Howe Sweet It Was

Sports Illustrated JANUARY 24, 1955

TWO SEASONS AGO, IN A GAME IN WHICH the Detroit Red Wings were trailing the Chicago Blackhawks by a goal and had only seconds remaining in the third and final period, the Wings' superlative rightwinger, Gordon Howe, corralled the puck at center ice and drove deep into Hawks territory. "Shoot! For heaven's sake, shoot!" bellowed Jack Adams, Detroit's veteran general manager.

Calmly, almost languidly, Howe held his shot, stickhandled across the ice and cut in from the other wing.

"For Pete's sake, shoot, shoot!" Adams cried despairingly, one eye on Howe, the other on the second hand of the stadium clock. Again Howe held back his shot in favor of faking a defenseman between himself and the goal and then took a lazy half-stride in the midst of which he flicked the puck low and hard past the Chicago goalie. The buzzer, signaling the end of the game, sounded a split second after the puck had bulged into the cords at the back of the net.

"Gordie! Gordie!" Adams stammered in the dressing room after the game, thumping his palm to his forehead in a gesture of barely controlled exasperation. "Gordie, you had two good shots you didn't take. What were you waiting for?" Howe waited a moment, then another, before answering. "Well," he finally drawled, "I guess I jus' wanted to make sure."

During his nine seasons with the Red Wings, Howe's unruffled, unhurried, Sunday-stroll-through-the-garden approach to the vigorous business of big league hockey has periodically produced large lumps of anguish not only in the turbulent larynx of Jack Adams but also in the hearts of all good Detroit fans. Howe, 26, undoubtedly possesses the most complete array of natural talent of any modern hockey player, and what bothers the Wings fans is the recurring dream of the prodigies he could perform if only he could light a fire under himself each time he steps on the ice—as Maurice Richard of the Montreal Canadiens does without conscious effort, or Howe's teammate Ted Lindsay. In the meantime, they put up as best they can with Howe just as he is. For some he is, with Richard, one of the two greatest players in the game; for others, the greatest.

The members of this latter persuasion find the record book an articulate confederate. For each of the last four seasons Howe has led the National Hockey League in scoring, in 1950-51 with 86 points (43 goals, 43 assists), in '51-52 with 86 points (47, 39), in '52-53 with a record 95 points (49, 46) and last season with 81 points (33, 48). No other player has ever led the league more than two years in a row. This season, on top of a slow start, Howe was forced by a shoulder injury to sit out eight games—incidentally the first league games he has missed in six bruising 70-game seasons. Since his return, and despite the absence of Lindsay—his old linemate and playmate who has been out with a bum shoulder—Howe has been moving at the pace of a goal and an assist a game, and at season's end he may well catch the leaders, the ageless Richard and Bernie Geoffrion and Jean Beliveau, two young Canadiens who have been having immense winters.

The Red Wings annually are a well-balanced team, anything but a one-star outfit, yet it was only after Howe came into his maturity as a hockey player (at age 21) during the 1948-49 season that the club began its long, uninterrupted reign as NHL champions. For six straight years now the Wings have won the league pennant for finishing the regular season in first place and have come to be regarded as the Yankees of hockey. Year after year, their only serious competition has been provided by Les Canadiens and the Toronto Maple Leafs, with the other three teams—the Boston Bruins, the New York Rangers and the Blackhawks—habitually bogged down at the bottom of the standings in what amounts to a league of their own to determine which one of them will limp into fourth place and so qualify for the Stanley Cup playoffs.

THE MOST SPIRITED RIVALRY IN HOCKEY for many years was between the Leafs and the Canadiens, a natural extension of the traditional contentiousness between the two cities (which reached something of an apex not so long ago when a Montreal newspaper announced a contest, first prize to be one week in Toronto, second prize two weeks in Toronto). More recently, this ancient hockey rivalry has cooled off a bit, due partially to the rise of the Wings and partially to the decline of the Leafs into a team that specializes in defensive positional play and is content, after scoring a goal, to sit back and play kitty-bar-the-door hockey as it attempts to make that goal grow larger and larger as the game clambers on.

In this day when superstars are becoming scarcer and scarcer, Detroit has four: Howe, Lindsay, defenseman Leonard Patrick (Red) Kelly and goalie Terrence Gordon (Terry) Sawchuk. Curiously enough, of this quartet only one, Sawchuk, was lined up all the way by the Detroit organization. The Leafs could have easily snagged Lindsay, who attended St. Michael's College in Toronto and was regularly on view playing with the school team in the Maple Leaf Gardens. With Detroit, Lindsay has been rated the league's All-Star left wing six of the last seven years. The Leafs had the same opportunity to land Kelly, who also attended and played for St. Mike's. With Detroit, Kelly has developed into the best defenseman in the league.