A legend on the ice and behind the mic
Former Maple Leafs player best known for his critical analysis and folksy style
Howie Meeker, who was the oldest living Toronto Maple Leaf at 97, has died.
He was a four-time Stanley Cup winner, a former Toronto coach/ general manager and a chatty hockey broadcasting icon.
The Order of Canada member and Foster Hewitt Award winner died Sunday at Nanaimo General Hospital in B.C. after spending his retirement years on Vancouver Island.
“Today feels awful,” tweeted former Hockey Night in Canada host Dave Hodge. “Howie's death leaves me with so much to say, and so little ability to find the right words. In this limited space, I'll try by remembering him as the best of friends during the best times of my life.”
Born in Kitchener, Ont., Nov. 4, 1923, Howard William Meeker, grew up a huge Leafs fan, playing in and around his birthplace.
“As a kid I had it made,” Meeker recalled. “I played hockey all winter long on rivers, dams and backyard rinks.”
At age 11, during a pond hockey game in Kitchener with a pair of boots for a net, he recalled an older boy on his team berated him for giving the puck away so easily when his mates had worked so hard to get it. That tough love lecture made a lasting impression.
At 21, Meeker debuted at the Detroit Olympia in the same 3-3 tie that Gordie Howe scored his first NHL goal. Meeker, not Howe, won the Calder Trophy as rookie of the year, with events of Jan. 8, 1947 having a huge role. In a 10-4 romp over Chicago at the Gardens, Meeker was credited with five goals, tying Mickey Roach's franchise record.
Most of his success came with the Tricky Trio line of himself, Ted Kennedy and Vic Lynn. Meeker nonetheless said he spent his early years wondering if he could hold on to his job in a competitive sixteam NHL.
Injuries slowed Meeker in later years and he did not play after November of 1953, ending his Leafs career with 185 points in 346 games and three appearances in the NHL all-star game. In 1951, he ran successfully for the Progressive Conservatives in a federal byelection in Waterloo South, serving two years.
After a few seasons coaching senior and AHL hockey, the latter with Toronto's farm team in Pittsburgh, Meeker was lured behind the Leafs bench in 1956 to replace King Clancy. But his Leafs had only five wins by the start of December and missed the playoffs, and he only coached the one season.
He kept busy in the 1960s running a large youth hockey program in Newfoundland's Avalon Peninsula, but being out of the game as a day-to-day participant gnawed at him.
He did some radio broadcast work for CJON in St. John's, but supplemented his income as a sales and promotions man for major companies such as Toyota cars, Samsonite luggage and Mattel toys. It was during a trip through Montreal in 1968 for a toy convention that he bumped into local TV
All I cared about was, would it get people interested and talking about hockey.”
play-by-play man Ted Darling, who needed a guest analyst for a game against visiting Chicago.
“The rest as they say, is history,” Meeker wrote in his 1999 book Stop It There, Back It Up! “I had no idea at the time what an amazing series of events was about to unfold when I first stuck on the head set.”
The squeaky-sounding Meeker figured he would get only one shot on an NHL telecast so gosh, golly gee, he should let 'er rip.
“I thought, `I've got the worse voice in the world, I can't remember faces and names and they want to make me a colour analyst?'” Meeker said when given the Hewitt award for broadcast excellence in 1998. “I didn't really need the job, but I had watched other guys do it. They were scared to say anything that would cost them their jobs. They said nothing instructional, nothing critical.”
Meeker made no apologies for his theatrics on air or his highpitched descriptions of the action and exclamations such as “Jiminy Crickets” and “golly gee willikers.”
“I grew up in an era where locker-room language was atrocious,” Meeker said. “If I would have used it on the air, I would have been fired, so I used something else. You're like an actor. You do things to disturb people. All I cared about was, would it get people interested and talking about hockey.”
Meeker became famous for his use of the new telestrator and his chirpy commands for the tape operator to speed up, rewind, slow down or freeze the highlight.
On Dec. 30, 2010, he was named to the Order of Canada.