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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781927855829 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Great Plains Press |
| Publication date: | 11/15/2017 |
| Pages: | 336 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d) |
About the Author
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CHAPTER 1
TERRY SAWCHUK
"We are the sort of people that make health insurance popular."
— Terry Sawchuk
Terry Sawchuk is widely regarded as the greatest goaltender that's ever lived. So frankly it was a pretty easy decision to put him here as the number one Manitoba hockey player of all time. It's tough to top four Stanley Cups and four Vezina Trophies. A sportswriter who knew Terry well said, "He was the greatest goalie I ever saw, and the most troubled athlete I ever knew."
The legendary Emile "The Cat" Francis told me personally that no better goaltender has ever come around in all of years he followed the sport and that Terry Sawchuk is still the greatest. Gordie Howe claimed throughout his later life that Sawchuk was the best goalie he ever saw. Don Cherry also says he's the greatest goalie he's ever seen. Basically, everyone that was around to watch Sawchuk play will tell you that he's the top netminder of all time.
The perfect goalie living in an imperfect world, shouldering the blame for every puck that slipped by him. The only thing that satisfied Sawchuck at game's end was a shutout. Terry dealt with clinical depression that went untreated his entire life. One can only imagine the severe mental anguish and trauma that went hand-in-hand with the physical sufferings of all the injuries he endured. He was a tormented soul there's no doubt about that, but he was put on earth if for no other reason than to be the greatest netminder in hockey history. "I don't think people understood the suffering he went through," said son Jerry Sawchuk. "He shouldn't have been an athlete. He was a freak of nature and was driven by two things — fear and adrenaline." His fear was "of losing his job because he didn't know how he was going to feed his family if he did. He was always insecure about it. That's why, despite horrible injuries, he hung on."
"A chain-smoking nervous wreck who seemed bent on self-destruction," wrote The Hockey News columnist Ken Campbell. "He was perceived as a moody, aloof cuss who seemed to be dogged by the dark clouds of insecurity."
I'm not going to go too much into Terry's personal problems in this chapter. Terry's full life story is very eye-opening and if you'd like to read more then I highly recommend checking out my colleague David Dupuis' tremendous book called Sawchuk: The Troubles and Triumphs of the World's Greatest Goalie. It's a truly fascinating read.
Terry Sawchuk was born in Winnipeg on December 28, 1929 to a Ukrainian family. He was the third of four sons (and one adopted daughter) born to his parents, Louis and Anne. Louis had fled Ukraine as a child and made a living as a tinsmith in a factory. Legend has it that Louis had once settled an argument with a former Canadian boxing champion by knocking him out with a single punch.
Tragedy became a common thing for Terry early on in his life. Louis and Anne's second son died of pneumonia when Terry was a baby and then when Terry was ten, his older brother Mitch died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of seventeen. Mitch was an up and coming goaltender that Terry idolized and his death scarred him for the rest of his life.
Terry was born and grew up in a house at 620 Aberdeen Avenue in the North End. Terry was put on skates for the first time at the age of three. His Uncle Nick played a big role in getting the Sawchuk boys started in hockey, "Louis (Terry's dad) had a nice big yard so we made a bob ski run. We had a larger, wider yard so we made the hockey rink there. Then, when Terry was getting better, we made one big rink, about the length of six houses, right to the sidewalk. It was as slick as you could make it. And we used to play with our shoes, just fooling around. All of the guys in the neighbourhood would come out, too, and we'd play around."
Terry went to nearby Strathcona School on McGregor Street and soon after started playing pick-up hockey with his chums at an outdoor rink on Cathedral Avenue. It was his older brother Mitch who taught him how to play goalie and showed him the "Sawchuk Crouch" that would later set Terry apart from the rest of the game's top goalies once he got to the National Hockey League.
Mitch was a high school goaltender and Terry's role model. Him and George Hainsworth, Terry's favourite goalie in the NHL growing up. Mitch and Terry would listen to Foster Hewitt on Saturday nights and Terry would be in awe of the great Hainsworth's netminding. He even went as far as trading four hockey cards for one of Hainsworth. Terry would pretend he was Hainsworth when he was playing on the outdoor rinks when he wasn't emulating his brother. Mitch died at the age of seventeen. Terry was only ten at the time and his world as he had known had crumbled with Mitch's untimely death.
Shortly after Mitch passed away, the family moved to a modest two-storey home at 257 Bowman Avenue in East Kildonan. Living his teen years in East Kildonan where NHLers Wally Stanowski and Alf Pike had grown up, the writing was on the wall that you could make the NHL one day if you put in the time and effort. Terry played his hockey at nearby Morse Place and Chalmers Community Club.
When Terry was twelve he dislocated his right elbow very badly playing rugby, and not wanting to be punished by his parents, he hid the injury, which resulted in the arm not healing properly and it ended up being two inches shorter than his left arm and had limited range of motion. It's an injury that hindered him for the rest of his life.
At around this time the Esquire Restaurant in Winnipeg, owned by a man named Max Fanstein, sponsored a boys' Midget hockey club called the Esquire Red Wings. The coach, Bob Kinnear, a western scout for the Detroit Red Wings, helped sponsor Fanstein's outdoor rink and ran a minor hockey program because Detroit was always looking for talent in western Canada. Kinnear was looking for a goalie and recalled that, "Terry was about eleven or twelve, husky and chubby. He was a defenceman with his school team. He was one of a hundred or so kids who hung around my outdoor rink. We always needed equipment and I recall him saying he had a pair of pads at home so I told him to bring them down." Kinnear encouraged Terry to try the pads on and see how he fared stopping pucks. To his amazement, Terry was a natural. After consulting with his scouting partner, they both agreed that the young Sawchuk had massive potential in goal.
Under Kinnear's tutelage, it was apparent after only a short while that Terry was the best young goalie around. Remembering Mitch's tutoring about the importance of balance to a goaltender, Terry began to develop his unique "Sawchuk Crouch" that became one of the most innovative things to happen in goaltending until the mask. Placing his hands out in front of him and bending his waist so that his center of gravity seemed always to be perfectly above his feet, his stance allowed him to have excellent lateral movement as well as balance.
Terry went to Prince Edward School at 649 Brazier Street and briefly attended East Kildonan High School (now Lord Wolseley School), before dropping out at fourteen to acquire his working papers so that he could help out his family by earning a wage. His father helped get him a job at a sheet-metal company, installing, among other things, huge vents over bakery ovens.
Kinnear eventually got the Sawchuk family to sign Terry with Detroit when he was fourteen, after Baldy Northcott, a Chicago scout, unsuccessfully tried to get Terry to sign a C-Form. When Terry left a little while later for Ontario to play for the junior Galt Red Wings, his mother slipped him a ten-dollar bill to help him on his journey. "It was one of the few ten-dollar bills she ever had!" Terry later said.
"Terry was kind of my idol because he lived on Bowman Avenue which was one street over from me when I was growing up," recalled Ted Harris. "I knew his younger brother real well but of course Terry was gone all the time playing hockey. I used to chum a little bit with his brother."
It should be noted that Sawchuk was also quite the baseball prospect around the same time. After his first season in Galt, he came home and led his Morse Park Monarchs to the 1947 junior provincial baseball championships. His .500 batting average attracted attention from baseball scouts for the St. Louis Cardinals, Pittsburgh Pirates, and Cleveland Indians. The next year, Sawchuk had a tryout with the Cleveland Indians' Indianapolis farm team of the American Association. After taking his swings, he was offered a chance to go to the minors in New Orleans for conditioning. Terry was very pleased with the offer but respectfully declined and returned home to Winnipeg.
He played first base for the Elmwood Giants of the Manitoba Senior League. The two-hundred-pound goalie with a right elbow that was permanently disfigured and painful, led the league in batting after twelve games with a batting average of .418. He went on to win the league batting championship with an average of .376, His Giants team won the Manitoba baseball championships. He also played that summer again with the Morse Park Monarchs but the playoff schedule conflicted with Red Wings training camp, so Terry had to miss it, and his Monarchs didn't fare so well without Sawchuk in the post-season.
The Red Wings signed the 6'0", 200-pound Sawchuk to a professional contract in 1947 when he was just seventeen years old. The Red Wings assigned him to the Omaha Knights of the USHL and he quickly learned what it took to be a pro hockey player. On Terry's 18th birthday in a game with Omaha, he was hit in the eye by a bullet slap shot. He lucked out that a surgeon happened to be passing through town and ended up saving Sawchuk's vision and hockey career with a successful operation.
He won Top Goaltender and Top Rookie honors with Omaha in 1947-48 before spending two seasons with the AHL's Indianapolis Capitals, which was culminated by a Calder Cup win in 1950. He even had a solid seven-game stint with the Red Wings in the 1949-50 season and soon after the Red Wings were confident enough about Terry to trade away incumbent starter Harry Lumley so Sawchuk could play full time in the NHL.
Sawchuk made general manager Jack Adams look like a genius when he won the Calder Trophy in 1950-51 (winning the Rookie of the Year award in three pro leagues — a record), playing in all of the club's 70 games with 44 wins and 11 shutouts, leading his Detroit side to a first-place finish in the regular season. Ultimately, they were knocked out of the playoffs by the Montreal Canadiens.
"Terry was the best goalie I ever saw," said CBC Hockey Night in Canada broadcaster Dick Irvin Jr. "I remember in 1951, the year I moved out east. The Montreal Canadiens outshot Detroit 48-12 and Detroit won the game 3-1. I've never seen a guy in my life play goal like Terry did that night. If I could ever see that game again I'd say the same thing because it was really something."
The next season was even better for Terry as he led the NHL in games played and wins for the second straight year, winning the Vezina Trophy in the process. In the playoffs, Terry was literally unbeatable going 8-0 with four shutouts and he didn't allow a single goal on home ice en-route to his first Stanley Cup. At 22 years old, he was already considered by most of the press as the greatest goalie in the history of the sport.
This was only the beginning for Terry. In the three seasons that followed, he won two more Stanley Cups and two more Vezinas to add to his already impressive trophy collection. Everything seemed to be going great for the Winnipeg native until June of 1955 when the Red Wings shocked the hockey world by trading Sawchuk to Boston in order to stake their future on young netminder Glenn Hall, who had been excelling in the minors. Terry felt betrayed. He had just won his team a Stanley Cup and all of the sudden they were trading him like he was used goods.
It was obvious that Terry didn't like his time in Boston. During his second season with the club, he contracted mononucleosis, and although he only missed two weeks of action, he was still very physically weak when he returned and was playing poorly. To top it off he was on the edge of a nervous breakdown, so he announced his retirement from the game in early 1957.
It turned out to be a very short retirement as by the time the next season rolled around, he was back stopping pucks in a familiar Detroit Red Wings uniform. Times had changed in the National Hockey League, however, and the Montreal Canadiens and Toronto Maple Leafs were now the teams to beat, and Detroit was only average so Sawchuk didn't have the same team success as he did in the beginning of his career.
With Sawchuk carrying the Red Wings workload, he led them to the Stanley Cup Finals in 1961, 1963 and 1964. And it was during that 1963-64 season that Terry broke his idol George Hainsworth's record for most career shutouts at 94. Sawchuk would eventually finish at 103 shutouts which was a record for 45 years until Martin Brodeur surpassed that mark.
In 1964, Sawchuk was claimed in an intra-league waiver draft by the Toronto Maple Leafs and for the next three seasons he would join forces in goal with Johnny Bower and the pair formed one of the greatest goaltending tandems the game has ever seen. In their first season together, they shared the Vezina Trophy even though their club finished in fourth in the league standings.
Leafs teammate Ron Ellis recalled Sawchuk in the Legends of Hockey documentary saying, "He hated practices. He would stand beside one post in practice and he'd hope that you didn't hit him, and he'd wave his stick once in a while at the other side of the net to see if he could stop the puck. That was the way he approached practices."
"Sometimes at the end of practice we'd have a shoot-off and there was money on the line," added Dave Keon. "Then he would play. And he usually won. But if there was nothing to the practice, his net looked like a coal bin there was so many pucks in it that it used to drive coach Punch Imlach nuts. But when it came time for the game to start, his record speaks for itself, he's the best that ever played."
"People don't want to give him credit for it, but he had a lot of class. Don't forget now he played for the Detroit Red Wings with the big stars. They got all the headlines, and they forget about the man back in the net, Terry Sawchuk," recalled Rangers teammate Eddie Giacomin. "We're in a unique position as goaltenders. In order for us to be good we have to be shot at. Remember that. We have to be shot at. And Terry used to say, 'Well you don't have to kill me.' What Terry used to get mad about is in practice the guys would come in and give it their all and blast that puck, and he would get furious at them and say, 'Why don't you do that in the game to the opposing goaltender? What are you trying to kill me for?'"
Sawchuk is perhaps best known today for his heroics in the 1967 playoffs. Saying that Terry "carried" the Leafs to the Cup would still be a massive understatement so I'll just say that he played out of this world in such a big moment during the twilight of his career. "He played so well," recalled Ron Ellis. "I can still see him standing on his head, I can still see him challenging Bobby Hull shot after shot after shot."
Sawchuk played the role of a miracle worker in a six-game semifinal victory against Bobby Hull and the Chicago Blackhawks. He then did so again throughout a long and tiring six-game series victory over Montreal in the finals. After making several miraculous saves in the dying moments of Game 6, Terry retreated to the dressing room while his teammates celebrated with the Cup.
"I don't like champagne and I'm too tired to dance, but this has to be the thrill of my life," said Sawchuk. "I've had a lot of wonderful moments in hockey and other Stanley Cups but nothing equal to this."
Leafs teammate Pete Stemkowski had some great stories about Terry during their time together in Toronto: "I used to have funny hair, didn't know whether to have a crew cut or to let it grow and Terry would tease me a lot about it. He used to tell me 'why don't you just shave it all off and start over again?' He was really banged up with that bad elbow and was physically damaged so he walked kind of hunched. When he used to walk across the dressing room he'd walk with that hunch with the elbows sticking out and sometimes I'd walk behind him and imitate him. He'd turn around right away and yell at me!
"I remember I had a penalty shot once against Roger Crozier and I hit the post. In practice the next day, he'd move out of the way when I would come in to shoot on him and say, 'can you put it in now?' He could definitely be moody and grouchy, but he was always friendly to me. Sometimes when I used to imitate his walk through the dressing room, he'd turn around and I'd see a little smile on his face. " When the NHL expanded from six to twelve teams for the 1967-68 season, Terry became the first overall pick in the Expansion Draft and went out west to the Los Angeles Kings to be the face of the franchise in their inaugural season.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Golden Boys"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Ty Dilello.
Excerpted by permission of Great Plains Publications.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Introduction,
50 Murray Bannerman,
49 Gord Lane,
48 Bill Juzda,
47 Don Raleigh,
46 Mike Ridley,
45 Mel Hill,
44 Gary Bergman,
43 Mud Bruneteau,
42 Alexander Steen,
41 Glen Harmon,
40 James Patrick,
39 Ted Harris,
38 Cully Wilson,
37 Pete Stemkowski,
36 Blaine Stoughton,
35 Sugar Jim Henry,
34 Haldor "Slim" Halderson,
33 Ted Green,
32 Andy Hebenton,
31 Eric Nesterenko,
30 Wally Stanowski,
29 Ab McDonald,
28 Jimmy Thomson,
27 Tom Johnson,
26 Art Coulter,
25 Herb Gardiner,
24 Harry Oliver,
23 Joe Hall,
22 Reggie Leach,
21 Ken Reardon,
20 Ron Hextall,
19 Butch Goring,
18 Ching Johnson,
17 Red Dutton,
16 Bill Mosienko,
15 Babe Pratt,
14 Theo Fleury,
13 Jack Stewart,
12 Joe Simpson,
11 Bryan Hextall,
10 Dan Bain,
9 Ed Belfour,
8 Dick Irvin,
7 Chuck Gardiner,
6 Andy Bathgate,
5Frank Fredrickson,
4 Turk Broda,
3 Jonathan Toews,
2 Bobby Clarke,
1 Terry Sawchuk,
Acknowledgments,
Selected Bibliography,