howe and fontinato, 1959: just like someone chopping wood
Officials at the game charged with breaking up such fights let this one run its course. Showing instincts toward self-preservation, neither linesman chose to step between the pair of 200-pounders as...
View Articlebreaking through: notes on fred sasakamoose in 1953, and some others, who...
Here’s what seems reasonable to say: the facts on just who might have been the NHL’s first Indigenous player are unsettled. I wrote about this back in December, here, but it bears reviewing. The record...
View Articlefall fashion
Detroit Red Wings coach Jimmy Skinner (right) gears up in the fall of 1957 with his boss, manager Jack Adams. A son of Selkirk, Manitoba, Skinner succeeded Tommy Ivan on the Wings’ bench in 1954,...
View Articleterry sawchuk: big hands, fast reflexes, an already much-stitched face
“He has big hands, fast reflexes, and an unorthodox, gorillalike crouch — ‘I feel more comfortable down there.’” So chronicled Life magazine’s unnamed writer in a February, 1952 feature profiling...
View Articlethe only goaltender ever to have won a game in the nhl? for an hour or two in...
Goaltender Bert Lindsay was 36 by the time he took his first NHL turn — though to be fair, before he skated out for that debut in the waning days of 1917, there was no NHL. Tending the nets for...
View Articlesomewhere in england
Wartime precautions kept the Royal Canadian Air Force from identifying the precise setting for this memento of a gathering of high-level hockey talent: the caption affixed to the back of the...
View Articlea brace of shakes
“He is a man of serious mien. He doesn’t smoke and he doesn’t drink. He dresses conservatively, favoring brown suits and white shirts with French cuffs — except on the golf course, where his raiment...
View Articlehockey players in hospital beds: the goalie wore (different) pyjamas
Terry Sawchuk played 53 of Detroit’s 70 regular-season games over the course of the 1963-64 season, and the 34-year-old goaltender was voted the Red Wings’ MVP when it was all over. He tended the...
View Articlenon-fungible number 9
I lost track of the bidding soon after the bidding started, in October, on the Gordie Howe NFTs. If there was bidding. Was there? I wasn’t bidding, but I think people were, if I’m not mistaken, people...
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