Great anecdotes on Terrible Ted and some amazing other videos scrolling across the bottom too.  I always wanted to go to Olympia to see a game, the advertisements for tickets in the Detroit Free Press were so enticing.  But we lived too far away for my Dad to take us, west of Flint, and he wasn’t especially a hockey fan even thought I tried like Heck to see the Wings or whoever was playing on Channel 9 Windsor 100 miles away.  He was a semi-pro barn storming baseball player in the 30s and 40s, so he did take us to Briggs/Tiger Stadium a few times. 

If you’re old enough, the first major league baseball game you saw in color was walking thru the turnstile and up the hallway and seeing the stunning beauty of the green outfield grass, fine brown dirt of the infield and immaculately chalked, white lines.  The home uniforms and the baseballs seemed to be another level of white, and you had never seen anything like the flight of the baseball off the fungo bat soaring way up into the blue sky...of course if you were in Tiger Stadium lower deck the overhang blocked visibility for about 50% of the fly balls! LOL!  And I watched the 1971 All-Star game peering around one of those pillars in lower deck right field, F. Robbie’s HR landed a few rows in front of me.

Posted by RWBill from the train station climbing on The Hasek.All Aboard on 07/13/08 at 11:42 AM ET

As I’m a younger fan, my favourite all-time Wing was Vladdie Konstantinov, who was really cut from similar cloth.  Those players who embrace the concept that their best asset, wonderful hockey skills aside, is to be an awful, awful player to play against, to embrace the concept that you could be most effective by getting players off their game because they were more afraid of what kind of hurt you were gonna put on them, that being the bad guy is sometimes what makes room for your teammates, and that if you’ve gotta take a few welts, scars, and hard hits to do so, you’re never, ever gonna back down...Those teammates and players are worth their weight in gold.  They cannot be out-competed, out-willed, and never intimidated away from repeatedly going to the “hard” areas of the ice, the places where you take some pain to get your job done, and if they took a whack or two to get their job done, they’d take your number, let you know they were coming after you, and they’d still get you and then some the next game or the game after that. 

That’s old time hockey.  You give somebody a holler to let ‘em know that you’re coming for ‘em, and you still make their lives miserable.  You can be as nice as you want before the puck’s dropped, but once it is, it’s war, and you simply cannot win against a player that can never be out-willed, out-hustled, or out-meaned.  Even listening to the Wings’ brass talk about how much they’re gonna miss a guy who embraced the “bad guy” role like Dallas Drake, I mean, these guys are still the difference-makers for championship teams, and while you might hate ‘em when they play for the other team, you respect them, because they’re never gonna stop coming after you.

Posted by George James Malik from South Lyon, MI on 07/13/08 at 01:30 PM ET

Thanks, Paul, that made my day. I would like to see (and I’m totally serious) a Ted Lindsay Award for the most Lindsayesque player of the year. As George pointed out, the Averys, the Otts, the Carcillos make a huge difference.

Posted by Leserv from Arizona on 07/13/08 at 02:18 PM ET

Tear

Posted by Osrt on 07/13/08 at 03:32 PM ET

Thats Awesome He totally deserves it he is the man!!!

Posted by Nick from Long Island, NY on 07/13/08 at 03:34 PM ET

I was impressed by how thoughtful Lindsay was in his interview, especially his discussion of the players’ association which he tried to organize.  (And was traded and black-balled for doing so)

The thought that the players were intelligent, and that as an organized players’ association could make the game of professional hockey better, was so far ahead of the pig-headed owners.

To this day, people who have lots of money (NHL owners), and have every opportunity to easily make more money, think they are inherently smarter and better than those who work for them.

It has been the same with race relations.

White people always thought, and many still think, that because they are white they are inherently smarter and better than people with different color skin.

Posted by w2j2 on 07/13/08 at 04:05 PM ET