'Terrible Ted' remembered for winning 4 Stanley Cup championships with Red Wings, unflinching principle
© Louis Jaques, Weekend Magazine, Hockey Hall of Fame; Le Studio du Hockey/Hockey Hall of Fame
The scale and tape measure meant nothing to Ted Lindsay, one of the most ferocious, feared and respected players of his time who was born 100 years ago on this July 29.
Lindsay was listed at 5-foot-8 and 163 pounds, but that might have been in thick-soled shoes after a four-course meal. If he looked up to many, in the physical sense, he was looked down upon by no one.
At a charity golf tournament years ago, Lindsay was introduced to PGA Tour great Billy Casper. The 5-11 golfer gazed at his diminutive new friend and said, “You were the scourge of the NHL?”
Came the steely eyed reply: “When I put my skates on, I’m 6-foot-5.”
‘Terrible Ted’ Lindsay took on all comers for Detroit
Lindsay, who died at age 93 on March 4, 2019, was a towering figure off the ice, too.
“One of the game’s fiercest competitors during his 17-season NHL career, Lindsay was among its most beloved ambassadors throughout the more than five decades of service to hockey that followed his retirement,” NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman said upon Lindsay’s passing. “In Detroit, he was a civic icon. What he lacked in physical stature he possessed in intensity, desire and will to win.”
One of the greatest left wings in hockey history, Lindsay was a man of deep, unflinching principle.
At great personal and professional sacrifice, he drew the ire of team owners by working to improve the lot of teammates and competitors alike, co-founding the NHL Players’ Association. The Detroit Red Wings legend was stripped of his captaincy in 1956 and dumped by his beloved, mighty team July 23, 1957, because of this union work, traded to the Chicago Black Hawks.
© Detroit Free Press via newspapers.com
The Detroit Free Press reports the July 23, 1957, blockbuster trade of Detroit’s Ted Lindsay with Glenn Hall to the Chicago Black Hawks for Bill Preston, Hank Bassen, Forbes Kennedy and Johnny Wilson.
The NHLPA’s annual most valuable player award, voted by the players themselves, was reintroduced as the Ted Lindsay Award in 2009-10, in honor of its namesake’s trailblazing work.
“Ted’s willingness to stand up for his fellow players helped lay the foundation for modern sports unions,” NHLPA Executive Director Marty Walsh said. “He saw the value in a unified voice for players, which is integral to the work that we do here at the NHLPA to this day.
“In recognition of his work, the NHLPA renamed the most outstanding player award (formerly named the Lester B. Pearson Award) after Ted. It’s a fitting tribute to his relentless leadership, his integrity, and his tireless efforts on behalf of the players.”
Lindsay last presented the award in 2017, on stage to hand it to Edmonton Oilers captain Connor McDavid. His fragile health left him unable to attend the 2018 NHL Awards, 10 months before his death.
“I’m honored to have my name on a trophy to the game I loved and still love, and will do anything for, if I can, in the twilight years of my life,” he said over breakfast in his Las Vegas hotel suite the morning of the 2017 awards. “As long as I can keep in good health, I’ll do whatever I can and stay involved however I can. Hockey is the greatest game in the world, bar none. You don’t hide when you get on the ice. You can’t hide. You either show that you’ve got something, or you don’t have anything.”
© Bruce Bennett/Getty Images; Imperial Oil-Turofsky/Hockey Hall of Fame
Ted Lindsay presents his award for the final time in 2017, posing in Las Vegas with Edmonton Oilers captain Connor McDavid; and taping his ankle, recovering from a hairline fracture, in his team’s Maple Leaf Gardens dressing room on Dec. 7, 1948.
That Jan. 1, Lindsay had been named one of the 100 Greatest NHL Players to begin the League’s Centennial year, an honor that moved him profoundly.
“There have been so many great hockey players, a lot of them deceased, a lot of older gentlemen who didn’t make the top 100,” he said. “I always believed they were very instrumental in selling the game.”
Lindsay was unable to attend the announcement and ceremony in Toronto because Joanne, his wife of 28 years, best friend and soulmate, was a month from losing her battle with cancer.
“It’s very difficult when I get together with people who were our friends,” he said over breakfast, tears welling up. “When I think of Jo, well, I try to keep away from it, but I’m getting better. She’ll never leave me. She was a gem, a real gem. She was good and she still is good. She’s still with me.”
© Turofsky/Hockey Hall of Fame
The puck bouncing at the end of his stick, Detroit’s Ted Lindsay prepares to test Toronto goalie Ed Chadwick during the Red Wings’ 4-1 win at Maple Leaf Gardens on Jan. 26, 1957. Looking on are referee Eddie Powers, Detroit’s Alex Delvecchio and Toronto’s Al MacNeil.
A half century before, Lindsay chose not to attend his 1966 Hockey Hall of Fame induction because families weren’t then invited to the luncheon. That policy was changed the following year.
“(Players) are wonderful people when we’re winning, but when we go home and we’re losing, we’re miserable for our wives and our children,” he said. “My feeling was, families put up with us when we were temperamental idiots, they should be able to enjoy the benefits of what the League and the Hall of Fame are giving us. That’s a very simple decision.”
In 2001, Lindsay and his wife established the Ted Lindsay Foundation to support autism awareness and research, an ongoing initiative that has dramatically improved the lives of those living on the spectrum, and their families.
The foundation’s mission: “To raise money and funds to support research and educational programs, focusing on the cause and management of autism spectrum disorders.”
About $6 million has been raised by the foundation and its partners. The 25th annual Ted Lindsay Celebrity Golf Outing — the organization’s signature fundraiser — will take place Sept. 9.
© Imperial Oil-Turofsky/Hockey Hall of Fame; Dave Stubbs/NHL.com
Ted Lindsay poses for a portrait as a member of the Toronto St. Michael’s Majors during the 1943-44 OHA Junior A season at Maple Leaf Gardens and photographed at Joe Louis Arena in Detroit on April 18, 2016.
Lindsay was proud to wear a diamond-encrusted pin on his left lapel, near his heart, that featured the winged-wheel logo of the Red Wings and his No. 7, which was hung in the rafters of Joe Louis Arena on Nov. 10, 1991, today over the ice at Little Caesars Arena.
“I loved the game of hockey, but I never looked at myself as a great hockey player,” he said, the latter claim one that would be laughed at by anyone who saw him play or weathered his fury. “Owners never paid my salary. I always recognized that it was the people in the seats who did. I always wanted to give my best. Some nights, it was great.
“But there were other nights,” he added with a laugh, “that I was not too pleased with my performance.”
There would be precious few of those during 13 seasons with the Red Wings from 1944-57, three more with the Black Hawks after the trade, to one final season in the sun with the Red Wings in 1964-65, at age 39 following a four-year retirement.
© Macdonald Stewart/Hockey Hall of Fame
Captain Ted Lindsay sits front row center behind the Stanley Cup with the 1953-54 champion Detroit Red Wings. Front row from left: trainer Carl Mattson, Bob Goldham, GM Jack Adams, Lindsay, coach Tommy Ivan, Marty Pavelich, head scout John Mitchell. Second row: Dave Gatherum, Glen Skov, Gordie Howe, Red Kelly, Alex Delvecchio, Marcel Pronovost, Terry Sawchuk. Third row: trainer Lefty Wilson, Jim Peters, Tony Leswick, Gilles Dube, Keith Allen, Jim Hay. Top row: Earl Reibel, Benny Woit, Al Arbour, Bill Dineen, Metro Prystai, Johnny Wilson, team PR Fred Huber.
Lindsay played his entire 1,068-game NHL career like every opponent owed him money, a short-fused keg of dynamite who suffered no fools and took no prisoners.
When he finally hung up his battered skates, he won the Stanley Cup four times with Detroit (1950, 1952, 1954 and 1955), had 851 regular-season points (379 goals, 472 assists) with another 96 points in 133 Stanley Cup Playoff games (47 goals, 49 assists), won the 1949-50 Art Ross Trophy as the NHL’s points leader and racked up a staggering 1,808 penalty minutes, a then-record, the equivalent of 30 full games. If he couldn’t look a scrapping opponent in the eye, he’d climb a ladder to get to him.
More than 60 years after having played his final game, he’s 72nd in NHL history in penalty minutes.
Lindsay was fiercely proud of the estimated 700 stitches he took during his career, carved by sticks and fists. Forever fighting well beyond his weight class, “Terrible Ted” gave every bit as good as he got.
© Turofsky/Hockey Hall of Fame
Toronto’s Jimmy Thomson absorbs a poke from Detroit’s Ted Lindsay during Game 4 of the Stanley Cup semifinals March 26, 1955. The Red Wings defeated the Maple Leafs 2-1 on the way to sweeping the series.
Indeed, his Las Vegas room-service breakfast of granola and tea was almost a disappointment; you expected him to be washing down a plate of broken glass with a mug of gasoline.
Every inch of the untold miles of his career could be found in the relief map that was his face. There was a magnificent, lived-in quality to this legend’s mug, one of craters and deep valleys and meandering scars. Imagine the lunar surface painted as a man’s face.
Born July 29, 1925, in Renfrew, Ontario but raised in the mining town of Kirkland Lake some 320 miles to the north, Lindsay treated every opponent equally.
“I hated everybody,” he said with a shrug. “I had no friends. I wasn’t there to make friends. I was there to win. It wasn’t necessary that I score, but I figured I could be an integral part without scoring. I had ability, I had talent, and I didn’t have an ego that I thought I was great. I realized I had to earn it. That was my purpose, to be the best that there was at the left-wing position. …
© Dave Sandford/Hockey Hall of Fame
Class of 1966 Hockey Hall of Fame member Ted Lindsay is introduced prior to the shrine’s Hall of Fame Game between the Buffalo Sabres and Toronto Maple Leafs at Air Canada Centre on Nov. 6, 2010.
“My hatred was sincere,” Lindsay admitted of his foes, sparring with anyone in a different sweater. “That was my problem, I guess. I understood people, understood human nature. I wasn’t a psychologist or anything, but I knew people. You’d figure out who the chickens were on the other side, who the bulls were on the other side, (then) spend your time with the chickens and stay away from the bulls.”
Which wasn’t true, of course. Lindsay was just as willing to mix it up with a bovine as he was with a rooster.
“I never looked at stats,” he said. “I was part of a team. I couldn’t do it by myself and nobody else on the team could do it themselves. We were part of a team. I had to help my teammates as much as they helped me. That was my philosophy.”
There was no thought, Lindsay said, of following in his father’s skates. Bert Lindsay was a goaltender in the pre-NHL National Hockey Association and in the Pacific Coast Hockey Association before playing two NHL seasons with the Montreal Wanderers and Toronto Arenas.
One of five boys in the family, Ted Lindsay began skating at age 9 in too-large boots given to him by a Kirkland Lake neighbor, but he’d never be a goalie.
© Dave Stubbs/NHL.com
The Ted Lindsay Award photographed Nov. 17, 2024, at the Hockey Hall of Fame Resource Centre in Toronto.
“No, no,” he said with a laugh. “I loved handling the puck, I loved handling that little black thing. I loved hitting people. And I love intimidating people, also.
“Every school in Kirkland Lake had two rinks in the backyard. Our normal winter, it was 15 below zero. There was no wind chill (factor) at that time, it was just temperature. We’d have snowstorms that could fill the rink to the top of the boards, and the teachers would say, ‘Get your homework done and I’ll let you out of class early. With a game Saturday, there’s a lot of shoveling to do.’
“It was always easy at the start of winter, you’d just throw the snow over the boards. But come Christmas time you needed somebody up top shoveling it back. That was the love of the game.”
Lindsay would play scholastic junior hockey at St. Mike’s in Toronto and win a Memorial Cup championship in 1944 with the Oshawa Generals. The Toronto Maple Leafs heard of this promising young forward, but Lindsay was hospitalized, nursing a calf that had been punctured in a game. When Maple Leafs brass went to a game, not knowing his name, they scouted the wrong player.
© Imperial Oil-Turofsky/Hockey Hall of Fame
Detroit Red Wings’ famed “Production Line” of Gordie Howe (l.), Sid Abel (c.) and Ted Lindsay on Feb. 20, 1948, at Maple Leaf Gardens.
It would be Red Wings chief scout Carson Cooper who later dangled the NHL bait, not even certain whether Lindsay was on Toronto’s negotiation list. He wasn’t, and fate brought him to the Red Wings, a team he had grown to love — especially hard-rocks Jimmy Orlando and Jack Stewart — by listening to powerful WJR radio, whose signal reached Kirkland Lake from Detroit on crisp, winter nights.
“My kind of hockey — big, tough guys,” Lindsay said of the Red Wings of his youth. “I got to play with Jack Stewart for many years, and I appreciated that. He was a wonderful policeman to have on your team. He was a farmer from Pilot Mound, Manitoba. Marty Pavelich (a close Lindsay friend, teammate and, later, business partner) used to say, ‘I’m seven-foot tall when I’m on the ice with Jack Stewart.’
“I’ve been blessed many times,” Lindsay said both of his life and of being discovered by the Red Wings. “I’ve never thought it was fate, but maybe it was.”
And so, this teenager arrived in the NHL with fire in his belly and an enormous chip on his shoulder, at 19 in his rookie season finishing just out of the League’s top five in penalty minutes.
In time he would be lined up with center Sid Abel and right-wing Gordie Howe, a prolific trio that would be known as the “Production Line.”
© Turofsky/Hockey Hall of Fame
Ted Lindsay starts up the ice in a 1957-58 game between the Chicago Black Hawks and Toronto at Maple Leaf Gardens.
“A 6-foot-2 guy, he can give me a shiner, he can cut me, I can go in and get stitched and come back out,” Lindsay said, distilling his rugged philosophy. “He’s not going to threaten me; he’s not going to scare me. I’ll be back and I’ll scare him before the game is over. …
“I loved the corners,” he continued, eyes sparkling. “That’s where you found men. You found more chickens. You knew who the chickens were on the other team because they’d always back off a little bit. If I was coming, they knew they were going to get lumber or elbows or anything. They were going to get into the screen (before there was glass).”
You won’t find Lindsay’s name on the Stanley Cup today. In 2010, the sterling and nickel-alloy band bearing the champions from 1953-54 to 1964-65 was retired to the vault of the Hockey Hall of Fame, the names of Howe, Maurice Richard, Glenn Hall (a friend packaged in his 1957 trade to Chicago), Bobby Hull and more than 300 others also removed.
“That’s part of history,” Lindsay said. “I’m fine with it. I know I won the Stanley Cup; I don’t need to see my name on it.”
© Le Studio du Hockey/Hockey Hall of Fame; Dave Reginek/NHLI
Ted Lindsay after one of the four 1950s Stanley Cup championships he won with the Detroit Red Wings, and beside his statue at Detroit’s Joe Louis Arena on Oct. 18, 2008.
He joked about the fact his name was misspelled “Lindsey” for the 1949-50 championship, saying “it didn’t bother me as long as we won the Cup.” And it was Lindsay who as captain of the Red Wings began the tradition of carrying the trophy around the ice for fans to have a better look.
“In those days (before shatterproof glass), everything was chicken wire at the end of the rink, from the faceoff dots and around behind the net,” he remembered. “Where the screen ended, the fans would lean on the boards, over the ice. They’d move back when the play came by.
“These were the people who paid my salary. When I saw the Cup sitting on a table after Clarence (Campbell, the NHL president) presented it to (Red Wings GM Jack) Adams, I guess I saw these people by the penalty box. So, I just picked it up. Adams was probably thinking, ‘What’s that idiot Lindsay going to do, throw it?’ The fans all wanted to see it.”
The small gesture was one of Lindsay’s many, part of his impressive, important legacy that is celebrated a century after his birth.
Today, the footprint on hockey of this small giant remains immeasurable. He is still larger than life, still heavier than the scale suggested, still taller than the tape measure read.
“I hope it’s good, what they would say,” he said of how he’d like to be remembered. “Maybe I didn’t always have a good night, but I never cheated them.”
Top photo: Detroit captain Ted Lindsay in a 1953-54 portrait (r.), and back with the Red Wings for his final NHL season in 1964-65.
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