most they could possibly have expected in return was a thank-you. All these years later, I’m still grateful.

Growing up during the Depression we didn’t have much, but we had each other, we had our friends, and that was pretty much all we needed. I was aware that some people had more, but those
who did, shared. Folks shared a lot back then. It was a different time. People cared about their neighbors and looked out for one another. If somebody needed help, they got it, and if you could give it, you did.

Kids today probably can’t imagine what it’s like to grow up with so little, but I don’t think about it as not having had a lot of stuff. We had everything we needed. I look back on my childhood and I feel
lucky.

Two

G
ROWING
U
P
IN
S
ASKATOON

M
y dad bought our first radio when I was six or seven. Before it arrived in our house we used to go over to a friend’s to listen to our favorite shows. When we got our own, it became something like the family hearth. We spent hours staring at that radio, and I can still picture it clearly. It was only about eighteen inches tall, brown wood, rounded at the top with three small knobs at the bottom. It was just a little box, but it opened up our whole world.

I can still hear Foster Hewitt’s voice coming into our home on a Saturday night. We’d tune in to hear him say, “Hello, Canada, and hockey fans in the United States and Newfoundland,” and it was as if we were rinkside at a game thousands of miles away. As an announcer, Hewitt was so talented that we didn’t need a television to picture what was happening on the ice. He made the game come alive in your imagination.

Back then, it seemed like everyone listened to hockey games on the radio. As I got older, when Hewitt would deliver his trademark “He shoots, he scores!” I’d imagine he was calling a goal scored by Gordie Howe. Kids all over the country probably had the same dream. Sometimes I shake my head at the fact that mine actually came true.

One of the most satisfying things about getting an NHL paycheck was having the wherewithal to make things easier for Mum. When we were growing up, she didn’t have any of the things that most of us now can’t imagine living without. No plumbing. No iron. No range. Not that it occurred to anyone—and certainly not to my mother—to complain. She was such a soft-spoken, thoughtful woman, yet tough at the same time. She never complained about a thing. I don’t think it ever occurred to her that she had it hard, despite the fact that she spent hours doing chores that would take only a few minutes today.

When my brother Vern went away to serve in World War II, his wife, Amelia, moved in with us. I remember sitting with her and going through Eaton’s catalogs, picking out different things I would buy for Mum when I made it to the big leagues. For someone who was barely a teenager, I could really run up a bill providing her with washing machines and refrigerators. I think it’s one explanation for why I practiced as hard as I did. The main reason was always just love of the game, but as I got older the idea of playing professional hockey started to become less of a childhood fantasy and more of a real possibility.

By the time I was ten or eleven I was playing as much organized hockey as I could. I think that five was the most teams I ever played for at one time. I attended King George School and played on our school team. Then there was a mercantile league that local
businesspeople put together. I played with my local Peewee team and then Bantam hockey as I got older. I played on a church team and also on one for pick-up games. I’d just change sweaters and go from one game to the next. For a kid who loved to play, it didn’t get any better than that.

Playing sports now seems so much more specialized. Everything is structured. If you play hockey, that doesn’t leave much time for anything else. Hockey was definitely my sport of choice, but I played whatever sport was in season. Athletically, I think it was good for me. The balance, speed, strength, and agility I developed playing different sports all contributed to what I could do on the ice. These days they call it cross-training, or at least they used to. There might be another name for it now. When we were kids, we just called it playing.

Most hockey fans, if they think about it, probably see me coming down the right wing. That’s where I played in Detroit, but it didn’t start out that way. Way back when, I actually began playing in net. In fact, I was in net for the first truly big game I ever played.

I was around thirteen at the time and I was between the pipes for our school team, King George, which won the championship. The way things worked back then, two players from each school were selected to play in an all-star game. It was a big honor to be chosen and I was proud to represent our school. The game pitted Saskatoon’s East and West school districts against each other and it seemed like everyone in the city had a rooting interest. The rink held about four thousand people and it was packed—standing room only. The men, of course, all wore hats and the women wore gloves. In those days, when you went for an evening out, you dressed for it.

I remember the crowd well, because I had a great view from the bench. As happy as I was to make the team, I was pretty
disappointed that a goalie from a different school was picked to start. When the puck dropped, there I was on the bench, excited to be there but unable to do much to help my team. As it turned out, things didn’t go so well for the first-stringer. The other team scored 3 goals in about the first five minutes. We were already nervous playing in front of such a big crowd and suddenly we were down by 3 quick goals. Our coach gave the goalie the hook, and in I went. The boys showed a lot of heart that night. We steadied the ship and won the game by a final score of 6–4.

The coach of my school team at King George, Mr. Trickey, was also our vice principal. Not only was he my coach but also he was a big part of the reason I finally started to enjoy school. He really took an interest in me as a student. We’d go over problems and he’d help me out with whatever I needed. It’s amazing what a good teacher can do for a kid. As good as he was to me, though, he did get one thing pretty wrong.

When I was playing goal for King George, I’d ask Mr. Trickey if I could play out sometimes, rather than stay in net. His answer? He thought it was in everyone’s best interests for me to stay in net. In fact, he told me that playing goalie would be the only way I’d get out of Saskatoon as a hockey player. We both ended up being happy that he was wrong. For some twenty years after I made it to the NHL, I’d send him letters to remind him of that. We actually became pretty close friends as adults and always made a point of getting together when I came back to town.

I don’t think anybody achieves much without the Robert Trickeys of the world. Growing up, we were lucky that Saskatoon was full of good people who spent a lot of time looking out for the local kids. I played in all sorts of leagues and they all had coaches, referees, and other volunteers who made it possible for kids to play
organized sports. At the King George Athletic Club I couldn’t guess how many kids benefited from the hard work of people like Buck and Doris Crawford and Bert and Frances Hodges. As it turned out, quite a few of us made it from Saskatchewan to the NHL. It wouldn’t have happened without folks like them, but there was more to it than just getting a few players to the big leagues. They made the lives of a lot of kids, including me, just a bit better. To me, that feels like something special.

The community looked out for us in ways both big and small. There was a system in Saskatoon to make sure we deserved our ice time. We didn’t just show up at the rink to play. You had to prove that you had been behaving yourself, by collecting signatures from people who would attest to the fact that you hadn’t been up to mischief. Before you could get on the ice, you needed to get your permission paper signed by a parent, one of your teachers, and someone from the church. I guess it was a way to instill some discipline in us and make sure we toed the line. If getting into trouble meant you couldn’t play, you were pretty likely to keep your nose clean.

Naturally, we still knew ways to work the system. Sometimes we’d go to services at the Salvation Army hall and get the people there to sign, which counted as a church signature. They were pretty good to us. In the middle of a service they’d even stop to announce that there were four young men who were due on the ice very shortly. We’d get up, smile thankfully at the people who were letting us out of the pews, and hustle our way down to the rink.

As it turned out, being a goalie did more for me as a hockey player than I could have realized. Over my career I was fortunate enough to put the puck in the net more than my fair share. One of the skills that helped me score some of those goals was the ability to shoot the puck with both hands. You don’t see that much anymore.
I’ve heard people say that I’m naturally ambidextrous, but that’s not exactly true.

The reason I could shoot from both the right side and the left side goes back to playing goalie as a kid. As you can imagine, proper goaltender equipment was expensive and pretty tough to come by. When I was scuffling around for gear, the only thing I could find for a catching glove was a first-baseman’s mitt that went on my left hand. If I was a left-handed shot that would have been fine, but I shot right—and there is no way you can shoot right with a catcher’s mitt on your left hand. Since the glove was dictating the terms, I didn’t have much choice. I learned to shoot the puck as a goalie, clearing it up the ice and steering it into the corners, from the left side. When I played out as a defenseman or forward, I would flip back to shooting from the right side. That’s how I developed a shot from both sides, but for a long time I didn’t realize I was switching hands. I just shot whichever way I thought had the best chance of putting the puck in the net.

It wasn’t until my first training camp with the Red Wings, when I was sixteen, that I found out I was doing something out of the ordinary. I went in on one of the goalies during a practice, switched hands, and scored. Jack Adams, the coach at the time, was watching. He called me over with a gruff “What are you doing?”

“What’s that, sir?” I asked.

He stuck his chin out toward the goalie and said, “You shoot both ways.”

I hadn’t ever thought about it, so I asked, “I do?” I had no idea. After growing up playing every position on the ice, it just seemed natural.

My early experience in net helped my career in other ways, as well. Spending time between the pipes didn’t just teach me how to
shoot the puck. It taught me
where
to shoot it. When you’re in net you see the ice—and more importantly the puck—from an entirely different perspective than you do as a skater. I used to think of the puck as having eyes. What it sees is totally different than what you see as a shooter. When you’re coming in on net, the goalie doesn’t see you as much as you might think he does. What he sees is the puck. Since the goalie is focused on the puck, as a shooter it only makes sense to think about things from the puck’s point of view. I envisioned the net and the goaltender from the puck’s perspective on the ice, instead of from what my eyes saw six feet higher up. I didn’t have to beat the goalie after all. That’s the puck’s job. Knowing what I saw as a goalie helped me understand where the puck needed to be to score. Any player who’s ever suffered through a cold spell knows that when you’re in a slump, all you see is the goalie. His pads and blocker seem to take up the whole net. But when you’re hot, it’s like he’s not even there. All you see is the mesh behind him. I visualized the puck seeing those empty spaces around the goalie and finding itself in the back of the net.

In any case, as much as I liked playing goalie, I’m glad I never had to go between the pipes in the NHL, particularly back when I started and goalies didn’t wear masks. As a kid, sometimes I’d stand under a lamppost at night and let the guys on the team take shots at me to practice. I didn’t have a mask or a jock at the time. That meant I had to be fast,
very
fast, especially on shots below the waist.

•   •   •

W
e were lucky to play as much hockey as we did, but we certainly did more than just play sports. As far back as I can recall, my brothers and sisters and I were always working at
something, whether it was chores or part-time jobs when we weren’t in school.

We didn’t have running water; no one in our neighborhood did. The streets in Saskatoon are laid out according to the alphabet, and in those days, streets from L Street down weren’t serviced by a water main, and that included us. The city kept a tap on every other block, and it was up to each household to carry water home from there. We had a forty-five-gallon drum at our house to store water. In summer it sat outside on the porch, and in the winter we moved it inside to keep the water from freezing. Winter or summer, though, that drum always seemed to need filling. And that job fell to the kids.

The trouble was, there was no way we could lift a full drum, never mind carry it. At best, we could maybe fill it halfway before we packed it back to the house. To top it up, there was no way around it: We had to haul pails of water. It was uphill-going for about half a city block. We were also on sandy soil, so your feet would sink a little. Trudging back from that tap with those heavy pails wasn’t fun, but it actually turned out to be pretty good training for my legs. I’ve often thought that lugging those pails made me stronger on my skates.

Having to carry water uphill made it something too precious to see wasted, and I kept a close eye on that drum. Occasionally Dad would dip a pail in to water the garden. We had an acre in the backyard that we planted every year. The vegetables we grew meant a lot to the family. What we didn’t eat, we’d end up taking door-to-door to sell. Still, seeing water from that drum get dumped on the ground drove me crazy.