You don’t have to know much about hockey to know about Mister Hockey, Gordie Howe.  If Michigan had a Mount Rushmore of athletes, Howe would be on it.  Heck, if we had to pick only one athlete for a Lincoln Memorial, it would be Howe.  Bobby Layne and Al Kaline were great, but Gordie Howe was it.  Like Babe Ruth, many of Howe’s records have been broken, but he was his sport’s first break-out star.

This week, we learned Howe suffered a serious stroke, and his family is “expecting the worst.”  With his days numbered, you’ll be reading a lot about Howe’s hockey heroics, and there are plenty to choose from.

Howe was very fast, very skilled and very tough.  He was ambidextrous, possessing the ability to switch from right-handed to left-handed while skating down the ice – all but unheard of.  He wasn’t afraid to fight – or lift an opponent off the ice by his nostrils, as he once did when a player took a cheap shot on a teammate.  The “Gordie Howe Hat Trick” consisted of a goal, an assist, and a fight – or an unseen elbow to the schnoz, take your pick.

“You’re working a game, and you see a player down,” veteran referee Vern Buffey once explained.  “You know Howe did it, but how can you prove it?”

Michigan’s Ed Switzer experienced Buffey’s dilemma first-hand during one of the twelve exhibition games the Red Wings and the Wolverines played in Ann Arbor between 1947 and 1959.  Although the Wolverines were in top form — coincidentally, the thirties, the fifties and the nineties have been the most successful decades for the Red Wings and the Wolverines — they were still a bunch of college kids with no realistic hopes of playing in the NHL.

When they chose to, the Wings could easily bury the Wolverines by scores of 10-1, 13-2 and 14-5, but they usually took it easy on their understudies by making mid-game trades and pulling Hall of Fame goalie Terry Sawchuk early in the contests in favor of equipment manager Lefty Wilson, who also served as the team’s back-up goalie in those informal days.  Wilson made the most of his appearances by taking to the ice wearing a ten-gallon hat, puffing on a big cigar and chatting up the crowd the entire night.

“Those games were just a lot of fun,” Switzer recalls.  “We’re a bunch of college kids playing against Sawchuck, Howe and Ted Lindsay — and those guys weren’t getting a dime for it.”

The Wings did have their limits, however.  In one game the Red Wings let a comfortable 7-2 lead slip to 7-5, after which Detroit coach Jimmy Skinner warned his players, “If you guys lose this game, there’ll be a two-hour practice on this ice.”

The Wolverines didn’t get a shot on the Wings’ net the rest of the night.

Which brings us back to Switzer’s run in with Howe.  During another exhibition Switzer lined up for a face-off against Mr. Hockey himself.  The puck went into the corner and Howe went in after it.  “I tried to push him into the boards,” Switzer recalls, “but it was like pushing a cement wall.  You just couldn’t do it.  On the same shift, the puck goes into the corner again, but I’m in there first this time — reluctantly.  He about throws me onto Hill Street.  I’m on my back, and he stops to look over me and says, ‘That’s how it’s done, sonny.’  Obviously, I never forgot.”

Howe set just about every NHL scoring record, and a dozen still stand.  One of the most impressive: he finished in the top five for scoring for two straight decades. He played in the NHL at 18 – and at 51.  And in that last season, he suited up for 80 games, and notched 15 goals.

Howe’s heyday paralleled his team’s, and his town’s.  From the mid-forties to the mid-sixties, the Red Wings were a dynasty, winning four Stanley Cups, and nine regular season titles.  No team symbolized the Motor City’s might like the Red Wings.

Yes, Howe had unequaled teammates – legends like Sid Abel, Alex Delvecchio, Terry Sawchuk and Ted Lindsay, all of whom have their jerseys hanging from the rafters at Joe Louis.  But if Howe benefitted from lining up with great players, he made them better, too.

With Howe leading the Red Wings, rinks and little leagues sprouted up all over Detroit – which is why Michigan is now one of the hotbeds of hockey talent.  Howe’s wife Colleen started the junior Red Wings, which produced hundreds of world-class players, including their sons, Mark and Marty.  For Gordie Howe’s last season in the NHL, his sons were his teammates — and good ones.  Mark went on to star for the Red Wings, too, and is a Hall of Famer himself.  You can understand why Colleen Howe was called “Mrs. Hockey.”

But I never fully appreciated Gordie Howe’s greatness until I researched my first book, Blue Ice: The Story of Michigan Hockey.  I learned that just a few nudges from Howe helped Michigan’s hockey program rise to the top – and stay there.

Gordie Howe was one of nine kids born in a farmhouse in Floral, Sasketchewan – a town so tiny, it’s not even on the atlas index.  When he joined the Red Wings, the entire province pulled for him.

That included Red Berenson and his junior teammates in Regina, the capital.  During Berenson’s senior year in high school, he and his buddies trotted down to the only library in town to search for the college that had the best combination of academics and hockey.  Berenson quickly concluded Michigan was the place, and his friends followed.

But they had a third reason.  When they looked up Michigan on the map, they found Ann Arbor was a mere 38 miles from Detroit.  Berenson’s teammate Joe Lunghammer confessed, “I’d never heard of the University of Michigan — but I’d heard of Gordie Howe!  And I figured, if he plays that close to Ann Arbor, we can go see him play.  And that’s how I picked Michigan.”

From 1958 to 1964, 14 players made the trek from Saskatchewan to Ann Arbor.  The group would lead the Wolverines to the NCAA title in 1964 – Michigan’s first title in eight years, and last for 32.

Berenson embarked on a 17-year NHL playing career, and spent four more coaching in the NHL, before returning to his alma mater in 1984 to take over a troubled program.

Berenson was convinced that a player from Calgary named Myles O’Connor, class valedictorian of his high school and a third-round pick of the New Jersey Devils, was the key to turning Michigan’s fortunes around.  So convinced, in fact, that when he learned O’Connor was on his way back home to Calgary after visiting Harvard, he flew to Toronto just to meet his connecting flight at the gate to talk to him before he started the second leg of his trip.

“Dumb luck,” Berenson says, “we run into Gordie Howe.”  Berenson knew Howe from their playing days, and Howe knew of Michigan’s program because Howe’s youngest son, Murray, made it to the last cut of Berenson’s first team.  (Don’t feel too bad for Murray.  His essay on being Gordie’s son won him a prestigious Hopwood Award, and he would graduate from the Michigan medical school.)  Howe had access to the Air Canada lounge, so the ad hoc group sat and talked hockey for three hours.  Howe chatted up Michigan, the importance of getting an education and the ever-improving quality of college hockey.  “I’m sure it made quite an impression on Myles,” Berenson says.  “It gave a lot of credibility to Michigan.  It added a lot to our case, and we didn’t have much of a case at that time.”

You guessed it: Mister Hockey closed the deal for Michigan.

“Myles was the first big name player we recruited,” Berenson says.  “His coming here sent a statement to other top players, and they all knew each other from the all-star camps.  He was the key guy.”

O’Connor became an All-American, the team rose from the ashes, and the Wolverines started their record streak of 22 consecutive NCAA tournaments.

But it all started decades earlier, with a bunch of Canadian high school kids who wanted to go to a good college, play serious hockey – and watch Gordie Howe lead the Red Wings down the road.

That’s how powerful Mr. Hockey was.

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After 12 years, I’m handing over my “Off the Field” hour on WTKA to my good friend Jamie Morris, who is launching his new two-hour show, “A View From the Backfield.”  I’ll be appearing two last times on Sundays, the day after the Michigan-Michigan State game, and mid-December.

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