This Guy Kept Foes in Check

You could always tell a hockey player in those days. He had no teeth. His face looked like a wall motto. It had so many stitches in it, you half expected it to spell out, “There’s No Place Like Home.”

You put a dozen Canadian roughnecks on skates, handed them sticks and told them they had to go through each other with a puck, and anything short of pulling a knife was legal. Some nights, you couldn’t skate for all the blood on the ice.

A prerequisite for championship hockey seemed to be to have (a) an uncontrollable temper; (b) a grudge against humanity--or at least that part of it carrying the puck; (c) murder in your heart or (d) all of the above.

There were only six teams in the “National” Hockey League as late as 1966. It was an exclusive club, and if you were lucky enough to be one of the 100 members getting paid by it, you weren’t about to let that guy with the puck take it away from you.

Guys played such fiery hockey that the nicknames told the story: Boom Boom, the Rocket, Cyclone, Blackjack, King (Clancy), the Hammer. Everybody else was named Butch.

Ted Lindsay was a big part of the game in that mayhem era. He had a nickname, too: Terrible.

Lindsay played the game like a cop raiding a crack house or a Cossack breaking up a demonstration. He got so many penalties--2,002 minutes in 1,201 games--that a spectator in Toronto once yelled at him: “Hey, Lindsay, they should make you pay for that seat! You’re in it more than we are.” He led the league in scoring once, but he led it in penalties annually. He once got 141 penalty minutes in a 69-game season. He got 184 in one 70-game season.

“The referees were prejudiced,” Lindsay explains sunnily.

The consensus around the league was, the referees missed half the misconducts Lindsay committed. Twenty-five years after they retired, Maurice (the Rocket) Richard refused to pose for a picture with Lindsay. “Rocket is afraid he’ll knock him off the platform,” a friend explained.

Lindsay’s point of view was that if you had the puck--or were even trying to get it--you had the same status as a burglar coming through his bedroom window. He felt he had two choices: Separate the puck from you--or you from the puck. Either way made very little difference to Terrible Ted.

His other nickname was Tough Teddy. Only 5 feet 8 and 160 pounds, he had to strike fast and hard. “The trick is never to give the other guy a chance to get out of the way,” he explains.

He was a workhorse. He was part of the line--Gordie Howe, Sid Abel, Lindsay--that brought Detroit’s Red Wings six consecutive championships and four Stanley Cups between 1949 and ’55. They were known as the Production Line.

Lindsay thinks the lines today should be the Chorus Lines.

It’s not that the game has gotten that much softer. It’s just that expansion has diluted the talent.

“When we had six teams--period--you knew you were facing the best players in the world every night,” Lindsay says. “In my day, a guy who scored 20 goals was the equivalent of a .320 hitter in baseball. Today, a 40-goal season is equal to a .320 hitter. There’s no defense today. Everybody’s a scorer. If a guy scored a breakaway goal on us, we were in Dubuque the next day. So we made sure he didn’t.”

Anything short of Murder One sufficed to stop him.

In addition to the guy with the puck and the referees, Lindsay hated goaltenders. Particularly since they had that crease to protect themselves. Lindsay liked to run into people--but you couldn’t go in the crease without the puck. Lindsay thought you should be able to go in there with a Luger if necessary.

He took part in some of the more famous on-ice fights in hockey annals. He and Ezinicki--Wild Bill, naturally--put on a fight at the Olympia Arena one night that made Dempsey-Firpo look like a minuet. Ezinicki lost a tooth, part of a nose and got a black eye. Lindsay won the fight by 14 stitches. Ezinicki needed 19, Lindsay five. And two of his stitches were in his knuckles. He didn’t hit hard, just often.

When a Toronto player named Ted Kennedy hit Gordie Howe so hard that fluid from Howe’s spine seeped into his brain and only heroic surgery saved his life, it was Lindsay who was tapped to knock Kennedy into the lights the next game.

Lindsay was as hard for hockey to handle off the ice as on. In the mid-1950s, he was a leader in forming the early, abortive NHL Players Assn., a bit of activism that was so far ahead of its time, it earned him the inevitable trade to Chicago, where, for all intents and purposes, he ended his career.

Lindsay, who scored 426 goals in his career when he wasn’t heisting the puck for Howe, is one of a cadre of past players touring the country now to call attention to the NHL’s salute to its 75th anniversary.

He is bullish about the game’s future. “It’s the fastest game men play,” he tells you. “Where else can you see a game where the puck travels 100 miles and a man 25 miles an hour?”

Does he think it will get more genteel? Lindsay grins and shakes his head. “Nobody likes to get run into by a guy carrying a stick.”