Tuesday, June 21, 2016
Gordie and Red Kelly
From the pen of Roy McGregor, related in The
Globe and Mail.
When Red Kelly left the Wings to play in Toronto
Early in the game, a puck was dumped into the
Leafs end. Kelly took off after it. As he neared the corner, he felt someone
closing in on him fast. He slowed. It was Howe.
“He slipped an arm around my waist, like a
lover,” Kelly recalled, beautifully.
Howe leaned in – and here Kelly leaned in as
well, to demonstrate the intimacy of the gesture – and whispered, “Hey, Red.
How’s the wife?”
Kelly turned to answer …
“And that’s when Gordie knocked me out.”
Kelly told this story in the living room of
his Forest Hill home 40 years after the fact. It was his favourite Maple Leaf Gardens
Kelly shone throughout the telling of it. He
was trying to convey something elemental about Howe – his duality, and a great
part of what made him special.
Off the ice, he was a gentle soul. On it, he
was on a seek-and-destroy mission. His targeting apparatus did not recognize
faces, only enemy colours.
Howe typified a brand of hockey that’s long
since disappeared – brutal, but not vicious; vengeful, and never contrived.
He was the last great link with what most of
us still romanticize as the authentic game. A game played by farmers, factory
workers and car salesmen, back when hockey was a job, and not yet a vocation.
It was a game in which civic borders were more
than a liminal space. They were absolute, uncrossable boundaries. You did not
just play against men from Chicago Montreal New York
Back in the 1950s and 1960s, clubs travelled
together via train between a home-and-home. One team would have to walk through
the other to get to the dining car. Those were genuinely fraught moments. A
cross word here could ignite a years-long vendetta.
They were hard men, and none harder than Howe.
He wasn’t especially big – six-feet tall, a little over 200 pounds. But his
hands hung at the end of his arms like wrecking balls. His torso was
cantilevered forward like some sort of industrial machine. He was built to
ruin.
Despite his reputation as one of the top
pugilists in the history of the game, he averaged less than a fight a year
during his career.
The legend was based largely on one bloodbath
in 1959 with Rangers enforcer Lou Fontinato. The Rangers goaded Howe into high
dudgeon. He needed to be shown the cape before the red mist would descend.
Sometimes Howe’s personal Iago, Ted Lindsay, supplied it on the bench;
sometimes an opponent was foolish enough to bait him on the ice.
Fontinato landed the first few blows. Howe
shrugged them off. Then he took hold of Fontinato and collapsed his face,
breaking his cheekbone, his nose, splitting both lips. The day-after pictures
remain some of the most gruesome in sport.
Howe fought even more rarely after that.
Everyone had seen the photos. He didn’t need to fight
any more. And since Howe took no particular pleasure in beating people up, he
stopped.
He continued abusing people with the rest of
his body, and at speed. Which was probably worse. He continued to pile up
points with such marvelous dependability, it tended to obscure his excellence.
If Howe hadn’t been quite so metronomic over
so many years, we’d probably talk more about his skill. Quiet efficiency
doesn’t rate on the heat scale.
Fifty years on, what we remember about Howe is
his soft sense of menace. He was a ruthless player. Dirty, even. But never
thought of with malice.
That would be impossible now. We’re too binary
– people are good or bad, never nuanced. We have slo-mo replays. We’d be going
over the Fontinato fight trying to pick out the moment when Howe should have
stopped swinging.
Imagine all the shots Howe delivered with
those swinging elbows. He would occasionally pin a man against the boards with
his hip and ride him the length of the ice, knocking his head back and forth like
a flesh piñata. He was a terror.
But thankfully, there is no video. So instead,
we get to remember Howe gauzily. Like the time in which he played.
Red Kelly, 2015 Christmas, going over his list.
Maybe he didn’t always do what we’d consider
the right thing, but he damn well did it for the right reasons. He stuck up for
himself and his teammates. He gave no quarter. He waited until you asked for
it, and then he gave you a lot more than you’d anticipated.
He’s gone now, but he’d long ago become a
feature of our imaginations. Howe’s name summons up a game we’d no longer
recognize and an idyllic, illusory vision of the sea-to-sea-to-sea.
What he represents now is Canada
He is an idealized vision of ourselves –
tough, decent and uncompromising.
Gordie Howe didn’t enjoy fighting, but he’d
happily go to war at the right time.
On some very basic level, that’s how we’d all
like to define ourselves
# posted by James Hurst @ 8:31 AM 
