The great and sometimes staggering figures of sports are fertile matter for literature. Lives defined by wins and losses make for rich metaphor, and tragic heroes are a dime a dozen in the locker room. American culture, of course, is best at making immortals from their very human athletes. "Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio, a nation turns its lonely eyes to you," sing Simon and Garfunkel, and an entire hero-worshipping country sighs in agreement. While they may occasionally traffic in the dissolution of their heroes - a hung-over Babe Ruth stealing hot dogs from kids in the crowd before pounding out one more circus-style home run - the central theme, always, is glory. Think Robert Redford rounding the bases in a shower of electrical sparks in The Natural.
Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems
, by Randall Maggs, Brick Books, 192 pages, $20
Legendary NHL goaltender Terry Sawchuk filled a couple of decades with glory, winning the Stanley Cup four times in total (three in Detroit and one in Toronto) while defending the crease on four of the original six teams. His jersey hangs from the rafters in Detroit and maybe should in Toronto, Boston and New York. Yet there is nothing at all immortal about him, and we, as both Canadians and hockey obsessives, are stoically content with that idea.
Newfoundland poet Randall Maggs signals early on his focus on the humanness of this god of hockey. He opens Night Work with a found poem from the postmortem examination of Terrance Gordon Sawchuk, who died in New York City in the spring of 1970 from internal injuries suffered in a still-mysterious tussle with a teammate. After absorbing the blows of countless hard shots and goalmouth collisions, most in the days before goalie masks and adequate upper body padding, Sawchuk's scarred remains were a topographical map of his outstanding career. The book finishes very near where it begins, in a New York hospital bed, with Sawchuk contemplating his final reward for athletic brilliance:
Fear of what was on the way?
What could there be about fear he didn't know?
As poetry collections go, this is quite a long book of long, narrative poems, but that shouldn't deter anyone from picking it up. Night Work is, in fact, an exquisite biographical novel, in the tradition of Michael Ondaatje's The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. Maggs has done his research, interviewing those who knew and worked with Sawchuk, his coaches, teammates, opponents and even referees. He also, clearly, has his own deep knowledge of what he calls "an ancient game with ancient rules." The challenge of turning all that into verse is well met, with only the occasional clunky rhyme - shots, squat - to remind the reader that sports poetry generally tends toward the Casey at the Bat variety.
We are not in Mudville here; rather, Night Work takes us into the darker, more complex psyche of a colder nation. Sawchuk's Ukrainian upbringing in Winnipeg is an important detail; the cultured ancestry, the working-class start. Our famed goalie's famed injuries are finely foreshadowed by the mishaps of his sheet-metalworking father:
a walking accident, it seemed, like many
displaced men. A connoisseur of cuts and wounds,
he'd turn a wrist to show his son the latest gash.
The hockey goaltender is about as displaced a figure as you'll find in sports. Simultaneously revered and shunned by superstitious mates, the goalie leads the team onto the ice and then stands alone, shouldering a responsibility no one else wants. Last line of defence. Goat for every goal. The bending of the twine at the back of the net is the only difference between grace and buffoonery when the goalie makes his desperate moves.
Sure, there's glory to be had, and Sawchuk managed to grab a lot of it in his career. But in a brilliant central episode, Maggs shows us Sawchuk's least-known opponent, a humiliated non-professional goalie in an exhibition game, receiving the message of Sawchuk's life. Nothing but Moonlight Here sends the two goalies ice-fishing after the one-sided game. In the middle of the night, on a frozen lake in Newfoundland, the hockey pro lays down some truth about being a hero, and our very Canadian everyman suddenly finds he is glad to be bad at hockey:
Out on the lake
that night I got free of a lot of foolishness
I wouldn't mention here.
Ineptness and geography.
I doubt there's many find salvation where they hope.
John Degen is the author of The Uninvited Guest, a novel about hockey and totalitarianism, short-listed for last year's Amazon.ca/Books in Canada First Novel Award. Visit him at http://www.johndegen.com.
