Obituaries

Red Wings Legend 'Mr. Hockey' Gordie Howe Dead at 88

Tributes are pouring in to "Mr. Hockey," one of the greatest hockey players in history, after his death Friday.

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Detroit, MI — Detroit Red Wings legend Gordie Howe, one of the greatest hockey players of all time, died Friday at his son’s home in Ohio at age 88, according to media reports.

He hoisted the Stanley Cup four times and was named a National Hockey League All-Star 23 times during his illustrious 25-year career with the Red Wings. He also played with the World Hockey Association’s Houston Aeros.

Howe had been in poor health for several years and suffered a stroke in 2014.

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Howe, who grew up poor in Saskatchewan during the Depression, fell in love with hockey when he discovered a pair of skates tucked in a stack of items a neighbor sold him when the family moved to Saskatoon.

He perfected his stickhandling by pushing frozen horse manure over potato fields on the Canadian prairie, which was so flat, someone once said, that “you can sit on your front porch and watch your dog run away for three days.”

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When the Rangers turned him down, the then 18-year-old looked to the Red Wings in Detroit, where he made his professional debut in 1946 and scored his first goal.

Howe earned the title of “Mr. Hockey” for his fierce competitiveness on the ice, but also his longevity. Howe played longer than any other hockey player in history in a career that spanned five decades.He finally hung up his skates at age 50.

He passed his love for hockey to his sons, Mark and Marty, and shared the ice with them when he came out of retirement at age 45 to play with the World Hockey Association’s Houston Aeros.

As the story went at a 2015 tribute dinner in Saskatoon, he had trouble keeping up and his sons worried privately to their mother, Colleen, that he might have a heart attack, according to Yahoo Sports.

“We said, ‘We don’t think Dad’s going to be able to make it,’ ” Mark Howe said. “He was turning 15 shades of purple. We thought he was going to have a heart attack.”

But Howe again proved himself to be unstoppable.

“I was 18 years of age, and I could skate as well as most anybody I knew at that time,” Mark Howe continued. “His endurance, to this day, it’s the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”

“The special part was seeing Gordie evolve from the different kinds of purple to all of a sudden bodies flying around him, going, ‘Oh, my god. Stay out of his way’,” Marty Howe said. “He was just as bad in practice as the game. When he put those skates on, he was all business. He had certain rules, and you learned them pretty fast or you were getting stitches, and it didn’t matter if you were on his team or not or you were his son or not. I know I almost got scalped a couple times. Good thing I was fast.”

Howe was as loved off the ice as he was when he was commandeering the puck.

When he and other former Red Wings sued the NHL in the 1990s charging they’d been shortchanged on pension benefits, which required the NHL to put $32.6 million in a retirement fund for players who retired before 1982, he could have emerged as one of the most hated hockey players in history, according to a Detroit Free Press account of his life and career.

“It is a measure of how genuine was Howe’s humility, off-ice geniality and love of hockey that he isn’t the most hated man of his era,” authors David Cruise and Alison Griffiths wrote in their 1991 book “Net Worth,” in which they asserted Howe was one of the most underpaid players in professional sports.

Tributes that showed how deeply Howe was loved filled Twitter feeds after news of his death spread.

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