12 The Faustian Bargain of the Athlete-Hero in Randall Maggs’s Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems

Framing the Question

Formally, Night Work has affinities with the “documentary poem” first defined by Dorothy Livesay in 1969. Livesay uses the term to describe longer poems, or poem sequences, “based on topical data” and containing a “dialectic between the objective facts and the subjective feelings of the poet” (1969, 269, 267). Night Work doesn’t use a historical figure as a double of the poet, in the manner of Margaret Atwood’s The Journals of Susanna Moodie or Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (classic early examples of the genre), but Maggs has a significant personal connection to Terry Sawchuk. Maggs and Sawchuk played on the same rinks in Winnipeg, and, for Maggs as a boy, Sawchuk’s name “had all the magic of the game in it” (McCurdy 2010). Night Work’s exploration of Sawchuk is also an exploration of Maggs’s relationship to hockey, as well as a way of looking indirectly at “the people and the age” in which Maggs grew up (McCurdy 2010).

In the McCurdy interview, Maggs describes the form of the book as “a kind of a collage” (McCurdy 2010). Indeed, Night Work contains a wide variety of elements: historical documents, photographs, prose, quotes from other poems, and poems in various styles from various points of view. Some of the poems are in a more historical or mythic mode, some convey the interior thoughts and perceptions of Sawchuk, and others are from the point of view of Maggs himself. The result is a kind of wide-angle/close-up effect, in which the mystery of what made Sawchuk tick is examined sometimes from a broader historical or social perspective and sometimes from a more interior, psychological perspective.

The book begins with a series of framing devices. The first is an epigraph from Robert Frost:

The question that he frames in all but words

Is what to make of a diminished thing.

These lines are from the end of “The Oven Bird,” a sonnet that appeared originally in Frost’s 1916 collection, Mountain Interval. Isolated from the rest of the poem, the lines take on new meaning, with the “he” seeming to refer to Terry Sawchuk. This identification is reinforced by the title of the first section of Night Work: “The Question That He Frames.” Together, these elements stress not only the difficulty of knowing Sawchuk but the importance of questioning itself. Indeed, another way to summarize the project of Night Work is as an attempt to discover not so much the secret behind Terry Sawchuk as the questions that his story raises. The first epigraph also implies that these questions will tend towards tragedy, towards diminishment rather than glory.

When the lines of the epigraph are read in the context of “The Oven Bird” as a whole, other meanings emerge. Frost’s poem is in the long tradition of poems that draw a parallel between poets and birds. Think of John Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” Emily Dickinson’s “The bird her punctual music brings,” and Earle Birney’s “Loon about to Laugh,” among many others. The choice of bird is important: the song of the bird reflects qualities the poet imagines in his or her poetry. In “The Oven Bird,” middle-aged Frost identifies with a bird who sings loudly in “mid-summer,” whose song remembers spring and anticipates “that other fall we name the fall.” Oven birds are not known for musicality, which, to Frost, is appropriate, since the bird’s song, like his own poetry, is not about an ideal of beauty. Instead, by “singing not to sing,” the oven bird acknowledges the inevitable passing of all things. The oven bird’s song, according to the poem, reminds us that “the highway dust is over all” (Frost 1969, 119–20).

The epigraph from “The Oven Bird” is a reminder that the story of Terry Sawchuk is not just about the personal difficulties of one man. Sawchuk, like every other human being, is subject to the aging and dying that is a part of life. Being a professional athlete seems to offer an escape from time. As I suggested in chapter 7 (agreeing with Michael Novak), great athletic achievements seem like “ritual triumphs of grace, agility, perfection, beauty over death” (Novak 1988, 48). Yet there is also a way in which being an athlete leads to a hyperawareness about time’s passing. Since high level athletics are so much the terrain of youth, athletes must face a time when, although they are still young as human beings, they are old for their sports. Sawchuk’s career, ended by death, offers an exemplary tale about the “dust” that haunts even the most god-like seeming athlete.

A second framing device is an excerpt from the autopsy performed on Sawchuk on May 31, 1970, which follows the epigraph. In a clinical-looking, old typewriter font, the excerpt describes the extensive network of scars on Sawchuk’s face. This description operates as a companion to the photograph of Sawchuk by Mark Bauman that ends Night Work. This photograph, which appeared originally in 1966 in Life magazine, was touched up to highlight the scars on Sawchuk’s face. Key qualities of Sawchuk as a hockey player and person are hinted at by these linked elements: the risks of being a goaltender, especially in the days before the mask, Sawchuk’s competitive nature (the photograph shows a steely-eyed gaze as intense as that of Maurice Richard), and a vulnerability that is simultaneously exposed and hidden by outward appearance.

The way in which the framing elements reveal and conceal Sawchuk hints at the method of the book as a whole. Take the photograph. The scars on Sawchuk’s face seem to map his history, each violent impact leaving its mark directly on his skin, but when you know that the image was touched up, the scars are revealed as fiction. The act of touching up is like the act of poetry itself, which consists of touching up subjects in the service of a truth that is not literal. The same quality of revealing and concealing can be seen in the autopsy excerpt. In one sense, this excerpt, as a historical document, offers evidence about the real Terry Sawchuk. Like the photograph, however, it conceals as much as it reveals. Sawchuk did not die of a blow to the face. He died of a blood clot that formed from a lacerated liver that would not heal (Dupuis 1998, 264). Maggs’s choice to select the part of the autopsy dealing with Sawchuk’s face, rather than the part that deals with the blood clot, hides the literal cause of death to create an image that evokes, metaphorically, the cause of Sawchuk’s death. Sawchuk, the excerpt implies, died from living the kind of life that would leave a face so scarred.

“The Question That He Frames,” the short first section of Night Work, is the last of the framing elements. This section describes a visit Maggs made to Red Storey to talk about Sawchuk. Storey was an accomplished athlete, particularly in football, who became the senior referee in the NHL during the 1950s. He was also a renowned storyteller, in keeping with his name, and was an important source for Night Work. In “Neither Rhyme Nor Reason,” the persona describes a Storey who, fifty years later, is still puzzled by a question Sawchuk asked once during a game: “What he came to me / wanting to know, Jesus. I thought he was joking” (Maggs 2019, 25). In “The First Wife,” Storey articulates why the enigma of Sawchuk is so fascinating. “[Why] would you fret about Sawchuk?” the voice of Storey asks. “Jumping Jesus, what the guy could do” (27).

The question alluded to in “Neither Rhyme Nor Reason” reappears in “Night Time,” “Big Dogs 1,” and “Big Dogs 2.” “Big Dogs 2” fills in the details. In it, Storey recounts how Sawchuk and some other players had a party in Storey’s hotel room. They drank his beer and made a mess, but Storey was fine with this, since he was the same way when he was young (117). Next game, however, when Storey pulled players off Sawchuk after a pile up, and asked if he was alright, Sawchuk replied, “Why don’t you go fuck yourself, you drunken son of a bitch” (117). After Sawchuk repeated the insult, Storey gave him a misconduct. Then, a few days later, before another game, Sawchuk skated up to ask the infamous question: “Last game there, what the heck did you give me that misconduct for?” Turns out that Sawchuk had forgotten not only about drinking Storey’s beer, but also about the insult. When Storey reminded him of it, he replied, “I don’t remember any of that” and turned away (118).

After the buildup of the previous poems, the actual content of Sawchuk’s question might seem anticlimactic. Yet the implications are profound. One implication is that Sawchuk’s drinking had become extreme enough to trigger amnesia. Another is that his personality had fragmented, from a combination of trauma and addiction, to the point that his “hockey self” was no longer in touch with his self away from the rink (including the self who drank). The obvious projection involved in Sawchuk’s denouncing Storey as a “drunken son of a bitch” is further evidence of this fragmentation. In either case, the question hints at a darkness within Sawchuk that is both mysterious and fundamental. Is hockey the cause of this darkness? Or did hockey only draw out a darkness that, as Storey suggests in “Big Dogs 1,” was already there from the start?

Desperate Moves and the Canadian Dream

Terry Sawchuk was born in Winnipeg in 1929, to an ethnic Ukrainian father and a Polish mother. Sawchuk’s father was a tinsmith, first with the MacDonald Sheet Metal Company, then in business for himself (Dupuis 1998, 2–5). His mother was a strong, sometimes domineering woman, with whom little Terry frequently “clashed” (4). There were five children in the family, four of them boys. Terry, third oldest, started to skate on outdoor ice at the age of four, and according to Dupuis, his “love of hockey was immediate” (4). During his earliest years he played from dawn to dusk with his brother Mitch, who was seven years older.

“Kings and Little Ones,” the second section of Night Work, opens with five poems about these early years. “Initia Gentis” (“First People”) stresses Sawchuk’s passion for the game (Maggs 2019, 31–32). The poem conveys this through the wonderful image of Sawchuk, as a boy, sitting at school in his hockey gear in order to spare precious minutes of after-school playing time. The young Sawchuk wills the clock to move ahead (a form of magical thinking I remember from my own childhood), a ritual that resonates with the opening line of the poem: “Begins in school the trouble / with time.”

Other poems fill out the portrait of the Sawchuk family. “Sheet Metal” describes Louis Sawchuk, Sawchuk’s father, and his work at MacDonald Sheet Metal. The poem describes Louis as a “connoisseur of cuts and wounds,” which hints at an affinity between father and son, and creates an evocative parallel between the physical risks of work as a tinsmith and of a hockey goalie (33–34). The next poems offer glimpses of Sawchuk’s mother and sister. Then, in “The Famous Crouch,” comes this description of the death of Mitch:

He clasped his hands behind his head (they said),

behind his desk at work that day and stretched and yawned,

content (he’d shut out St. Vitale the night before and he’d seen

Corinne Wynick in the crowd), and smiling, cocked

his head to make a final point (they said),

half rose, and then pitched forward on his face. (37)

Mitch Sawchuk’s death of a heart-attack, at age seventeen, had a profound impact on ten-year-old Terry. Dupuis suggests that Terry’s world was “shattered” and that the death compounded his problems with his mother (Dupuis 1998, 6). The trauma was made worse by the fact that Terry’s other older brother, Roger, had died of scarlet fever when Terry was a baby.

One theory about Sawchuk’s competitive drive is that it was supercharged by the death of his brother. Kendall suggests that after Mitch’s death, Sawchuk “seemed almost obsessed with the idea of succeeding in hockey—not just for himself, but for both of them” (1996, 7). There is a pleasing symmetry to this idea: Mitch, after all, was also a goaltender. Dupuis, who had access to Sawchuk’s family, reports that over the next years Sawchuk “often took Mitch’s pads and put them on in memory of his dead brother” (1998, 7). Mitch’s death must have had a profound impact on Sawchuk. It would be simplistic, however, to draw a straight line between the death and Sawchuk’s motivation and later problems with alcohol and depression. One of the strengths of “Kings and Little Ones” is that it doesn’t simplify. Instead, it dramatizes a series of possible origins for Sawchuk’s competitive drive, beginning with the pure joy he felt in play, as evoked by “Initia Gentis.” Sawchuk’s early demonstration of talent, his working-class background, and his Ukrainian heritage are also likely factors. His character, in fact, has affinities with the fictional Felix Batterinski from The Last Season—the big, athletic, immigrant boy, sensitive about fitting in (“Initia Gentis” says that he “never hears a word of English” at home), who, because of geographical and historical circumstance, sees in hockey a way to get ahead in the world.

One other parallel with Felix Batterinski is worth noting. “Initia Gentis” combines its portrait of Sawchuk as a young lover of hockey with his first stirring of sexual desire. The day portrayed in “Initia Gentis,” in which Sawchuk wears his equipment at school, is also the day his teacher, Miss Nelson, wears “the famous blouse” (Maggs 2019, 31). The last stanza of this poem tells of Sawchuk and his friends heading home after their game. The boys are “twelve years old and troubled by … difficult names / and dreams (the blouse that made your hair stand up)” (32). The connection between sexual desire and the yearning for some larger meaning or satisfaction in life is made explicit in the poem’s last lines, which describe the boys as “like lonely riders / with their cattle in the rain, or cousins on barren farms / in the old country, imagining [a] green / and perfect garden” (32). Humans have a strong yearning to achieve something like a return to the Garden of Eden. The yearning is not so mysterious if you consider what a “perfect garden” might represent: peace, prosperity, wholeness of self, and love (both human and divine). Some people—traditionally boys, from places like Winnipeg—have seen in hockey a way to satisfy the yearning for such a place.

The rest of the poems in “Kings and Little Ones” explore episodes from Sawchuk’s early career. “Writing on the Walls,” from which the section title comes, describes young Terry riding a train, possibly for the first time, and being seduced by a card game. At first he wins, but then he keeps playing and loses all his money. The episode predicts two aspects of his character: how his competitiveness is so intense that it blurs into addiction, and how, in a literal and metaphorical sense, he “didn’t know how / to get out ahead of the game” (39).

Luck is a key theme in these poems. “Hole in the Hat” tells of an injury Sawchuk suffered on December 28, 1947, his eighteenth birthday, while playing for the minor league affiliate of the Detroit Red Wings in Omaha. According to Dupuis, there was a scramble in front of the Omaha net, Sawchuk reached for the puck, and “the stick of Houston forward George Agar unintentionally flew up … [and] struck Terry in his right eyeball.” The doctor at the hospital said he might lose sight in the eye—or even, if an infection set in, go completely blind (Dupuis 1998, 16). Turns out that a brilliant eye surgeon, “Sir This or That,” was stranded in Houston at the time, and he performed a delicate operation, removing the eyeball, stitching it, and putting it back in, and Sawchuk woke up the next morning to “a promising haze” (Maggs 2019, 41). Two weeks later he was back in goal, went on to win 24 of 27 games in Omaha, and was on the fast track to the NHL.

The eye episode is part of a larger network of chance and circumstance that shaped Sawchuk’s career. “Hole in the Hat” opens with another one, when an anonymous voice states what many people would have said to young men of Sawchuk’s age in 1947: “Lucky boy … you missed the war” (Maggs 2019, 40). Hard work and talent are required to be a hockey star, the poem implies, but luck, in the form of personal and historical circumstance, is also required.

Luck was particularly crucial for NHL goalies of the Original Six era. Poor equipment, and a lack of masks, meant that a career-ending injury was a threat each time a goalie stepped onto the ice. In the early years of Sawchuk’s career, teams also only carried one goalie, which meant that there were only six goaltender jobs in the league. Other poems in the “Kings and Little Ones” section explore the uncertainty created by these facts. “The Question for Harry,” for example, imagines how Harry Lumley, the goaltender for Detroit in 1950, felt about the rise of Sawchuk. There is a camaraderie among goalies, the poem implies, that goes beyond the competition for jobs, but one injury, and the bad luck of having Sawchuk behind him on the depth chart, turned Lumley into an old man at twenty-three (48). “Let’s Go Dancing” tells of a night Sawchuk took a shot in the mouth, lost his teeth, got stitched up with no anaesthetic, and was back in the net in twenty minutes. Already he is “sick of the life,” but he remembers how he supplanted Lumley because of an injury, and realizes that Glenn Hall, the next goaltending phenom, is waiting “back in Edmonton, freezing his ass” (61).

As I explained in chapter 10, luck has a powerful mystique in sports and adds a layer of complication to what might be known as being “in the zone.” Are great plays the result of an almost mystical level of excellence, as when a player is in the zone, or are they a result of luck? The difficulty in deciding this question is captured by the last poem in the section. “Desperate Moves” recounts an after-game interview between Sawchuk and Jacques Plante. Plante tries to compliment Sawchuk on “The greatest save I ever saw,” but Sawchuk replies, “It’s better to be lucky than good” (Maggs 2019, 70–71). On the play in question, Sawchuk, seeing Dave Keon wide open, “stuck up a leg,” and Keon’s rising shot hit Sawchuk’s pad. If Keon has simply slid the shot along the ice, it would have been in. After some further back-and-forth, Plante says to Sawchuk, “So … what you made was a desperate move,” and Sawchuk agrees. The ending of “Desperate Moves” provides a powerful image to sum up a key question raised by Sawchuk. Was his career a result of “greatness” or “a desperate move”?

A Place That Can Teach You Something

The spring of 1955 was a time of triumph for Terry Sawchuk. This was the same spring in which Rocket Richard was suspended for punching linesman Cliff Thompson, leading, ultimately, to the Richard Riot. Whether Richard’s absence in the playoffs was the deciding factor or not, Detroit beat Montreal in seven games to win the Stanley Cup. This was the fourth Cup for Detroit in six years. Sawchuk, at the age of twenty-five, had been the starting goaltender in five of those years, winning three Cups. In 1955, he also won the Vezina Trophy for the third time as top goaltender in the league.

Then he was traded to the lowly Boston Bruins. Jack Adams, the General Manager of the Red Wings, offered this rationale for the trade: “We let Sawchuk go because we found ourselves with two top goalies. [Glenn] Hall is more advanced now than Sawchuk when he joined us.… It was a case of trading one of them and Sawchuk … brought a better offer” (quoted in Dupuis 1998, 105). Behind the scenes, however, rumours were that Adams was eager to get rid of Sawchuk because of his “temperamental nature” (Kendall 1996, 115) and because injuries had made him “damaged goods” (Marcel Pronovost, quoted in Dupuis 1998, 105). Trading Sawchuk and other veterans also substantially reduced the team payroll (Kendall 1996, 114).

The trades of the summer of 1955 remain one of the darkest episodes in Detroit Red Wings history. Even the famously circumspect Gordie Howe mentions them in his autobiography. By that summer, Howe writes, the Wings had all the ingredients in place “to form one of the greatest dynasties in hockey history,” but “Trader Jack” spent the off-season “dismantling the team” for reasons that “defy explanation” (Howe 2014, 147). About his own trade, Sawchuk was diplomatic in public in the way expected of a professional athlete. Privately, however, he was devastated. Dupuis quotes Pat Sawchuk, Terry’s wife, as saying it was “the darkest day of Terry’s life.… [It] just ripped him apart. He gave everything for that organization and he felt like a piece of meat afterwards” (Dupuis 1998, 105). The psychological impact of the trade accelerated Sawchuk’s self-destructive behaviour, especially his drinking.

Sawchuk played well on a bad Boston Bruin team in 1955–56. The Bruins were surprisingly competitive for much of the season but collapsed near the end to miss the playoffs by two points. Afterwards, the team management tried to make up for a lack of playoff revenue by sending the players on an exhibition tour of Newfoundland.

The little-known 1956 tour of Newfoundland by the Boston Bruins is the subject of “Two Goalies Going Fishing in the Dark,” the third section of Night Work. Poems in this section offer nuanced meditations on the give-and-take that occurred during the tour between the local players and the NHLers. Sometimes the emphasis is on the pleasure of the locals in rubbing shoulders with the pros; other times, it is clear that the pros, especially Sawchuk, are getting as much out of the encounter as they put in. The tour is portrayed as an example of the economic vulnerability of NHL players at this time, and also as part of a larger journey in which the meanings of the game and the meanings of human existence are complexly intertwined. As “Solid Ground” says about Newfoundland, “This was a country that could show you things, / but you had to be in a decent mood, / and looking” (Maggs 2019, 76).

“Nothing but Moonlight Here” reinforces the key themes of the section. In this poem, Sawchuk is taken ice fishing by the Corner Brook All-Stars goalie after an exhibition game. The poem is a companion to “Fair Trade,” which tells of how the goaltenders switched teams during the game. Together, the two poems emphasize how the goaltenders are alike, despite their wildly different hockey talents and worldly success. Not only are they both members of the fraternity of goaltenders, but they are both men, both human beings, with similar desires and fears. While out fishing, Sawchuk tells “a thing or two” that the other goaltender decides to keep to himself (81). The other goaltender, in turn, feels “a chill” and thinks about his wife and his own life.

The section about the 1956 tour is shot through with an irony: the Boston Bruins players are “privileged” athletes, famous and relatively well paid, and yet during a period of the year that is supposed to be their off-season, they are stuck, away from their families, working to make money for their employer. Maggs portrays Sawchuk as highly aware of this irony. Sawchuk in this section feels isolated and exploited; at various points he revisits the trauma of the trade. The affinity between the Bruins players and the residents of Newfoundland hints at what “this place” can teach: that although there are material differences in the way people live, there are challenges that all people share. What does it mean to find “solid ground”? What uncertainties are revealed when the lights go out and two goaltenders go fishing in the dark?

Regulation Tie

Sawchuk played another half-season with Boston. His performance was hindered by mononucleosis, from which he returned too quickly. Then, citing a combination of physical and emotional exhaustion, he quit the Bruins in January 1957 (Dupuis 1998, 116). The next summer he was traded back to Detroit. Ironically, his return was driven, in part, by the determination of Jack Adams to crush the fledging players’ association, one of whose strongest supporters was Glenn Hall, the young goalie brought in to replace Sawchuk (Kendall 1996, 144). Hall was traded out of Detroit along with Ted Lindsay, the former Red Wings captain. The team, by this point, was a pale shell of the one that Gordie Howe thought could be a dynasty in 1955. Sawchuk played seven seasons during his second stint with the Red Wings until he was claimed in the intra-league draft by Toronto in the summer of 1964. This set the stage for one of the most celebrated feats in NHL history, the unlikely win of the Stanley Cup by the Maple Leafs in the spring of 1967, to which Sawchuk was a major contributor.

The second half of Sawchuk’s career has the makings of a Hollywood redemption story: the twice-discarded goaltender, past his prime, leads a ragtag team of has-beens and also-rans to an unlikely Stanley Cup. Sawchuk made 41 saves in the deciding game and allowed just one goal. To add to the mythic aura: the 1967 NHL Final was the last of the Original Six era and was a Montreal-Toronto match-up played during the nationalistic fever of the Canadian Centennial. Toronto has not won a Stanley Cup since (fifty-seven years and counting, as I write this in 2024).

Night Work only glances at the highlight reel version of Sawchuk’s later career. Like Twenty Miles, the collection suggests that what is important lies elsewhere. The later sections of Night Work stress the physical and mental costs paid by goaltenders in the pre-mask era. What most distinguishes these years for Sawchuk, the “Hurt Hawks” section suggests, is the increasing damage to his body, along with the growing sense that his days as a player are numbered. The photograph that begins the section shows Sawchuk clutching his shoulder after being struck by a Bobby Hull slapshot (Maggs 2019, 150). Another photograph has Sawchuk with his arm around his goaltending partner, Johnnie Bower, after the 1967 win. Sawchuk is smiling and savouring the moment. What is most striking, though, is how emaciated he looks: his open undershirt reveals a washboard line of meatless ribs (171).

“Tidal Fears,” the final poem in “Hurt Hawks,” asks the question posed by Sawchuk’s later career: “What was it kept him going?” (169). The poem stresses how much he suffered, physically and mentally, by continuing to play: “His back was bad, the famous crouch had left its mark, / two ruptured vertebrae, he couldn’t straighten up. He couldn’t sleep two hours at a time” (169). The poem also wonders if Sawchuk, like the players in Purdy’s “Hockey Players,” was self-conscious about the arrested development involved in continuing to play:

You’d think at forty you’d feel silly

getting dressed with thirty other guys, buckling on

a flaccid garter belt and wearing regulation ties and making

wisecracks on the bus. (169)

As always in Night Work, however, the poem offers no easy answers.

What “Tidal Fears” does offer is four possible reasons for Sawchuk continuing to play. Perhaps he needed the money, the poem suggests, with his seven children “who needed shoes” (170). Perhaps retiring would force him to face mortality in a way that terrified him (“A tidal fear of being swept to sea?”). Perhaps, although he often played like “shit” in his later years, he still had moments of the old magic, as in Game 6 of the Stanley Cup Final, and those moments made him believe he could “play this game forever” (170). Or perhaps it was just habit. Perhaps, like Felix Batterinski and other Faustian hockey characters, the singular devotion required to excel in the way that he did had left him unequipped for anything else. As the epigraph from Mary Oliver that begins “Tidal Fears” puts it: “the mind clings to the road it knows” (169).

Twilight of the God

“The Last Faceoff,” the second last poem in “Hurt Hawks,” offers a vivid account of the deciding play of the 1967 Final. This was a faceoff to the left of Sawchuk with 55 seconds left, with the Montreal goaltender pulled, which turned rapidly—and somewhat miraculously—into a Toronto breakout that allowed George Armstrong to score into the empty net for a 3–1 victory. The poem describes how Sawchuk was toasted by his teammates afterwards (though a little cautiously, given his character), and how he must have savoured the moment: “What a feeling, oh my Jesus” (Maggs 2019, 168). Then it offers a tantalizing thought. What if this had been the last moment of Sawchuk’s career? No matter what came next in his life, the poem points out, “what a hell of a way to go” (168).

Sawchuk did not retire after the 1967 victory. Instead, he began a strange twilight period, in which he played for three teams in three years, ultimately ending up in New York. It was there, on May 31, 1970, that he died. What the investigations into his death revealed, as reported by Dupuis and Kendall, is that on April 29, 1970, Sawchuk and his Ranger teammate Ron Stewart were drinking at a local bar and got into an argument about unpaid bills in their shared rental house. Sawchuk became belligerent and tried to start a fight. The two of them were thrown out and drove separately back to the house. There, Sawchuk tried to fight again. Stewart backed away, tripping over a barbecue pit, and Sawchuk fell on top of him or onto the pit. The fall caused internal injuries, especially to Sawchuk’s liver. Over the next month, Sawchuk was in hospital, undergoing various procedures to try to stem his internal bleeding, but ultimately, he died of blood clots to his lungs (Dupuis 1998, 252–64; Kendall 1996, 233–38).

The last section of Night Work, “No Time Left on the Clock,” explores this last period of Sawchuk’s life. Maggs treats the death only indirectly. He offers no dramatic re-enactment, nor does he attempt to answer the many questions left by the investigations. Instead, the section’s first poem, “The Season of Wayward Thinking,” reintroduces Maggs’s persona: “I take a long walk, thinking of Terry after all the years” (Maggs 2019, 175). Walking in autumn reminds Maggs of a story about Bill White, a stay-at-home NHL defenseman whose career overlapped with Sawchuk’s. White was asked during exhibition season once what was on his mind, and, apparently, replied: “Burning leaves … it always makes me think of home.” This, according to Maggs’s reimagining, causes the ears of the “young wolves” trying to make the team to “[prick] up,” and leads the coach, Billy Reay, to think he should “keep an eye / on Bill for a game or two” (175).

This first poem reinforces the theme implied by the epigraph to the section: “Think of the long trip home. / Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?” These lines, from Elizabeth Bishop’s “Questions of Travel,” pose the question that haunts the premature death of Sawchuk. Would it have been better for him not to have “travelled” to the NHL? Was the price of success too great? The anecdote about White also stresses how time, in more ways than one, is the enemy of hockey players: every fall brings a new crop of young “wolves” ready to take your spot on the team. Did the pressure make Sawchuk like Bill White in the poem? Did he too engage in the “wayward thinking” of home?

Four poems make up the rest of “Last Minute of Play.” The second poem, “Tunnel to Windsor,” takes place during Sawchuk’s third stint with the Red Wings, from the middle year of his career’s twilight. In the poem, he is in a taxi under the tunnel from Detroit to Windsor. In the dark of the tunnel, he recalls that his wife, Pat, came to the game he had just played, and remembers with regret how she used to “brush my face, / the ridges of scars” (Maggs 2019, 178). Behind this line is the biographical fact that, during the 1968–69 season, Pat served divorce papers on Sawchuk because of his long-time drinking and abuse of her and their children (Kendall 1996, 228). Trapped in the literal and metaphorical tunnel, Sawchuk reflects that “At some point, it’s just too late / to turn back” (Maggs 2019, 178). He realizes that he had not become the man he “hoped to be.” Then the taxi driver looks in the mirror and reinforces the harsh reality of his almost finished career. “So, Mr. Goalie,” the taxi driver says, “the word’s out that you’re leaving town / again, what does it feel like to be a three time loser?” Sawchuk, it turns out, is the holder of another record: he is one of the few NHL players, perhaps the only one, to have been traded away three times from the same team. In the summer of 1969, he was dealt from Detroit to the New York Rangers, where he played his last, fateful season.

The next two poems, “Bachelors” and “River of Ponds,” report on conversations Maggs had with players who knew Sawchuk. These conversations contain subtle allusions to the circumstances of the death. In “Bachelors,” Orland Kurtenbach describes the house Sawchuk rented with Ron Stewart in his last year. His description contains a sinister detail: “the toppled barbecue behind the house” (179). As reported in the poem, Sawchuk and Stewart often visited the Kurtenbachs, and Sawchuk, apparently, was moved by the presence of the children, presumably missing his own. One much debated topic has to do with how much the breakup of Sawchuk’s marriage contributed to his self-destructive behaviour. Kurtenbach says “I think he felt like he was in a trap. Seven kids to feed / and what would he do with the rest of his life? Then the talk / of a divorce again” (180). Kurtenbach, like Maggs, admits that the full truth about Sawchuk’s motivation will never be known.

“River of Ponds” recounts a meeting between Maggs and Eric Nesterenko. Nesterenko was a tough-nosed, two-way forward whose long career, mostly for the Chicago Blackhawks, overlapped almost exactly with that of Sawchuk. Like Sawchuk, he was of Ukrainian descent and came from a working-class family in Manitoba. Though not a star player of his era, Nesterenko is honoured in hockey circles for his articulateness and intelligence. A good example of his thoughtfulness is the Studs Terkel interview in Working, in which he says that his fondest memory of his hockey years is the pure joy he experienced skating (Terkel 2004, 386). Fans during the Original Six era also seemed to love the ring of his name, which is perhaps why it leaps to the tongue of Draper Doyle in The Divine Ryans when he is caught buying underwear. The Hockey Hall of Fame interview with Nesterenko is still available on YouTube and is excellent viewing. After hockey, Nesterenko retired to Vail, Colorado, where he became a ski instructor.

In “River of Ponds,” Maggs has travelled to Vail to talk to Nesterenko about Terry Sawchuk. Despite his reputation as a talker, Nesterenko will not reveal any details about the death. “Some guys had a hard time at the end,” he admits, but “you can find a way to save yourself.” His last reported words are as unrevealing as they are suggestive: “You have to want to, though. I won’t say more” (Maggs 2019, 181). Nesterenko’s words help to close the circle with the opening excerpt from the autopsy report, which raises the question of why someone would submit to such abuse (was there something self-destructive in Sawchuk?), while stressing the difficulty of knowing the truth that is dramatized throughout Night Work.

The final poem, “New York Hospital: I.C.U.,” is side-by-side with the touched-up photograph by Mark Bauman. This reinforces a formal similarity between the two. Each works by “touching up” the documentary evidence about Sawchuk to get at a deeper, but more elusive, truth. The poem opens with Sawchuk opening his eye in a hospital bed (182). The scene resonates with other scenes of Sawchuk injured and in hospital because of hockey, a resonance invited by the references to his current trainer (“Lefty”) and coach (“Emil Francis”). This hospital stay, however, is not because of hockey but because of what William Cahn, the district attorney at the inquest into Sawchuk’s death, called a “childish and senseless verbal argument, with a lot of pushing and shoving” (Cahn in Kendall 1996, 242). The reference to Sawchuk’s “withered arms” subtly references his words to Shirley Walton, wife of journalist Stan Fischler, who snuck in to interview him. When Walton mentioned him coming back, he “raised a pencil-thin arm” and said that he could never “come back from this” (Dupuis 1998, 260–61).

The poem ends with Sawchuk anticipating death:

Fear what was on the way?

What could there be about fear he didn’t know?

Open the door.

Infinity is just another fucking number. (Maggs 2019, 182)

The last line echoes the opening of “Initia Gentis” about Sawchuk’s boyhood “trouble / with time” (31), as well as other places in Night Work in which time is an important theme. The image of time contains a doubled significance: it evokes the significance of the game clock for hockey goalies, as explored in “Different Ways of Telling Time” (among other poems), but also the existential significance of time for human beings. Is the last line an example of the toughness of Sawchuk, one last refusal by him to fold under pressure? Or is it an example of false bravura, an expression of his despair in the face of death? The text, as Night Work consistently does, leaves the question open.

Faustian Time

The ending of Night Work is steeped in Faustian motifs. Time, as my epigraph suggests, is a key issue in the original Dr. Faustus. Once the Doctor makes his deal with the devil, he becomes acutely aware of time. Scene by scene, as the twenty-four years of the deal go by, he becomes more frantic about time passing, until the famous climactic scene in which he watches the last minutes go by while hopelessly willing the clock to stop. Faustus’s obsession with time is ironic, since his motivation for bargaining with the devil is rooted in time. At the beginning of the play, Faustus is revealed to be a talented but restless man. He rejects a series of possible careers—theology, law, and medicine—because they promise only limited rewards. His reasons for rejecting medicine hint at what he ultimately desires:

Couldst thou make men to live eternally,

Or, being dead, raise them to life again,

Then this profession were to be esteeme’d. (Marlowe 1933, 1.24–26)

What Faustus sees in magic, the art that leads him to the devil, is the possibility of becoming “a mighty god” or “a deity”—that is to say, one of the immortals (1.60–61). Once he makes his deal, however, his mortality becomes an even greater issue for him than before. Trying to escape death turns every waking hour into a nightmare-like reminder of death.

The tragedy of Terry Sawchuk, as conveyed in Night Work, is not just that his demons led him to an early death, but that they often turned the time he had while alive into a nightmare. This is why, at the end of “New York City Hospital: I.C.U.,” Sawchuk doesn’t fear what’s “behind the door”: he has already experienced the worst. Faustus’s tragedy is compounded by the fact that the power he receives in exchange for his soul turns out to be “illusory, merely theatrical” (Worthen 2007, 256). The most famous example of this is when he orders up Helen of Troy to be his “paramour.” Helen’s appearance inspires these famous lines:

Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships,

And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?

Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss. (Marlowe 1933, 13.112–14)

When Helen kisses him, however, her lips suck out his soul. What has appeared by his conjuring is not Helen but a devil in disguise.

Are the rewards and accolades received by Terry Sawchuk the equivalent of the Helen demon in Dr. Faustus? Night Work doesn’t answer the question definitively. What the book implies, though, is that the rewards of hockey seemed more and more inadequate to Sawchuk as the costs of those rewards accumulated. Sawchuk’s betrayal in 1956 haunted the rest of his career. The stark truth that, as an NHL player, he was ultimately just a piece of meat, tainted any satisfactions he later experienced. As he faced the challenges of being an aging athlete, he was also confronted by the fact that his singular focus on hockey had left him ill-equipped for a life outside. Eric Nesterenko is particularly eloquent on this point in his interview with Studs Terkel. “I know a lot of pro athletes who have a capacity for a wider experience,” Nesterenko tells Terkel. “But they wanted to become champions. They had to focus themselves on their one thing completely.” The tragedy of such a singular focus, according to Nesterenko, is that it ends up “dehumaniz[ing]” the person (Terkel 2004, 386). In “River of Ponds” in Night Work, Nesterenko implies that Sawchuk was one such athlete.

Sawchuk’s life and career are not simply tragic. Despite his demons, Sawchuk remains not just a fascinating character, but, as Night Work illustrates, an attractive one as well. Unlike Marlowe’s Faustus, Maggs’s Sawchuk retains his ambiguity until the end. When death’s door opens, Marlowe’s Faustus collapses in despair; Maggs’s Sawchuk mixes resignation with a last gesture of defiance: “infinity’s just a number” (Maggs 2019, 182). Sawchuk’s hint of defiance, I think, speaks to a lasting strength in his character, and also contains, perhaps, a subtly hopeful message about human resilience in the face of death. The level of achievement in Sawchuk’s life makes questions about the cost of his success so absorbing. It would be easy to say that the cost was too great if the rewards were self-evidently paltry. As it is, someone like Sawchuk challenges us to ask where we would ourselves draw the line—in hockey as in life. What kind of Faustian bargains are we willing to make for what kinds of possible success?

Works Cited