Terry Sawchuk

**Terry Sawchuk** (born Terrance Gordon Sawchuk on December 28, 1929 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada) was a Canadian professional ice hockey player who played in the NHL for the Detroit Red Wings, Boston Bruins, Toronto Maple Leafs, Los Angeles Kings and the New York Rangers.

## Playing Career

### Early Playing Career

After inheriting his good friend's goalie equipment, Terry began playing ice hockey in a local league and worked for a sheet-metal company installing vents over bakery ovens. His goaltending talent was so evident that at the age of 14, a local scout for the Detroit Red Wings had him work out with the team, who later signed him to an amateur contract.

The Red Wings sent him to play for their junior team in Galt, Ontario in 1946 where he also finished the 11th grade, but most likely did not graduate from high school.

### Professional

In 1947, the Red Wings signed Terry to a professional contract in 1947 and he quickly progressed through their developmental system, winning honors as the Rookie of the Year in both the U.S. and American Hockey Leagues.

He also filled in for seven games when the Detroit goalie Harry Lumley was injured in January 1950. He showed such promise that the Red Wings traded Lumley to the Chicago Black Hawks (although he had just led the team to the 1950 Stanley Cup).

Nicknamed "Ukey" or "The Uke" by his teammates because of his Ukrainian ancestry, Terry led the Red Wings to three Stanley Cups in five years, winning the Calder Memorial Trophy as the top rookie and three Vezina Trophies for the fewest goals allowed (he missed out the other two years by one goal).

He was selected as an All-Star five times in his first five years in the NHL, had fifty-six shutouts, and his goals-against average (GAA) remained under 2.00.

In the 1951–52 playoffs, the Red Wings swept both the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Montreal Canadiens, with Terry surrendering five goals in eight games (for a 0.625 GAA), with four shutouts.

Terry was ordered by Detroit general manager Jack Adams to lose weight before the 1951–52 season. After his weight loss, his personality seemed to change; becoming sullen and withdrawn. He became increasingly surly with reporters & fans (preferring to do crossword puzzles than give interviews).

He also struggled for years to regain the weight. Also contributing to his moodiness and self-doubt was the pressure of playing every day despite repeated injuries — there were no backup goaltenders.

He frequently played through pain, and during his career he had three operations on his right elbow, an appendectomy, countless cuts & bruises, a broken foot, a collapsed lung, ruptured discs in his back and severed tendons in his hand.

As as standup goaltender, Terry adopted a crouching stance to see through the legs of skaters. Years of crouching in the net caused him to walk with a permanent stoop and resulted in lordosis (swayback), which prevented him from sleeping for more than two hours at a time.

He also received approximately 400 stitches to his face (including three in his right eyeball) before finally adopting a protective facemask in 1962.

In 1966, Life Magazine had a make-up artist apply stitches and scars to Terry's face to demonstrate all of the injuries his face sustained over the years. The make-up artist did not have enough room for everything.

In June of 1955, the Red Wings traded him to the Boston Bruins in June 1955 because they had a capable younger goaltender in the minor leagues (Glenn Hall). During his second season with Boston, he was diagnosed with mononucleosis, but returned to the team after only two weeks.

Physically weak, playing poorly and on the verge of a nervous breakdown & exhaustion, he announced his retirement in early 1957 and was labeled a "quitter" by team executives & several newspapers. Detroit reacquired him by trading young forward Johnny Bucyk to Boston.

After seven seasons, when they had another promising young goalie (Roger Crozier) ready for promotion from the minor leagues, Detroit left Terry unprotected in the 1964 intra-league waiver draft and he was quickly claimed by the Maple Leafs.

With him sharing goaltending duties with the 40-year-old Johnny Bower, the veteran duo won the 1964–65 Vezina Trophy and led Toronto to the 1967 Stanley Cup.

In his last game with the Maple Leafs, he stopped 40 of 41 shots in 3-1 victory over the Montreal Canadiens in the Cup clinching game 6. Left unprotected in the June 1967 expansion draft, Terry was the first player selected, taken by the Los Angeles Kings where he played for one season before being traded back to Detroit.

Terry spent his final season with the New York Rangers where he played sparingly, starting only six games.

On February 1, 1970, in only his fourth start of the season, he recorded his 103rd and final shutout of his career by blanking the Pittsburgh Penguins 6–0; this was also his last NHL win.

Terry's last regular season start was on March 14, 1970 in a 7–4 loss to the Chicago Black Hawks. His last playoff start was in a 5–3 playoff quarterfinals loss to the Boston Bruins on April 9, 1970. He appeared in his last NHL game on April 14 in the same playoff series.

In game 5 after Phil Esposito had scored at 7:59 of the third period to put Boston in the lead, Rangers coach Emile Francis, in an effort to slow down the game, replaced goalie Ed Giacomin with Sawchuk. He was in the net for less than a minute before Giacomin returned and the Rangers lost the game 3–2. Boston went on to win the series 4 games to 2.

## Death

Terry struggled with untreated depression, a condition that often affected his conduct. After the 1969–1970 season ended, he and his Rangers teammate Ron Stewart (both of whom had been drinking) physically fought over expenses for the house they rented together on Long Island, New York. He suffered severe internal injuries during the scuffle from falling on top of Stewart's bent knee.

At Long Beach Memorial Hospital, Terry's gallbladder was removed and he had a second operation on his damaged and bleeding liver. The press described the incident as "horseplay" and he told the police that he accepted full responsibility for the events.

At New York Hospital Manhattan, another operation was performed on Sawchuk's bleeding liver. He never recovered and died shortly thereafter from a pulmonary embolism on Sunday, May 31, 1970 at the age of 40.

The last reporter to speak to him a week before his death was Shirley Fischler (wife of Stan Fischler), who went to see him in the hospital as a visitor, not identifying herself as a reporter.

Terry told her the incident with Stewart "was just a fluke, a complete fluke accident."
Fischler described him as "so pale and thin that the scars had almost disappeared from his face." A Nassau County grand jury exonerated Stewart and ruled that Terry's death was accidental.

Terry was buried in Mount Hope Cemetery in Pontiac, Michigan.

## Accolades

* USHL Rookie of the Year (1948)
* AHL Rookie of the Year (1949)
* Calder Memorial Trophy winner (1951)
* NHL All-Star Game (1950, 1951, 1952, 1953, 1954, 1955, 1956, 1959, 1963, 1964, and 1968)
* NHL First All-Star Team (1951, 1952, and 1953)
* NHL Second All-Star Team (1954, 1955, 1959, and 1963)
* Vezina Trophy winner (1952, 1953, 1955, and 1965)
* Stanley Cup championships (1952, 1954, 1955, and 1967)
* Lester Patrick Trophy winner (1971)
* First ever goaltender to record 100 career regular-season shutouts (1967)
* Inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1971
* Inducted into the Manitoba Sports Hall of Fame and Museum in 1982
* In 1998, he was ranked number 9 on The Hockey News' list of the 100 Greatest Hockey Players, the highest-ranking goaltender
* In 2010, he was ranked number 1 on The Hockey News' list of the 100 Greatest Hockey Players by position (goaltenders ranking)
* Detroit Red Wings #1 retired on March 6, 1994
* Selected to Manitoba's All-Century First All-Star Team
* Selected as Manitoba's Player of the Century
* “Honoured Member” of the Manitoba Hockey Hall of Fame
* Inducted into the Canada's Sports Hall of Fame in 1975.
* In January 2017, Sawchuk was part of the first group of players to be named "100 Greatest NHL Players" in history.

### Records

* NHL record; Career ties leader - 172
* His NHL record for career shutouts (103) stood until broken by Martin Brodeur in 2009. He held the record for shutouts for 46 years. He passed George Hainsworth with his 95th shutout on January 18, 1964 for the all-time shutout record.

## Personal Life

Terry was born in the North End of Winnipeg and raised there until his family moved to Bowman Avenue in East Kildonan, a working-class, formerly Ukrainian section of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.

He was the third of four sons and one adopted daughter of Louis Sawchuk, a tinsmith who had immigrated to Canada as a boy from Galicia, Austria–Hungary (now Ukraine) and his wife Anne (nee Maslak), a homemaker. Their second son died young from scarlet fever and their oldest son (an aspiring hockey goaltender whom Terry idolized) died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 17.

At the age of 12, Terry injured his right elbow playing rugby and, not wanting to be punished by his parents, hid the injury, preventing the dislocation from properly healing; the arm was left with limited mobility and several inches shorter than the left which bothered him for his entire athletic career.

He excelled in many sports. He played baseball for a number of years for the Elmwood Giants first in the Manitoba Senior AA League starting in 1948 when he won the league's batting title, and then in Mandak League. He played in both the infield and the outfield.

Terry married Patricia Ann Bowman Morey on August 6, 1953 after a brief courtship and they had seven children.

The family endured many years of his increasing alcoholism, philandering (he impregnated a Toronto girlfriend in 1967), verbal & physical abuse. Morey threatened to divorce him numerous times and finally did so in 1969.