It’s still impossible for me to describe: the feeling of taking a five-dollar bill from the outstretched hand of Gordie Howe. It’s taken more than a decade to sort out in my mind what probably didn’t add up to thirty seconds in the presence of Mr. Hockey.
I was working as a grocery store cashier back then. What remained of my adolescence was being drained by days behind the register and in sleepy undergraduate classes. My nights were spent alone, at my parents’ house, staring at a news magazine or a new video release. Everyone else my age seemed to have found a more joyful, hedonistic way of killing of the rest of youth. But I’d finally been cured of the acne that had turned my boyish skin into a landscape of blemishes that ran the spectrum of purples and reds. Clean skin, as I saw it, was a both an auspicious sign in general, and one that boded particularly well as I entered adulthood more and more fully.
By that time, just over a decade into his second, final retirement from professional hockey, Gordie Howe had reached the usual retirement age of the world’s assembly line workers and engineers – a remarkably short gap, considering that the longest-lived careers in the sport rarely extend into an iron man’s forties. Naturally, he was no longer the specimen he’d been through his playing days. White-haired and bald on his crown, carrying his extra weight in the rear and gut, his body was more like that of a bottom-heavy cartoon penguin than of the sleek bird on the Pittsburgh squad’s jerseys. He set down on the conveyor belt a box of a dozen doughnuts and a bottle of Coca Cola. My sebaceous glands started pumping double time, at the thought of the snack.
Back then, I thought that there was something sad in the sight. I, too, had been a hockey player, and a Gordie Howe fan even though his playing days had ended before mine began. Growing up in a part of the country where hockey wasn’t much more than a footnote in the sports pages, I gorged myself on the kid-friendly player bios the local library did stock. In his day, Howe had been a Greek god on ice, helmet-less and greased-haired, his physique so powerful and efficient that the thin protective equipment of his playing era seemed useless on him. My own hockey equipment was growing mold in my parents’ basement, where I’d consigned it not long after the revelation that my playing days were over, the highlight of my career likely skating, in double-digit losses, against a kid who would go on to be a marginal big-league player for the better part of a decade. My old barbells were rotting down there, too. And I could feel it, in a way, standing behind the register, my back aching like it never would have before I’d given up the barbells.
It was my first college roommate, a fullback on the football team, who had given me my initial firsthand glimpse of the unmanly self-absorption and petty cruelty that are like the birthright of male athletic prowess. Fresh back from their start-of-the-year orientation trip, he and his new friends gathered in our dorm room to down massive quantities of cheap beer and relive, again and again, his bringing to tears some homely girl who had been on the trip with them. Soon, he would befriend a lineman known throughout the college as Mr. Date Rape; and by the end of the semester, he would have cheated so often on his girlfriend, halfway across the country, that even the distance could not keep the rumors out of her ears. Ten years after leaving the grocery store, I would witness a coda, of sorts, to this strain of boorishness. In the early hours of the morning, my housemate and her boyfriend the ex-pro football player would burst into the house, screaming at each other about the abortion she refused to have.
“Hockey is a man’s game,” Howe once said. If the statement now seems retrograde, it would not be unfair to contrast Howe to the prefab celebrity athletes who fill the professional ranks today. It’s hard to imagine nowadays, the young Howe building his legendary strength through work on the family farm in frigid Floral, Saskatchewan, as the Depression gave way to the Second World War. It’s even harder to imagine my old roommate or my former housemate’s ex in the sort of caretaking role Howe has assumed, as his wife struggles with Pick’s Disease.
And so Gordie Howe turns eighty today.
For years after our encounter, I continued to believe that the physical decline of Gordie Howe was somehow sadder than anyone else’s – as if Mr. Hockey had not merely stepped off the ice at the Olympia one last time, but had descended from Olympus to the world of mere mortals. But I’m no longer so sure, now that the flashes of my own inevitable decline are getting a bit too clear and regular. And I don’t regret the dead end that my hockey career turned out to be: Better to know you just don’t have it than to wander through life convinced otherwise.
Not that Gordie Howe has lost much. Just taking that five-spot from him, I could feel that he was the strongest person who had ever graced me with his presence.
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