“Trouble comes in threes,” he’d heard
his mother say. Her gloom would grow darker
whenever his father came home.
The first one followed a late-season game
when he’d blanked Chicago 3 to 0—Congratulations on
reaching shutout 100.
And who’d been on the other bench
but Hall—the ancient rivalry would flicker now and again
but, by then, Detroit had traded each to make room for the other,
then dumped them both. The sender seemed self-assured
and frugal—A high-water mark none’ll match.
Terry thought he recognized the name.
The second came after he beat the Hawks in six
with Hall in goal for the final game, the last
he would play for Chicago.
Those zero-zero ties—how far
from that night they seemed, but they’d been fierce,
the first games after the trade, Hall and Sawchuk battling
head-to-head. Back-to-back scoreless ties. Neither gave an inch,
but over the years, you sensed a kind of truce between them.
Hall had said how much he’d learned by watching Terry
at the other end. As Terry had watched him take a shot
in the mouth a couple of nights before, the first teeth Hall
had lost, and 25 stitches to close a nasty cut. And here he was
in goal again, just as, after that blast from Watson long ago,
Terry had spit out his broken teeth and taken the stitches
without anaesthetic to keep them from recalling Hall.
Ironies tumbling over ironies. The trade to Boston
and the ties had happened the year the team had gone
to Newfoundland. Congratulations on beating Chicago,
the second telegram read, the boys wish best against Montreal.
But then the Forum brought him crashing down.
Bone-tired from battling Chicago, the bridge
of his nose cut, hammered into the crossbar, and taken out
hard by Balon, Terry let six get by him, losing game one,
then six in game four, losing again. Though Bower,
not fully recovered himself, had salvaged
the two games in between.
Terry was weak in that second defeat. He fought
the puck all night, got caught off the post, waving at pucks
that were already past him. “It wasn’t the best game
I ever played,” he said, “and it wasn’t the worst.”
The press found little comfort in a philosophical goalie.
Some said maybe he’d shot his wad in Chicago.
Some were more bitter, sneering he looked hungover.
Put simply, Backstrom was better that night. Béliveau too.
“Some days you stop ’em,” says Terry,
“and some days you don’t.”
And no one knew better how fast the tune
could change and telegrams travel.
Here was the third in his hand and hurled to the floor
before he’d lit his first cigarette—Congratulations in order
Terry boy, it read, how much did you get?
He watched as water from the showers
darkened the words away, but he would see them
more than once that night, brooding in a lounge downtown
and later in a sleepy taxi travelling east on rue Pie IX,
and waking in a reassuring stranger’s bed.