Gordie Howe revealed

What do you do when your interview subject has little to say?

I WAS THRILLED when I learned from the Hartford Whalers PR people that Gordie Howe had agreed to give me lots of time over a three-day weekend so that I could profile him for a Canadian magazine. My plane landed in Connecticut’s capital early one Friday afternoon. Our initial interview took place in an office at the arena at 4 p.m.

Gordie’s wife, Colleen, sat in. They made frequent eye contact as he answered my questions, and she sometimes elaborated or clarified his answers. I was reminded of interviewing a cabinet minister in Ottawa. You switch on your recorder, an assistant turns on hers, you ask your questions (in some cases pre-submitted), the minister says what he’s said a hundred times before, the assistant looks at her watch, the interview’s over. A minister once responded entirely with talking points unrelated to my questions, not even attempting segues. I wanted to knock on his shiny bald head and ask, “Anybody in there?”

Colleen had met Gordie in a bowling alley when she was 17 and he was 22. When I went to Hartford, in 1980, most hockey wives stayed in the background. The sport was still in the paleolithic era. Females were people that players tipped in coffee shops and “banged” on road trips. Colleen was about the only woman with actual standing (largely, I suspect, due to Gordie’s stature). She was publicly admired, but I’d heard her privately called everything from “a mother hen” to “a bitch with a capital C.”

In those days, talk of “brand strategy” was restricted to the head offices of General Mills and Proctor and Gamble. Colleen, however, was well ahead of her time. She understood that Gordie was a brand and that putting him, at age 52, in the same Whalers uniform as their two hockey-playing sons, Mark and Marty (they also had another son and a daughter), was a golden opportunity. The Howes were a business, and Colleen was CEO, CFO, and president.

That first interview, at the arena, was entirely forgettable, but apparently I passed muster. They agreed that I could drive out to their home in the woods after Saturday practice and interview Gordie while Colleen ran errands. Here was my chance to discover the real Gordie Howe.

Hockey had played a big part in my early life and he was my exemplar. I, too, played right wing and I, too, was on the way to becoming a great NHLer before my career was tragically cut short at 17 by a separated shoulder, a fondness for my front teeth, and—the crux—an increasingly apparent lack of talent.

As I drove to their home, half an hour outside the city, I imagined that, alone with Mr. Hockey, I’d get past the numbing cliches that 30 years of sportswriters had settled for. I was looking for the sort of meditative reflections for which Ken Dryden was becoming known.

Gordie, however, proved to be nothing like the cerebral Dryden, who was a Cornell graduate, soon-to-be lawyer, and eventual author and politician. Gordie struck me a raw-boned, Saskatchewan farm boy in a man’s heavily muscled body, an innocent who, protected by Colleen, had spent his entire adult life in a bubble of hockey arenas, airports, and adulation.

For three hours, as he puttered in his garage and swept snowflakes from the flagstones and made toast and tomato soup for our lunch, I could elicit nothing but banality. I don’t wish to speak ill of the dead—especially someone who was incredibly kind to me—but introspection and critical thinking are not among the criteria for the Hockey Hall of Fame. No matter what I asked, I got served pablum.

Player he least liked to play against?

“I wouldn’t know where to start, there’s so many of them.”

Best goaltender he’d ever faced?

“There’s a lot of great ones, I couldn’t pick just one.”

The time he crashed head-first into the boards, fractured his skull, and needed surgery to relieve pressure on his brain?

“Aw, it wasn’t as bad as it sounds.”

How he’d kept on performing at such a high level for so many years?

“I wasn’t very good at other things, what else was I gonna do?”

The richest contract he’d signed with the Red Wings?

“Colleen will know, she’ll be home soon.”

OK, then—I wasn’t going to get usable quotes from Gordie. The phone rang, and it was son Mark, a terrific player himself, whom I had also planned to interview. He said he was sorry but he couldn’t make it after all. The weekend was turning into a disaster.

I didn’t want to rehash Gordie’s decades of feats and fights and memorable moments, so the article would have to be observational, a series of you-are-there scenes. Unfortunately, besides this visit to their home, I didn’t know what those scenes might be. I said goodbye just as Colleen got home. In the falling snow, I drove back to town.

I found the shopping mall adjoining my hotel almost empty, and did a bit of shopping as the snowstorm intensified. An hour later, I was poking around in the bookstore, the only customer, when a middle-aged gent entered and approached me. His fedora and the shoulders of his overcoat were wet with snow. It took me a moment to realize it was Gordie.

“Do you have any boots?” he asked, looking at my shoes. “I brought a pair that might fit. They’re in the car.”

“Actually, I just bought some, but thank you so much.”

He took an envelope from his pocket. “If you’re not doing anything tonight,” he said, handing it to me, “we’ve got these Debby Boone tickets we can’t use.”

I had to give my head a shake. My boyhood hero had driven in a snowstorm and searched through the mall to locate a previously unknown journalist from Toronto and offer him winter boots and tickets to a concert. (“That’s the prairie boy in him” a friend from Saskatchewan later told me.)

Debby Boone was the daughter of the crooner Pat Boone and a star in her own right, thanks to her Christian anthem “You Light Up My Life.” She sang it not once but twice, to me and the rest of a half-empty arena that night, as the city began digging out from the storm.

The next afternoon, Sunday, the Whalers played a touring Russian team. I forget who won the game, but Gordie had one assist, one hit goalpost, three shots on goal, and two minutes for roughing. Afterwards, I waited in a corner of the dressingroom as reporters stuck mics in his face for postgame cliches, which he delivered with his soft voice and slight lisp. Naked from the waist up, with huge hands and wrists, he looked like he could tear an old Manhattan phone book in half.

Few people were left in the room when he finally put on his coat, took a hockey stick from the rack, signed it—“One or two R’s?”—and offered it to me. When I went to accept it, he pretended to spear me in the nuts. When I made to take it a second time, he pretended to elbow me in the chops. Finally he handed it over.

“Thank you,” I said. “What a wonderful souvenir.”

“Are you hungry?” he said. “Do you like Chinese?”

“Sure do.”

“OK, let’s go.”

Gordie followed me out of the dressingroom, paused, and looked up and down the empty corridor.

“Where’s Colleen?” he said. “Have you seen Colleen?”

THE FORMAL interviews may have been a flop, but I had my scenes. Gordie was a fascinating character—sweet and gentle off the ice, quietly fierce on it—and the piece came together quickly. Before Bobby Orr came along, Gordie Howe was by consensus the greatest hockey player of all time. That weekend, he also earned a place in my personal pantheon of wonderful people.

P.S. Colleen died in 2009, having been diagnosed with Pick’s disease, a nasty form of dementia. Gordie suffered a massive stroke in 2014 and died in 2016 at age 88. RIP both.