Frank Litsky

<h1>Ted Lindsay, a Hall of Fame player who packed a fierce combativeness in a slight frame as he helped the Detroit Red Wings win four Stanley Cup championship titles, died Monday at his home in Oakland Township, Michigan. He was 93.</h1>

Lew LaPaugh, a son-in-law and the president of the Ted Lindsay Foundation, which raises money for autism research, confirmed the death.

Lindsay, nicknamed Terrible Ted, played 17 seasons in the National Hockey League, 14 of them with the Red Wings, coming out of retirement for the final one. He was the first NHL player to play 1,000 games, a first-team All Star eight times and a participant in 11 All-Star Games. The Red Wings named him their captain.

Lindsay could be scrappy off the ice as well. In the mid-1950s he led an initially unsuccessful effort to create a players’ union, for which he paid a price.

In Detroit, Lindsay is revered as part of a celebrated triumvirate, the Production Line, in which he played left wing alongside Gordie Howe at right wing and Sid Abel at center. He was the last surviving member of that trio.

All three were elected to the Hockey Hall of Fame, Lindsay in 1966, a year after his final retirement, when the three-year waiting period for eligibility was waived. And all three are remembered at the Red Wings’ new home, the Little Caesars Arena (as they were at the team’s previous home, Joe Louis Arena), where oversize jerseys hang from the rafters bearing their retired numbers — Howe’s 9, Abel’s 12 and Lindsay’s 7.

In 1950, Lindsay won the Art Ross Trophy as the league’s scoring champion; Abel finished second and Howe third. In all, in 1,068 regular-season games, Lindsay recorded 379 goals and 472 assists for 851 points, making him at the time the highest-scoring left wing.

A battler on the ice, perhaps to compensate for his size — 5-foot-8 and about 165 pounds — he was heavily penalized, too. He spent 1,808 minutes in the penalty box, the equivalent of 30 games.

“I was born a poor loser,” he told The New York Times in 1973, explaining his feistiness. “I wouldn’t talk to anyone who wasn’t on my team.”

Bill Chadwick, a Hall of Fame referee, spent many nights trying to keep Lindsay under control. “Ted was a mean hockey player,” Chadwick once said, “but he was the kind of guy I would have wanted to play for me. He’d do anything to get the puck in the net.”

Robert Blake Theodore Lindsay was born on July 29, 1925, in Renfrew, Ontario, the home of one of professional hockey’s premier teams in its early years, the Renfrew Millionaires. Ted’s father, Bert, was a star goaltender for the team and played as well in the early NHL. His mother, Maude (Villemarie) Lindsay, was a homemaker.

In 1929, with the onset of the Depression, the family moved to Kirkland Lake, Ontario, where Bert Lindsay worked in the gold mines and where Ted grew up.

After two years in junior hockey, he joined the Red Wings at 19 in 1944 and remained with them until 1957. That was the year Lindsay led a group that tried to establish a players’ union.

Lindsay took his plans to Jimmy Hoffa, the Teamsters union boss, who told him that professional athletes did not need a union. Jack Adams, the Red Wings’ longtime general manager, had another response: He traded Lindsay to the Chicago Blackhawks.

Lindsay recalled that in his first game against his old team, he smacked Howe over the head. Howe remembered, too. “I laid him out,” Howe said. “Then I asked him if this was the way he wanted to play.”

Lindsay got up off the ice, he said, and replied, “No, I guess it’s not worth breaking up a friendship.”

After the Lindsay trade, the new NHL Players’ Association filed a $3 million federal antitrust suit, calling the league a dictatorship. Four months later, in February 1958, the players dropped the suit and plans for a union when the club owners agreed to a $7,000 salary minimum and a 60-percent increase in pension benefits.

The players now have a union, the National Hockey League Players’ Association, and the average salary is about $3 million a year.

Lindsay played three seasons in Chicago (1957-60), retired for four seasons and returned to Detroit for one more, 1964-65.

During his time in Detroit, the Red Wings won the Stanley Cup in 1950, defeating the New York Rangers, 4 games to 3; in 1952, sweeping the Montreal Canadiens, 4-0; and in 1954 and 1955, beating the Canadiens each time, 4-3. In 133 playoff games, Lindsay had 47 goals and 49 assists for 96 points.

He later became general manager of the Red Wings (1977-80) and coached them for nine games in the 1979-80 season and 20 games in 1980-81. His coaching record was 5-21-3.

In later years, Lindsay was a television hockey analyst and a manufacturer’s representative.

He is survived by a son, Blake; two daughters, Lynn Lindsay LaPaugh and Meredith Berman; a stepdaughter, Leslie Richardson; six grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.

In their playing heyday, Lindsay, Howe and Abel were good friends as well as Production Line teammates. “There was a place we used to meet for drinks after a workout or a game,” Abel, who died in 2000, once said.

Howe saw them as the quintessence of teamwork. “They used to say that if you blindfolded us, we’d still be able to find one another,” he said. “All of us knew where everyone else was at any given moment. Maybe the closeness off the ice had something to do with it.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="ad51c98b-9763-4e40-8efa-00e8340ae6cd" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/04/obituaries/ted-lindsay-dead.html">The New York Times</a>.

Ted Lindsay, Hall of Fame scorer who powered Red Wings, dies at 93

Lew LaPaugh, a son-in-law and the president of the Ted Lindsay Foundation, which raises money for autism research, confirmed the death.

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Frank Litsky

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Ted Lindsay, Hall of Fame scorer who powered Red Wings, dies at 93