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Catching Up With . . .
Howie Young, Red Wings defenseman
January 28, 1963
Posted: Tue June 9, 1998
Howie young's
ferocity toward his fellow man led to standing ovations in
Detroit and suspensions by his team and the NHL office.
"My job," he once said, "is to get my
shoulder into somebody." While patrolling the blue
line for the Red Wings in the early 1960s, Young
would hurl himself at opposing forwards like a human
tsunami. His crunching checks and seat-of-the-pants style
helped spark Detroit to the Stanley Cup finals in 1961. Two
seasons later he shattered the
league mark for penalty minutes, with 273 in just 64
games.
The smiling visage that graced SI's cover, however, belied
a tortured soul. Young says he drank nearly every day for
12 years, until he bottomed out at 27. Indeed, he was hung
over when he posed for SI after a morning practice.
"On the bench
I would
say, 'Please God, just get me through this
game,'" says Young, now 60. "Then it was, 'Hey, God,
just get me through this period.' Finally, it was, 'God,
just get me through this
shift.'"
The Red Wings finally gave up on Young and dealt him to the
Chicago Blackhawks in 1963. Later that season he was exiled
to a minor league team in Los Angeles, where he began to
act, appearing as a marine in the 1965 Frank Sinatra movie
None but the
Brave. His descent reached its nadir, however, on a May evening
in '65, when a besotted Young was hauled off by police
after breaking into his own apartment. That night, alone in
a four-by-six-foot jail cell, he vowed to get off the
sauce. Two days later he joined Alcoholics Anonymous, and
he says he has been sober since.
Young returned to the Red Wings in 1966, and over the next
nine years suited up for nine teams in five leagues. After
that he drifted, washing dishes in Oklahoma, digging
ditches in Phoenix and making a brief comeback, at 48, for
a minor league team in
New York City. Five years ago Young finally found a home in
Thoreau, N.Mex., a predominantly Navajo community two hours
west of Albuquerque. There he and his third wife, China,
share a two-acre ranch with nine cats, two geese and a
quarter horse named
Big Red. Hockey's
former enfant terrible is now a mild-mannered bus driver for the
McKinley County public schools.
For two years Young has been drumming up funds to build a
rink for the community. His dream is to nurture the NHL's
first Navajo player. "These kids are such natural
athletes," he says. "All I've got to do is bring the ice, and
they'll do the rest."
—by Richard
Deitsch
photo: Chip Simons; John G. Zimmerman (cover)
Issue date: June 15, 1998
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