Gordie Howe, the National Hockey League’s longest tenured player and a member of the sport’s Mt. Rushmore, died Friday at age 88.
The skilled and feared winger who wristed the puck as ably as he threw his industrial-strength elbows is regarded to this day as perhaps hockey’s most well-rounded competitor. He played professionally into his fifties and spent the majority of his 32 seasons with the Detroit Red Wings, with whom he won four Stanley Cups and helped popularize the game in the United States.
In the history books, Howe is known as Mr. Hockey. To his teammates and the NHL greats who followed in his skate marks, he was a model athlete. And to anyone who liked to mix things up on the ice, he was a bad idea.
Howe played in an era of no helmets, no facemasks, and no holds barred. That included holding a grudge, for which he was famous—but it was always a fair one, said former all-star Dennis Hull. “He wasn’t mean to anybody who played the game the way he thought it should be played. But when somebody got out of line, he took care of it.”
Just ask New York Rangers defenseman Lou Fontinato, who Life magazine described in 1959 as “the self-appointed tough guy of the league.”
According to the article, Fontinato suffered the fifth broken nose of his career in the exchange. (His sniffer would later be “hammered back into shape” in the hospital, Life reported.)
The Ranger wouldn’t concede that he was on the losing end. But the adjacent photos atop the article’s headline told the story. The one on the left was of a seated Howe in the dressing room, arms crossed and forehead crinkled staring into the camera like it had just questioned his manhood. The one on the right was of a facially mummified Fontinato, with several strips of white tape holding bandages in place over his nose. One photo was captioned “THE WINNER” and the other “THE LOSER”. Guess which belonged to which.
In a historical context, the New York Times placed the fight thusly: “Hockey fighting was glamorized with Hollywood lighting, the heroic Fontinato praised for taking on the toughest hombre of them all — Howe — and living to tell the tale. Perhaps hockey’s first ‘reality TV’ moment. This was the apotheosis of the mano a mano fight in which ‘the heat of the moment’ fighting was always accepted as ‘part of the game.'”
“The Lou Fontinato fight was the one that most will always remember, including myself. Lou and I didn’t like each other much back then, and that wasn’t the first time our paths crossed. We did respect each other, though, and I am proud to say that Lou and I became friends years later.”
Of course they did. Men would be men.
Howe finished his NHL career with 801 goals, 1,049 assists—and 1,685 penalty minutes.
“Gordie, when you talk about the greatest legends of all time, how are you going to have comparables with all the other superstars,” former Red Wing and NHL hall of famer Marcel Dionne said. “[T]here’s only one guy you could answer ‘yes’ to any question. He had everything.”
