Quote:
Originally Posted by Puppet Guy
I had Terry Sawchuk right off the bat, but the 'Hawk took some digging. Harry Lumley.
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I thought you might enjoy this read:
When Lumley couldn’t play, the Wings called up young Terry Sawchuk, who’d been starring in Indianapolis for the AHL Capitals. Sawchuk, who’d already been up before, in December, when Lumley’s flu was bad, was 20.
Old Apple Cheeks, I said, but Lumley was only 23.
Anyway, the Boston game. The Sawchuk biographies, of which there are two, both frame the scene from the dressing room, before the game where Sawchuk struggles into Lumley’s number 1 sweater.
Brian Kendall in
Shutout: The Legend of Terry Sawchuk (1996): “Terry squeezed into Lumley’s too-tight jersey …”
David Dupuis,
Sawchuk: The Troubles and Triumphs of The World’s Greatest Goalie (1998): “Terry Sawchuk stretched Lumley’s sweater over his beefy frame …”
Which seems strange, given Lumley’s listed dimensions (six feet tall, 195 pounds) versus Sawchuk’s (5’11”, 190 pounds). Poet Randall Maggs thinks the problem through in “The Question For Harry,” from his luminous 2008 collection,
Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems:
You hardly thought of Harry Lumley as a little guy,
but Terry was having trouble getting his sweater
over his head.
It’s not really a poem about getting dressed. Or it is and it isn’t. Maggs has Lumley standing there, in the room, on his crutches — it’s his knee that’s hurt, in the poem — and when no-one else steps up to help Sawchuk, he’s the one who reaches out:
One-handed, he gripped he sweater near the number,
his number, hauling it down, something welling, as always,
helping a team-mate into his armour. Big as Harry was, though,
how would he really feel if the kid fell flat? Friend or foe,
for goalies it got fuzzy here. He felt the shallow
breathing under his hand. “You get that first shot, Kid,
“you’ll be okay.” He tugged out the wrinkles
and flattened the number.
For goaltenders in the old NHL, there were only six jobs, and here was Lumley watching his own sweater head out to play without him. That’s what the poem’s about
: one great goaltender giving way to another who would be greater. There were a few more stages to the succession, it’s true. Sawchuk was a loser in that first game, 3-4 to the Bruins, though by all accounts he played well, was unlucky, with Detroit defenceman Clare Martin twice deflecting Boston shots into his own net. And a few nights later Boston beat him again. But before Lumley returned, Sawchuk’s record for seven games of replacement was 4-3, and he conceded just 16 goals. After he shutout New York, Rangers’ coach Lynn Patrick said, “There are only three big-league goalies right now and one of them is in the minors.”