Hockey Changes Rankle A Legend

Frank Mahovlich spends a couple of minutes dealing with the changes in the game he grew up with before he’s leaning back in his chair and throwing up his hands.

“You’re going to get my blood boiling way too early,” he said, laughing.

The current of the conversation is rerouted.

It was a few minutes after breakfast on Monday morning. One of the legends of hockey - Mahovlich’s Hall of Fame career spanned 22 years - was talking about the game he’d play at the Spokane Coliseum on Monday night and the game he left in 1978.

Exhibitions like this one, he said, put the fun back in the game.

Fun is the tone, but it doesn’t take much prompting to get Mahovlich teed up again.

Mention helmets with face shields, for instance.

Mahovlich rolls his eyes.

“I don’t believe in them,” he said, “but I don’t know how you convince people it’s all wrong. I think it started in 1972 when we (the Canadian all-stars) played the Russians. Why should the Russians dictate to us, our game, that we created?

“We could stay here for hours and talk about it, but if you want to get specific, taking the steel goalposts out was wrong. You just don’t do things like that. It’s like taking out the cement wall at a race track. The wall is there for a purpose, to make you slow down.

“If you want to gamble, it costs to gamble. By taking the posts out, they’ve allowed players to skate harder and faster into the goalie. They’re knocking the goalie all over the place. The posts were in there for a reason: to make a player slow down.”

Frank Mahovlich - a 57-year-old who could pass for 47 - shrugs.

“People calling the shots aren’t hockey people,” he concludes. “A hockey-minded person wouldn’t have created such things.”

Big M was rolling, but he wasn’t here to play the Grumpy Old Man.

Most of his comments reflect a lifetime love affair with hockey.

“I was born with skates on,” he claimed. “Nineteen thirty-eight. The only reason I didn’t skate that morning is that it was snowing. My mother wouldn’t let me go out.”

That’s not much of an exaggeration. Hockey was a passion before Mahovlich started school in Timmins, Ontario.

“There was a pond just across the road from our place, a little marsh area,” he recalled. “I cleared the snow off it. This was before I was old enough to go to school. I was no older than 4.

“My mother gave me some blue and red ribbons and a pot of boiling water. I put the hot water over the ribbon and it melted it into the ice.”

That created instant home-made blue lines and a red center stripe.

“I’d make an indentation into the snow banks and that was our goalie nets,” Mahovlich said. “I had a rink. I’d wait for the kids to come home from school and we’d have our game.”

Mahovlich had a giant foot up - a size 11 as a matter of fact - on most of the older kids.

“My godmother gave me a pair of skates,” he said. “They were size 11s. Men’s size 11s. My dad was a gold miner up there. I’d put three or four of his socks on.”

Maybe that brought out the quickness. Mahovlich moved up the line in a hurry. At 12 he was in organized juvenile hockey. By 18 he was with the Toronto Maple Leafs.

By the ‘61-62 season he was second in the NHL in goals and fourth in penalty minutes. His 11 assists and four goals were big in the ‘64 Stanley Cup final won by Toronto in seven games over Gordie Howe and the Detroit Red Wings.

A 1968 trade to Detroit revived his career. Mahovlich that year tied Phil Esposito for second in the league in goals, behind Bobby Hull. Three years later he was in Montreal, where he’d win Stanley Cup championships again in ‘71 and ‘73.

“My last season was with the Birmingham Bulls of the old WHA,” he said. “I wasn’t happy with the way the game was going. I kind of got away from it.”

For a time it was easier to just turn his back on the disillusionment.

“Then five years ago, Billy Harris, who was one of my centermen with the Maple Leafs, told me to come out and play some hockey,” Mahovlich said. “He said we were going to stay younger together.”

Harris was right. Mahovlich, who was good enough to play up as a youngster, is good enough to play down as an old-timer.

“Forty-year-olds I can handle,” he said. “It’s when they bring on the 25-year-old who gets competitive. Then I’ve got a little problem.”