The kid from the Prairies was born to play hockey
After 12 NHL seasons, legendary goalie remained a fan favourite until his death
SASKATOON Johnny Bower’s old hockey photos look so iconic — lumpy brown pads, battered face, leg flung this way, arm that.
He looked like a man born to the game. He played like it, too.
As scars mounted and teeth dwindled, as saves and Stanley Cups and red lamps came and went, there arrived one night when Gordie Howe stopped by his crease for a little chat.
Bower, who died Tuesday night at age 93, told me about it in the summer of 2016, after Howe’s passing.
“He skated by,” Bower recounted, “wished me a happy birthday, said, ‘I hope you have many more. How long are you going to live?’ All that stuff. I said, ‘Gordie, I’m going to out-live you, I’ll tell you that right now.’ And I did, I guess. For how long, I don’t know, but I’m still holding on.”
Bower and Howe were both old Saskatchewan boys, Prairie bred, steeped in hockey from the time they were toddlers. The former hailed from Prince Albert, the latter from Saskatoon.
Money was tight for both kids during those terrible Depression years. Bower’s first goalie pads were made from an old mattress, but he grew with the game, spent most of his 20s in hockey’s minor leagues, and was well into his 30s when he finally broke into the NHL for good.
Howe scored his first NHL goal at age 18. Bower’s wait was much, much longer.
It was a tough time to be a goaltender. Just six men held jobs in the NHL, and they did it barefaced, exposing noses and cheeks to hard rubber discs.
“It’s a way to test you,” Bower once told the Financial Post, when asked about those facial stitches. “Then they find out if you’re puck shy or not. If you can play with injuries, if you don’t pull up on shots after something like that, then they know they’ve got themselves a pretty good guy in the nets.”
Once that final NHL breakthrough happened, he made it last 12 glorious seasons, retiring in his mid-40s as one of the greatest goaltenders the game had ever seen. Bower was both short-sighted and arthritic, but they called him “the Great China Wall” because that’s how he played — solid, impenetrable, seemingly ageless.
Bower won four Stanley Cups and two Vezina Trophies. He’s a consensus top-100 when hockey buffs talk about the greatest NHL players of all time.
He and Howe battled fiercely on the ice, but they were fishing buddies, too, making regular returns to Saskatchewan’s lakes and playgrounds.
There was a quiet, easy respect between the two men.
Both remained hockey ambassadors long after retirement. Bower was a friendly man with a warm smile, a fantastic testament to the types of characters depression-era Saskatchewan and long nights on the rink could produce.
He made it a point to be approachable.
Bower signed autographs gladly, mixed with fans, remained a living link between the game and the people who love it.
Bower always seemed older than his years, maybe because he was one of the more ancient players on the Maple Leafs as his belated NHL career ticked along.
He was philosophical when he turned 65: “The best part of it,” he told the Montreal Gazette at the time, “is that now I get 10 per cent off at the supermarket.”
He handled aging with grace and dignity, but also with a little sadness, as peers slowly shuffled off the Earth.
“I sit here many times and say, ‘Nancy, there goes another one of those players I played against. There goes another one,’ ” Bower said when I asked him about Howe. “There are so many players passing away, and it hurts. You pick up a paper, and Joe so-and-so just passed away. It’s hard to take, in a way.”
Bower’s the latest of those Joe so-and-sos, his obit flashing across the wires, just like Gordie Howe’s did a year and a half ago.
He got five more years on this Earth than Howe, packed a lot of living into that span from 19242017, and stopped thousands of pucks along the way.
As a kid in Prince Albert, Bower would listen to Foster Hewitt calling faraway games on the radio, dreaming the whole time.
“You know how kids are,” he told interviewer Kevin Boland many years ago. “I wanted to get my name on the Stanley Cup, and maybe to end up in the Hall of Fame.”
Which he did, of course, and so much more.