I don't know how it happened that my friend Al Cummings and I wandered into the Calgary Convention Centre on Jan. 17, 1976 and discovered the Houston Aeros were there for a luncheon meeting.
We already knew the Aeros were playing the Calgary Cowboys that night in a World Hockey Association game at the Stampede Corral and at 13 years old, I was pumped about seeing Gordie Howe play with his sons Mark and Marty. At the time, Gordie was a couple months shy of his 48th birthday and was coming off a 99-point season, having won the scoring title the year before with a 100-point season.
Al and I couldn't believe our luck when we saw the Aeros' luncheon listed on the TV screen and I asked the convention centre receptionist if we could borrow a pen and a piece of paper to get the players' autographs. She didn't have a spare pen but gave me a pencil and we went up the elevator and staked out the room.
After about a half-hour wait, the door opened and what we saw was nothing like we expected. The Aeros were in the middle of a spirited bun fight, tossing bread at each other at close range with full velocity. Gordie ducked away from the mayhem at the table and was the first to leave the room and he saw me standing there. With his big Saskatchewan farmboy mitts he took my pencil and paper, plopped a bun into my hand, and signed his name. Someone had a pen and I used that to get the rest of the Aeros' autographs.
That night, my dad and I went to the game and we had excellent seats in the lower section, 10 rows up, just to the left of the blueline, sitting in a near-capacity crowd of 6,902. It was strange and somewhat surreal seeing Gordie skate around, the only guy on the ice without a helmet. I can't remember if he got any points that game, but just seeing him skate with the puck was so cool.
The Cowboys were in their first season in the WHA, after taking over the Vancouver Blazers franchise. They had some snipers - Danny Lawson, Ron Chipperfield, Bob Leiter and Butch Deadmarsh. They had Harry Howell on defence, and one of the most entertaining goalies in the league - Don "Smokey" McLeod, the only pro goalie at the time to use a curved stick. Known to reach for a post-game cigarette, McLeod had a habit of leaving his crease to stop the puck behind the net, not a common practice for goalies then. He used his stick to clear the puck off the boards and spring teammates free on breakaway passes. In 63 games that season he picked up 13 assists and in his WHA career assisted on 37 goals.
The Aeros had plenty of talent, having won the Avco World Trophy the previous two seasons as WHA champs. They had Terry Ruskowski, John Tonelli, Larry Lund and Rich Preston to help lighten the scoring load off Gordie. But on that night, they lost to the Cowboys 4-2, much to my delight.
Howe went on to play in New England for two more seasons in the WHA before the Hartford Whalers joined the NHL for his last season. His combined NHL/WHA regular season/playoff stats are simply amazing - 2,421 games, 1,071 goals, 1,518 assists, 2,589 points and 2,419 penalty minutes (which equates to about 40 hours in the sinbin).
Fifteen years later, I took one of my first reporting jobs working in sports at the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix. One of my co-workers, James Parker, and I, played hockey with a bunch of guys from the newspaper, TV and radio stations in town. We played in a dingy old rink with wooden bleachers, not the Saskatoon Arena which was torn down in 1989, but it was close to downtown and apparently Gordie had played there lots of times.
You couldn't go far in Saskatoon without being reminded of the footprint he left on the town. There's a campground named after him and now his statue stands outside SaskTel Place, where the WHL Blades play hockey. I covered high school football and the junior football Hilltops and they played at the Gordie Howe Bowl on the west side of the city at Avenue P South. Since renamed Gordie Howe Park, the stadium had an open-air press box exposed to the easterly winds that blew in off the prairies. I remember one playoff game in November it was -22 C with a howling wind while I was typing out my story trying to make deadline with fingers rigid as icicles. I don't know if Gordie played football but I wouldn't be surprised if he did. He was an athlete, good at every sport he tried. If he did play on that field, it's a safe bet he stuck out his elbows a few times to avoid the clutches of an unsuspecting tackler.
With Mr. Hockey's death Friday at age 88, the world has lost a great ambassador to the game. He was one of a kind, a hero the likes of which we will never see again. He played old-time hockey with a nasty edge in a pro career that extended six decades but was the perfect gentleman off the ice, the only grandfather to play in the NHL. He once told a reporter, "One of my goals was longevity, I guess I've pretty much got the lock on that."
He certainly left a lasting impression on me.
