Indo Canadian News News That Matters
Howie Meeker, Hockey Night in Canada icon and a former National Hockey League (NHL) player, passed away on Sunday (Nov 8, 2020) at Nanaimo General Hospital located in British Columbia, Vancouver Island. He was 97 years old.
A spokesperson for Toronto Maple Leaf has confirmed via email that Howie Meeker died on November 8, 2020. There is no statement on the cause of his death.
Different generations have different memories of Howie Meeker, but almost people involved hockey. He played hockey, talked about it and taught it.
Toronto Maple Leaf said that Howie Meeker was their oldest alumnus. On September 15, 2019, he received warm applause when he attended a team alumni game held in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador province.
Born on November 4, 1923 in Kitchener, Ontario, Howie Meeker had won four Stanley Cup championships with Toronto and was the oldest living Maple Leafs. He was also a National Hockey League (NHL) star and won the Rookie of the Year Award in 1947 after scoring 27 goals and 45 points in 55 games.
He went on to play in three all-star and games. He also played for 8 years in four Stanley Cups with the Maple Leafs and won NHL championships in 1947, 1948, 1949 and 1951.
He finished his NHL career at age 30 in the 1953-54 season with 83 goals, 329 penalty minutes, 102 assists and 185 points in 388 regular season games, while scoring 15 points in 42 playoff contests. Most famously, he passed the puck to Bill Barilko to win the 1951 Cup overtime against Montreal.
But, he continued to play pro hockey games for another 15 years at different levels including the American Hockey League and Newfoundland Senior League, etc. After the end of the 1968-69 seasons, he retired from playing and skated until the 1980s.
He went on to become a broadcaster of the Hockey Hall of Fame because of his innovative and colorful commentary, mainly in the hugely popular “Hockey Night in Canada” telecasts in the 1970s and 1980s. He was well known for phrases such as “Stop it right there!”, “Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat!”, “Jiminy Cricket” and “Golly gee willikers”. After 30 years of working with CBC and TSN, he won the Foster Hewitt Memorial Award in 1998 while working with HNIC.
Howie Meeker has been running a hockey school for more than 30 years and literally wrote a book about hockey, called “1973’s Howie Meeker’s Hockey Basics”. In the 1970s, he provided drills and techniques during his Howie Meeker Hockey School sessions on CBC. Later, he wrote another book named “Golly Gee — It’s Me: The Howie Meeker Story”. He had many opinions and tricks on how to improve the game that he loved the most.
