Winning the 1943 Saskatchewan midget championship is not Gordie Howe’s greatest hockey accomplishment.
It’s easily trumped by any of his four Stanley Cup victories. And it’s buried under a mound of individual awards he earned during 33 professional seasons.
But that provincial title — claimed at a long-gone arena in downtown Saskatoon — is a meaningful brick in the Howe legend. It is, he says, the first hockey championship he ever won.
“It meant a hell of a lot to me,” Howe told The StarPhoenix this week. “On the way home, on the bus, the trophy never left my lap.”
Sixty-seven years later, Howe is in Saskatoon to accept an honorary doctorate of laws from the University of Saskatchewan. He collects that honour this morning, and while he’s here, he’ll also collect a long-lost plaque from that 1943 championship. The wooden shield — delicately engraved with “G. HOWE” — has been hanging in a northern Saskatchewan home for decades, and Shannon Arcand intends to fulfil her late father’s wish of getting it back to Gordie.
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Exactly how the memento landed in Ward Giles’s hands is a mystery.
His daughter remembers the plaque hanging in the living room of their Leask home in the late 1960s. But then the trail runs cold.
“We’re really not sure how he acquired it,” said Shannon Arcand, whose father died in October 2008. “We never, ever thought to ask him. I had no clue if it was authentic, other than it looked old.”
Giles delivered bread from Prince Albert to Leask, so Arcand theorizes that he might have accepted the plaque from someone who needed a ride. Or, she says, it might have been collateral from an acquaintance who borrowed money.
The missing link remains a mystery to Howe, too. He believes he probably gave the plaque as a gift — something he’d done with other awards. But Howe jokes that “too many bumps on the head” prevent him from remembering how he surrendered ownership.
What’s clear, however, is Ward Giles’s wish for the plaque.
“Maybe a year before he went into the nursing home,” said Arcand, “he would ask me on occasion: ‘Do you still have that plaque?’ And I’d say, ‘Yes, I do, dad. Do you want it back?’ He’d say, ‘No. Just make sure Gordie Howe gets it back.’
“He was adamant about it.”
On Sunday, Howe will get the plaque back. Arcand and her mother Shirley, are scheduled to meet Mr. Hockey for coffee at a Saskatoon hotel.
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Howe was just shy of his 15th birthday when his team, the Saskatoon Lions Bruins, contested the provincial championship against Yorkton in March 1943.
The strapping youngster ranked among the tallest players on his team. Sporting hair that was too bushy to be a flat top, but not quite a pompadour, Howe nudged past the six-foot mark.
“He was a tough son of a gun,” recalls Metro Prystai, a Yorkton forward who was later Howe’s teammate with the Detroit Red Wings. “Their whole team was tough. We didn’t have that much trouble getting out of our (south) division until we met those guys and they beat us.”
Saskatoon won the two-game, total-point series 11-6. Howe scored five goals in the opener, an 8-4 victory in Yorkton. He added an assist in the return match, won 3-2 by the hosts at the old Saskatoon Arena on 19th Street.
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