Lester Patrick vs. Gordie Howe

Did Lester Patrick overlook the promise of a young Gordie Howe (pictured here on his 1969 O-Pee-Chee card)? In September 2003, Bob Duff of the Canwest News Service wrote about Howe’s first NHL training camp with the New York Rangers at age 15, which took place in Winnipeg in 1943. Lester, the Rangers general manager, was helping run the camp and sizing up dozens of young players, but Howe barely made his radar.

“[Lester] spoke to me four times,” Howe told Duff. “At the start of camp, he asked ‘What’s your name, son?’ and then they wrote it on a piece of paper and pinned it to the back of my sweater. The first day, I hit [Rangers veteran] Grant Warwick with a pretty good bodycheck and Mr. Patrick called me over and asked ‘What’s your name, son?’ Two other times, when I did something on the ice he called me over and asked ‘What’s your name, son?’ Finally, I said ‘It’s on the back of my shirt, sir.’”

Howe left camp without signing with the Rangers. The following year, he attended Detroit’s camp and embarked upon a 33-year career in which he scored 975 regular season goals in the NHL and WHA.

It wasn’t the first time that it was suggested Lester let Howe get away. On Feb. 3, 1955, Boston Daily Globe columnist Herb Ralby claimed the Rangers would have won a bunch more Stanley Cups if they had been less oblivious. “Gordie Howe is the Detroit player of whom Lester Patrick said ‘he’ll never be a hockey player’ and sent him home from the Rangers’ camp years ago,” Ralby wrote.

Ironically, in 1967, Howe became the second recipient of the Lester Patrick Award, bestowed for service to hockey in the United States. At the time, Globe reporter Tom Fitzgerald discussed the story about Lester supposedly passing on Howe, adding that Lester had kidded about it: “A great selector of talent I was, the man who turned away Gordie Howe.”  

But Howe told Fitzgerald that wasn’t how things actually went down.

This was the first time I’d ever been away from home. What happened was I was just plain homesick and wanted to go back. Actually, Mr. Patrick sent [coach] Frank Boucher to me, and tried to interest me into going to school at Notre Dame, a collegiate preparatory in Wilcox, Sask. … I said something like thanks just the same and went back home.

Howe said much the same thing in his 2014 autobiography Mr. Hockey. But first he elaborated on the hit that got Lester’s attention. He said it was on Bill Warwick, not Grant Warwick. (It could have been either; both brothers were on the team.)

I went low, stuck out my hip, and sent him for a ride almost into the seats. He ended up straddling the boards and he wasn’t too happy about it. Lester Patrick … called me over and said “You don’t do that here.” In the heat of the moment, I thought he was talking about how they played in Winnipeg. I replied, “I’m sorry, sir, I’ve never been here before.” It wasn’t until later that I realized he meant you don’t hit your own teammates like that during practice.

Howe said Boucher and Lester later called him to their hotel room. Far from sending him packing, “They liked enough of what they’d seen to sign me.” But the deal would have given the team his rights in perpetuity, and he wasn’t Catholic, “so my first thought was that Notre Dame would be a bad fit. … I didn’t want to go to Notre Dame and I didn’t want to sign anything with the Rangers, so I listened to their offer and told them thank you very much, but that I really just wanted to go home. They pressed me a bit, but my mind was made up.”

So the truth appears to be that Lester liked Howe well enough to want to keep him in the Rangers organization, but Howe simply declined the offer out of homesickness and skepticism about attending Catholic school.

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Another thing that binds Lester Patrick and Gordie Howe: both had the nickname “Mr. Hockey,” although there were plenty of others too.

Eric Zweig has looked into this. Lester was called Mr. Hockey as early as 1933 (much to the irritation of Toronto Maple Leafs owner Conn Smythe, whom Lester had replaced as coach and general manager of the New York Rangers before they played their first game), and occasionally referred to that way until his death in 1960.

But Art Ross, Eddie Shore, Jack Adams, and Maurice Richard were all dubbed Mr. Hockey as well at one time or another. Gordie Howe was first called Mr. Hockey in 1953 and upon Jack Adams’ death in 1968, the title was his alone. It appeared on his 1969-70 O-Pee-Chee hockey card, seen above.