I didn’t grow up in Canada, but even I knew of Ted Lindsay, star hockey player, cantankerous personality, hard-nosed union leader, even when I was a kid.
Lindsay died Monday at the age of 93.
Little guy, tough as nails, a face filled with stitches, a hockey player from another era before the boys put on helmets and face masks.
Lindsay played on Detroit’s aptly-named Production Line with future fellow Hall of Famers Gordie Howe and Sid Abel.
Lindsay poses next to the renamed Lester B. Pearson Award at the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto in 2010, the year the NHL Players’ Association, which Lindsay helped found, renamed the award in his honour. (THE CANADIAN PRESS/Greg Strong)
Maybe more important, what Eugene Debs was to railroad workers, Lindsay was to hockey players.
He and a guy from the west end of Montreal named Doug Harvey spearheaded the drive for a players association back in the late 1950s.
For their efforts, both got traded from teams they loved playing for and were banished to Chicago and New York respectively.
But in the end, they made their case for all to see: professional hockey players are a pretty tough crowd that doesn’t take to being pushed around.
This 1949 file photo shows Lindsay, right, fighting through the block of two Boston Bruins. Lindsay lived to do what he thought was right. He pioneered the first NHL players union, started the tradition of taking the Stanley Cup closer to fans in the stands and refused to attend his own Hall of Fame induction ceremony because only men were allowed. Lindsay, who provided muscle and meanness on the Detroit Red Wings. (Detroit News via AP)
In the end, Lindsay and Harvey, bitter rivals on the ice (the Montreal Forum and Detroit’s Olympia), made their point together away from the rink.
Tim Burke watched and wrote about all this, working for a series of newspapers, with a writing flair that you don’t often see a lot of anymore.
I caught up with Burke by phone on Tuesday as he was about to head out in the Montreal winter.
We talked of Lindsay and Harvey, their teammates and rivals, and the old six-team National Hockey League.
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