Howie Meeker spent five seasons with the Toronto Maple Leafs and won four Stanley Cups, but one exchange with Gordie Howe stayed with him longer than most. It started in the corner and escalated until there was blood on the ice and a tooth missing.
Meeker described it in detail years later, just what happened in the season opener 1966.
“He runs me into the fence, and I turn around and I whack him across the shins, and he gives me a push back in the shoulders, just misses my head, and I give him another crack,” Meeker said, per CBC. “He turns with his elbow and catches me right in the mouth. I say, ‘Uh-oh, I’m in trouble here.’ I got blood running down, and I stick my tongue up and the tooth is gone.”
The referee stopped play. Players from both teams searched the ice for the tooth and never found it.
The part Meeker seemed to appreciate most came afterward. For years, whenever their paths crossed, Howe would politely ask how his dental health was getting along.
Why was Gordie Howe called Mr. Elbows?
Before he was Mr. Hockey, Howe carried a less flattering nickname, and he never made much effort to deny where it came from. He once described his preferred method of settling accounts in a single sentence.
“If a guy slashed me, I’d grab his stick, pull him up alongside me and elbow him in the head,” Howe said.
READ MORE: The bizarre reason Gordie Howe lasted so long in the NHL
Roy MacSkimming, who wrote Gordie: A Hockey Legend, summed up the philosophy with a line Howe himself might have enjoyed.
“He played hockey like a good Christian: It is better to give than to receive,” MacSkimming said, per Yahoo. “He was talking about meting out punishment on the ice, and that you have to have your elbows up in the corners because you never know who’s coming to get you.”
The image outlasted the career. Howe’s statue outside SaskTel Centre in Saskatoon depicts him with his left elbow raised.
Read more:
