Howe says hockey is the big loser
Wings legend sees no winners in lockout, and adds players have never had it so good.
Howe
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Permanent stalemate?
If a labor contract is not worked out by the scheduled start of the next NHL season, should the league hire replacement players?
DETROIT -- No hockey in Hockeytown, and Mr. Hockey, perturbed by the likely loss of an entire schedule, sees a blurring of the seasons.
"It's taking the winter away," Gordie Howe said. "It seems like it's going to be spring, because there's no hockey."
As boy and man, Howe has played and followed his sport for more than seven decades. He has been attached to major-league hockey for six decades, a player for 32 seasons and a goodwill ambassador throughout. And like all those who cherish hockey at its highest level in the NHL, he is dismayed by the lockout and labor haggling between the owners and players that have shut down the sport.
"I wonder what they've been talking about," said Howe, known widely in Canada and the United States by his nickname of Mr. Hockey.
"There's no winner. I wish I knew more so I knew where to blame it on."
Howe, who joined the Red Wings as a lad of 18 in 1946, played 25 seasons in Detroit and seven more with Houston and Hartford in both the World Hockey Association and NHL.
There was no talk of the owners imposing a salary cap when he was the finest hockey player in the world.
The player salaries were ridiculous in comparison with those the owners are trying to reduce at the cost of a full NHL season.
"It's hard for the old timers to understand that the today's players play for a minimum of a $1 million or $1.2 million," said Howe, now 76.
"All 20 of us combined got a total of $240,000."
In those days, the champion Red Wings had a team of Hall of Fame bound players -- Howe, Ted Lindsay, Terry Sawchuk, Red Kelly, Marcel Pronovost and others
"When it's all over, the players are going to realize what a good job they had," Howe said.
Howe, as a goodwill ambassador, took a whirlwind trip to Vancouver over the weekend. He met school kids and adults.
"There's no winner," Howe said on his return home to suburban Detroit. "In Vancouver people were talking about it. I met a man who said he could take his money and go skiing (instead of to hockey games). Go to Banff and have a good time with his family.
"I think hockey's losing. I don't like it. I went to a school, the kids love the players. What about the people working around the rinks?"
Gordie Howe was never paid much by the Red Wings. He recalls playing seasons for $5,000.
"I didn't make any money until I went to Houston," Howe said.
That was after 25 seasons in Detroit. Howe returned as an active player in 1973 to team with sons Marty and Mark on the Aeros of the WHL.
"Bob Baun was the one who set me straight," Howe said of a veteran defenseman who joined the Red Wings late in his career. "Baun took me out to dinner. I said, 'We're both making the same.' "
Baun had signed a contract for as much money as Gordie Howe was earning after his more than two decades as the NHL's then-all time scoring leader with the Red Wings. Howe said that he was earning around $45,000 at the time, the early 1970s.
Now the players' salaries are so immense that the businessmen owners are trying to control their spending sprees with a salary cap. The players association has balked.
And there is no hockey in Hockeytown.
"I just hope they hurry and get it done," said Mr. Hockey, "especially for the older ones."
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