[Editor’s note: Ted Lindsay died Monday at age 93. This story originally published on July 15, 2018.]
This is when he’s at his best.
Ted Lindsay, 92 years old, is sitting at a table in the Oakhurst Golf and Country Club ballroom. He’s picking at a platter filled with cheese and sliced fruit. He sips occasionally from a healthy-sized glass of merlot in front of him.
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One by one, the former hockey players finish their round of golf and enter the room. They light up when they see the Hall of Famer waiting.
Greg Stefan, the Red Wings’ goalie for most of the 1980s, walks over and introduces himself.
“Greg Stefan,” Lindsay says, not missing a beat, “You sure as hell don’t have to tell me your name.”
A fellow Hall of Famer, Dino Ciccarelli enters the room and spots Lindsay.
“Hey Ted!” Ciccarelli shouts as he enters the hall, immediately walking in Lindsay’s direction.
“How the heck are you?” Lindsay asks. “Great to see you.”
“You, too! Always good to see you. Glass of wine in your hand. That’s awesome.”
The scene repeats itself, over and over. Every former player, from all generations, stopping over to pay their respects. With Lindsay paying his right back. These are the guys he loves. These are the guys he’s always fought for.
An old friend, Joe Gagnon, sits down next to him. Gagnon was a good hockey player in his day, NHL-caliber. Like Lindsay, he comes from an era when players had to decide between playing hockey professionally and finding a real job that might actually pay the bills.
Lindsay introduces Gagnon to an observer nearby.
“This is one of the great men you’ll ever talk to in your lifetime,” he says.
Gagnon smiles.
“I’m just an appliance repairman,” Gagnon says.
Gagnon had a choice to make early in life and he chose repairing appliances rather than chasing professional hockey. That’s what it was like for players of their generation.
“A long time ago, I couldn’t make any money playing hockey,” Gagnon explains. “I took a class out of a magazine in Chicago, ‘How to fix your appliances.’ I was in Halifax; I was making more money fixing the players’ appliances than I was making playing.”
He turns to Lindsay.
“You know those days,” Gagnon says.
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Oh, Lindsay knows. If there’s anybody on this planet that understands what it was like to make just a few grand playing in the NHL, it’s Lindsay. He played when players were told it was an honor just to play hockey for a living. That they had the job every kid dreamed of, so they should just accept whatever salary owners decided to pay each year. He played when they got only what was given to them and nothing more. Until he put an end to it.
“I made, $2,500 a year, playing in the National Hockey League,” Lindsay answers.
“Can you imagine?” Gagnon asks.
“And I was well paid,” Lindsay says.
Gagnon jokes that Lindsay at least got new skates every year. That was a luxury.
“Not oversized skates like you did when you were a kid. Three sizes too big or too small. Remember those days, eh? You remember what hockey sticks used to cost? We’d play with them and break them and we’d tape them with soup cans. Remember those days?”
“Put on the cans, fold them over,” Lindsay answers.
“We treasured hockey,” Gagnon says, staring ahead.
In moments like this, it’s so clear that hockey treasures Lindsay. Just a few weeks earlier, a similar scene played out in Toronto. The Hockey Hall of Fame was hosting an anniversary celebration. Some of the greatest players to ever put on skates flew in to take part.
There was a private dinner and reception for familes at the Four Seasons on Sunday night, followed by a celebration the next day at Maple Leaf Gardens.
The reception was a chance to catch up with former teammates. It was a chance to share old stories. It was a gathering of hockey legends that may only have been rivaled recently by the NHL’s celebration of the Top 100 players at the 2017 All-Star Game in Los Angeles.
Two guys received the most attention from the players in the room that night: Lindsay and his old Red Wings teammate Red Kelly. Players were drawn to them.
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“I’m 68 years old, and I still hold those guys in awe,” Flyers legend Bobby Clarke told The Athletic. “Those guys who came before me, I still look up to them. [Lindsay] looked great. He talked great. All those guys — it was really, really good to see them. They were fired up.”
For Mark Howe, it was even more special. Howe grew up in the Red Wings dressing room at Olympia Stadium. He remembers how the players sat in numerical order and can still picture how he scanned the room left to right and saw No. 7, Norm Ullman, sitting next to No. 8, Val Fonteyne, sitting next to his dad, sitting next to No. 10, Alex Delvecchio.
Mark was about 5 years old the time he saw Lindsay in a Blackhawks sweater, and he recalls how odd it was, the result of Lindsay being shipped out of Detroit for his efforts to start the players’ association.
Now, 63 years old and a Hall of Famer himself, Howe was looking at these guys again at the Four Seasons. It was a connection to his childhood. A connection to his dad.
“It makes me feel like a kid in a candy store. It makes me feel young again,” Howe told The Athletic. “I know what they meant to me as a kid. It’s the history of the Red Wings.”
It’s the history of the Red Wings. It’s the history of the NHL. It’s the history of a movement that changed the entire landscape for players for the rest of time. It’s a history that is kept alive through stories over glasses of wine in some cases and, in others, very intentional efforts made by those who realize time around these history-makers is not infinite.
Aside from being one of the best left wingers to ever play the game, Lindsay put all his personal success and comfort on the line by organizing the first NHL players’ association in 1957, along with Bill Gadsby, Doug Harvey, Fern Flaman, Gus Mortson and Jim Thomson. He did it because he saw young players shipped out on a moment’s notice. He saw injured players discarded. He observed a former Maple Leafs star selling broken sticks for a quarter, in an attempt to squeeze out extra money. So he organized. And those efforts had massive repercussions.
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From a pure hockey standpoint, it likely cost the Red Wings a few more Stanley Cups, because Lindsay was banished to the Blackhawks in a trade with fellow Hall of Famer Glenn Hall — an attempt by team management to cut off any union talk by removing Lindsay from the equation in Detroit.
From a personal standpoint, it cost Lindsay a relationship with Red Wings general manager Jack Adams and, on some level, Gordie Howe, whose support for the association efforts wasn’t on Lindsay’s level.
“Jack Adams was my Godfather,” said Lindsay’s son Blake Lindsay. “They still said, ‘Get rid of him. Chop the head of the snake off.’ Dad was the organizer. (Red Wings owner James) Norris had all the arenas, and Chicago back then was the worst team in the league. They sent dad there.”
And Lindsay’s family stayed behind in their home in Birmingham. More personal strain.
It all came at a huge cost, but it led to the official ratification of the NHLPA in 1967 and players finally having a voice, and ultimately representation, in the game.
“Virtually everything that happened after that happened because of what he started,” NHLPA executive director Don Fehr told The Athletic. “He was the spark that created the player consciousness that things are not right, and there are things as players we can do about that. … And he did it at considerable personal risk and considerable personal sacrifice.”
For years at the NHLPA, there were conversations on how best to honor Lindsay for his pioneering efforts and sacrifice. In 2008, longtime NHLPA communications director Jonathan Weatherdon dug in on getting the Lester B. Pearson Award re-introduced as the Ted Lindsay Award, given annually to the NHL’s Most Outstanding Player, as voted by his peers.
And he did it with Lindsay’s assistance. They wanted his influence on the trophy that would be given to the NHL’s best player every year, so Lindsay and his late wife, Joanne, would take the train to Toronto often to be a part of the design of the trophy.
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A close look at the trophy reveals so many of the personal touches that Lindsay influenced. He’s a guy who preaches staying active, so he was adamant that it was an action shot used to form the trophy. Engravings mark the long list of his accomplishments. It has his career stats. It has the names of the executive committee of the original NHLPA that he formed in 1957. It has The Production Line — the famed Red Wings trio comprised of Lindsay, Sid Abel and Gordie Howe. It has his “Terrible Ted” nickname, along with the story of how he started the tradition of skating the Stanley Cup around the ice after winning it. There is so much of his legacy preserved on that single trophy handed to hockey’s best player each year.
The end result is that these stories get shared again and again.
In 2017, in a Wynn Las Vegas banquet room, Lindsay sat at a table between Sharks defenseman Brent Burns and Oilers center Connor McDavid, two players nominated for the Lindsay Award, and shared stories from his career.
Burns, to Lindsay’s right, leaned in on one elbow, listening intently. McDavid sat in rapt attention to Lindsay’s left.
Another anecdote that made the Lindsay trophy is the story about the time he and Gordie Howe received a death threat in Toronto before playing in Game 3 of a semifinal playoff series against the Maple Leafs.
“We’re playing in Maple Leaf Gardens on Friday. They got a call on Friday morning,” Lindsay told McDavid and Burns. “‘If Howe and Lindsay show up for the game, they’ll be shot.’ Long story short, nobody got shot. I was lucky enough to get the tying goal in the third period. I was lucky enough to get the game-winning goal in overtime. Everybody is booing in Maple Leaf Gardens.”
At this point, Burns is all in. He has access to a living piece of history, and he takes advantage.
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“How did you guys travel back then?” Burns asks.
“Train,” Lindsay answers. “We didn’t know anything else. They were ready to play. We were ready to play.”
Moments like that capture the essence of why the trophy was created. It sparks conversations. It keeps memories alive. It connects one generation of stars to the next.
And while the NHLPA had so much access to Lindsay in developing the trophy, they took advantage by preserving the stories. They grabbed audio recordings of Lindsay. They sat him down and did video interviews. They took pictures.
In Lindsay’s own words, recorded on NHLPA video, they captured the moment their organization was created:
“Back in the six-team league, we as players never spoke to each other on the other team. To form a players’ association, when you don’t speak to each other, is pretty difficult.
“I just thought, ‘We’ve got to get together where we can do some negotiating. And the owners met nine, 10 times a year. We as hockey players never met, because we didn’t speak to each other.
“It was a Monday night in New York. We’re all in the room. Doug (Harvey) and I were there, Jimmy Thomson, Gus Mortson, Ferny Flaman. We’re all there. We have the meeting. We had to put $100 in because we had to pay the lawyers in New York.
“All the fellas said, ‘Who is going to be the president?’ They said, ‘Well, it was Ted’s idea. We’ll make Ted the president’ — knowing darn well, when we got back to our home bases on Tuesday morning for practice, somebody was going to get hung. I knew darn well when I got back to Olympia, the Red Wings wouldn’t be getting dressed for practice. There would be a red-faced Mr. Jack Adams in the room, and he was there. And he was ranting and raving.
“I’d do the same thing today.”
He just takes things on. That’s the best way to describe Ted Lindsay. He’s not afraid of a good fight, part of the reason he earned the “Terrible Ted” nickname.
“I hated to lose,” Lindsay tells The Athletic, while sipping his merlot. “If you were my opposition, there was only going to be one winner. You’re going to be on your ass most of the night. I ran into some pretty good men, strong men. But I found out they bleed same as I do.”
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That’s his mentality. And if he sees an injustice, he does something about it. Like when he was elected to the Hall of Fame but skipped his 1966 induction ceremony because the Hall wouldn’t allow women to take part.
“It’s so typical of dad and his determination to do the right thing,” said his daughter Lynn LaPaugh. “He assumed his mom, my mom and us kids would be able to attend his induction to the Hall of Fame. He was told, ‘This is a stag event. Men only.’ Dad said, ‘I’m not going. Do you have any idea what my family has put up for years for me to play hockey?’”
The next year, the rule changed.
It’s the same ethos that sparked the creation of his foundation. He has raised millions to fight autism, and it’s not because autism is something that impacted the Lindsay family directly. His friend and trainer John Czarnecki had an autistic son, and it was initally something Lindsay knew nothing about.
“John’s son was diagnosed in 2001 with autism,” Lynn says, telling the origin story. “John was stretching dad one day, and John did not show up for a party that we were having for dad, and he goes, ‘What happened John?’ ‘My son was diagnosed with autism, and he was not having a good night.’ Dad was like, ‘What is autism?’”
Lindsay went home, dove into medical books and then asked the simple question too many of us skip: What can I do to help?
Through fundraisers, like the annual golf tournament that will take place again in September at Detroit Country Club, the foundation has raised more than $3 million to support autism research and educational programs.
And this isn’t a guy just signing a few autographs and playing golf. There’s passion. There’s even anger when he starts talking about fathers who abandon families with autistic children.
“You’re supposed to raise children and educate them. Not desert them,” he said. “Don’t be a deserter.”
The idea of leaving a challenge is foreign to him. The notion of backing down from a fight still upsets him. At 92 years old.
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So he does what he can. He shares his passion. He carefully signs items that he knows will chip away at the fundraising goals, with his signature so deliberate and clear that it’s part of the logo of his cause. Nothing is half-assed with Ted Lindsay. Not even the autograph.
When he’s done signing, he’s joined again by his friend, Gagnon. They reminisce a bit. You can tell there’s even a bit of reflection, natural for two guys who have seen so much.
“The good Lord has been good to me,” Lindsay tells his friend.
“You deserved it,” Gagnon answers.
“I don’t know if I deserved it, but I sure do appreciate it.”
[Editor’s note: This piece is the second in a series called Our Game Changers, longform stories focused on Michigan athletes who transform their sports. If you have a Michigan athlete who fits that description you’d like to know more about, e-mail [email protected]]