Gordie Howe, who died today, made the Canadian virtues of modesty, persistence, and family-above-all-else part of the heritage of hockey. Photograph by Bettmann / Getty

Gordie Howe, who died today, was so much a legend—Mr. Hockey!—and so often referred to as the greatest player of all time, even lending his Number 9 to Wayne Gretzky (who turned it into his own 99), that it is surprisingly hard to put his achievements into clear relief. His persistence was such that, in memory, it overwhelms his peculiar excellence. The persistence was pretty startling. He played until he was fifty-two, long enough to skate professionally alongside his own sons. His accumulated stats include 2,421 games, 1,071 goals, 1,518 assists, 2,589 points, and 2,418 penalty minutes. Until Gretzky passed him, he held the professional records of 801 goals and 1,850 points. He seemed to play forever, and he forever played well, winning six M.V.P. awards and six scoring championships, too.

Yet it is hard to freeze his style, his special manner, his way of playing, neatly into a mental image. Maurice Richard, his great rival among the 9’s of hockey, was the Rocket: his fire and passion can still be distilled from ancient video and collective memory. Bobby Orr’s end-to-end rushes are well preserved on tape, and his achievement is still distinct—he made defenseman an attacking position. Gretzky’s quiet genius (so oddly like that of today’s basketball Gretzky, Steph Curry, both of them unassuming athletically and beyond perfect in situational intelligence) still leaves Wayne in our heads, parked behind the enemy net, sizing up the perfect pass.

Some of Howe’s peculiar greatness is summed up in the still-current “Gordie Howe hat trick,” which is when a player has a goal, an assist, and a fight all in one game. Howe was tough—and, by all accounts, mean. I forget now which young player it was who recalled, in tones combining awe and disbelief, how his first experience of playing the Red Wings, and meeting his hero, was receiving a slicing Howe elbow to the jaw, perfectly timed to the referee’s turning back. But if Howe was tough, he was also hugely skilled. Perhaps only Mark Messier, among players bright in our contemporary memory, combined the same qualities of grit, skill, desire, and accuracy. As Gretzky lived on the edge of his skates, Howe lived in his wrists: the accuracy, power, and quickness of his shot are the first things those who saw him up close, in his prime, often reference (after they reference the elbows that rose above those wrists).

Above all, he was a representative—the perfect representative—of a certain kind of Canadianness, reflected, as it was bound to be, in a hockey player, as perhaps Lou Gehrig or Stan Musial, other Iron Men, were representative of similar, American baseball values, now largely lost. A product of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, the most Canadian of Canadian places, Howe might have had the Canadian fault of being a touch too trusting, easily and even brutally exploited by the Red Wings owner Bruce Norris. He nonetheless made the Canadian virtues of modesty, persistence, and family-above-all-else part of the heritage of hockey. He didn’t just play with his sons; he played well with his sons—while his wife, Colleen, a Detroit girl, was always surprisingly visible, in a way few athletes’ wives were at the time. He even got to play in the now mostly—and unfairly—forgotten 1974 Summit Series, when the World Hockey Association’s stars took on the Soviets. He was old, but still the leader.

His sheer endurance may have clouded the edges of his accomplishment—but if you could clone an ideal Canadian athlete, you would probably still clone Gordie Howe.