Meet Mrs. Hockey
Howe biopic pays homage to legend’s late wife
TORONTO It’s called Mr. Hockey: The Gordie Howe Story, but the film that airs Sunday on CBC-TV gives an equal amount of face time to another key player in the famed family.
As the movie shows, late wife Colleen Howe was the support system for Howe and their hockey-playing sons Marty and Mark, particularly as the beloved patriarch made a comeback to compete alongside his boys in the fledgling World Hockey Association league in the 1970s.
“Gordie was this giant on the ice and this giant figure in the hockey world but he’d spent so much of his life devoted to that, that I think even in their later years without her he was kind of lost because she handled everything else,” Vancouver actor Michael Shanks, who plays Howe in the film, said.
“That’s one of the reasons the movie is dedicated to her. It demonstrates this unsung hero, Mrs. Hockey, who was really where everything flowed back into.”
“She was doing things that women just didn’t do at that time,” said Hamilton-born star Kathleen Robertson, who plays Colleen.
“She was very involved and very influential in all the business dealings of what it was to be Gordie Howe in that time period. She was very protective of her sons, she basically negotiated their deals, she was their manager and she was really smart and really tough.”
Mr. Hockey finds Saskatchewanborn Howe in his mid-40s, retired from his 25-year career on the ice and unhappily working a job in the Detroit Red Wings front office.
When sons Marty (Dylan Playfair) and Mark (Andrew Herr) are drafted into the newly formed WHA in a deal initiated by agent Colleen, Howe decides to join them and they play for the Houston Aeros in what was billed as “the first father-son team ever.”
As the film shows, the move was also labelled by some as “the biggest publicity stunt in hockey history” and had officials with the rival NHL threatening that the Howe sons would never play in their league. But Howe wasn’t deterred. “He’d spent so much of his life playing the game that he was a little bit lost when he wasn’t doing it,” said Shanks.
“And then when the opportunity presented itself, where he saw that his two kids were drafted at a young age and he still had that fire burning, I think he just took advantage of the opportunity that he had to use his name to get back in the sport.”