Matthew Stranach: The Last Book I Loved, Night Work

I do not play hockey. I do not watch hockey on TV. I have no memories of youthful visits to bone-cold arenas at five o’clock in the morning to thwack pucks. Many of my friends go batshit crazy when their favorite teams make the playoffs. I am someone who reads the sports page first because it is the best-written part of the newspaper.

Randally Maggs’ Night Work is a book of poetry about a hockey player named Terry Sawchuk. It is one of the best books I’ve read in a long time.

Did I know who Sawchuk was before reading Night Work? No. I had to look him up in Wikipedia. This is what I learned:  Sawchuk was a top National Hockey League goalie from the 1940’s, 50’s and 60’s. He played on several different teams. He led the Detroit Red Wings to multiple Stanley Cup championships back when there were only six teams in the NHL. He had a troubled personal life and died at age 40 after getting kneed in the stomach by a fellow hockey player. This fracas wasn’t part of the game. It happened off-hours.

Maggs imagines Sawchuk’s life and career in detail. Journalism, fiction, and poetry are blended together to create a work which is as singular a piece of literature as Sawchuk was a goalie.

One of the best things about Night Work is that the style is so accessible. Many people profess to dislike poetry because is obscure / hard to follow / opaque / pretentious / etc. In most places Maggs’ poetry reads like prose. It is populist poetry, in the best possible sense. This is entirely appropriate given Maggs’ subject. You get the sense that Sawchuk wasn’t the kind of guy who would read a book of poetry. He’d be too busy chasing women, taking pucks, or fighting insomnia.

His vocation was for diving after pucks in a freezing cold rink.

He tries to stop a speeding bullet.

Night Work tries to imagine a man like Terry Sawchuk in totality.

Hockey is an incredibly fast and dangerous sport. Back in the fifties and sixties players didn’t wear helmets or face masks. There are pictures of Sawchuk and other players throughout the decades. Many of these photographs show men with black eyes and missing teeth. Why are they are doing this?

As Maggs would have it, hockey players were journeymen in those days. They were laborers with very specific skills. Some men worked on construction sites. Others were in the military. Sawchuk jumped in front of pucks. He propped himself up against the tables of bars. He was psychologically troubled. He did not get paid terribly well.  You get the sense he made about as much as a traveling salesman. He got abused by the fans and newspaper writers.

In Night Work the goalie is portrayed as a hero or a goat, depending on if his team won or lost. The inherent unfairness of this role echoes throughout Night Work, just as it continues to appear in the sports pages of newspapers each day.

The game described in Night Work seems a world away from the slick glossy product offered on Hockey Night in Canada (or in similar formats in the US). I remember being incredulous when a work stoppage prevented the 2004-2005 NHL season from going ahead. I didn’t give a damn if there would be a Stanley Cup that year (and there wasn’t). The lowest-paid of these guys made salaries in the high six-figures and they were going on strike (even if that strike was being called a “lockout”). The whole concept blew my mind.

You wonder what Sawchuk would think.

I admire the ambition of this book. As soon as you think one thing is happening, it switches to something else. A different character’s voice is taken up. The chronology jumps decades. Mathematical equations are prefaced by a photograph. Prose follows poetry. You don’t know that certain bit of hockey lore? There’s a bibliography. You can look it all up. But you don’t need to.

The reader takes on the role of goalie. Each line of each poem is like a shot taken from a different angle.

Try to imagine the mind and life of a goalie that died forty years ago. Why would anybody do that?

I’m a thirty-two year old English teacher living in a small city in the Middle East. I don’t know or care about most sports. My experience and personal history is about as far removed from Sawchuk’s as you can get. And yet I’m still thinking about this book months after I read it. It makes me want to be in North America forty years ago. It makes me want to get on a plane and go to Detroit, Montreal, Boston, Chicago, and Toronto and walk around, preferably during the winter.

Terry Sawchuk left the world early.  By the end of Night Work you will miss him and wonder about him, even if you had never heard of him before.