WINNIPEG, Manitoba – Unlike many of his late-teen contemporaries in Winnipeg during the mid-1980s, Danny Schur resisted the old saw that the “only way up was out” of the city.
He not only stayed, but has also become a multi-tasking artist who has found fame in celebrating the city’s rich history on stage and film.
Mr. Schur is currently working on a musical on the life of Louis Riel, who brought Mr. Schur’s home province, Manitoba, into Canadian Confederation in 1870, but who was executed for high treason 15 years later after leading a resistance to federal encroachment of land claimed by his Métis people of mixed European and Indigenous ancestry.
Danny Schur
Markian Tarasiuk playing the role of Terry Sawchuk circa 1948.
Next summer, Mr. Schur’s well-known musical about the historic 1919 Winnipeg General Strike, one of Canada’s most famous labor disruptions, goes into production as a feature film. The principal character in “Strike!” is named Mike Sokolowski, who in reality was a Ukrainian-born man who allegedly threw a brick at police during a violent clash with police and military, and died after being shot through the heart. He was believed to be 40 years old at the time, and largely forgotten by history until Mr. Schur chose to use Mr. Sokolowski’s name for his protagonist based on another Ukrainian Canadian, Harry Damaschuk, who had an actual role in events leading up to that Bloody Saturday demonstration.
Mr. Schur has contacted Academy Award-winning director Tom Hooper (“The King’s Speech”) to direct “Strike!” the film.
With “Strike!” Mr. Schur used fictional elements to bring a human face to a sad and violent chapter in Winnipeg’s history. However, he needed no such dramatic device with a biographical film he recently completed. Its subject’s life was incredible enough without requiring creative license, but somehow escaped Mr. Schur’s radar until recently.
A lifelong hockey fan and player as goaltender since the age of 8, Mr. Schur, 49, grew up idolizing National Hockey League great Ken Dryden, the Montreal Canadiens’ celebrated and cerebral goalie. Mr. Schur became interested in a man regarded in many circles as the NHL’s greatest goalie and a Ukrainian Canadian folk hero late only last year during a conversation with Andrew Hladyshevsky, president of the Ukrainian Canadian Foundation of Taras Shevchenko and vice-chair of the Endowment Council for the Canadian First World War Internment Recognition Fund.
Mr. Schur received a $50,000 (about $38,000 U.S.) grant from the fund to write, with “Strike!” collaborator Rick Chafe, a screenplay for a feature film, “The Braiders,” about yet another sad chapter in Canadian history when more than 8,500 “enemy aliens” – mainly Ukrainians – were held at 24 receiving stations and internment camps from 1914 to 1920. Mr. Schur is hoping to cast Oscar-nominated actress Vera Farmiga in the lead and/or direct the film.
Manitoba Sports Hall of Fame
A young Terry Sawchuk
Mr. Schur recalls Mr. Hladyshevsky asking him, “Why aren’t you doing anything on Terry Sawchuk? He’s a Winnipegger, a Ukrainian Canadian, and a goalie like you.”
That was enough to convince Mr. Schur to start researching this late hockey legend’s life. What he discovered is the stuff that could be fiction.
Terrance Gordon Sawchuk played an astounding 21 seasons as an NHL goalie – 14 of them with the Detroit Red Wings for whom he led the team to win three Stanley Cups. The last time the Toronto Maple Leafs won that championship trophy (in 1967), Sawchuk was in the net.
Inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame a year after his death in 1971, he won the Vezina Trophy, awarded to the NHL’s best goalie, four times, and held the league record for career shut-outs (103) for 39 years until New Jersey Devils’ goaltender Martin Brodeur beat it in 2009 with 124 career shut-outs. But to reach that milestone, Mr. Brodeur needed to play in over 250 regular-season games more than Mr. Sawchuk did to reach his achievement, Mr. Schur points out.
“A goalie is lucky if he can play 10 years because it’s so hard on the knees, and Sawchuk more than doubled that,” Mr. Schur says. “He was the original iron man.”
Yet Mr. Sawchuk, the son of a Ukrainian-born tinsmith, Louis Sawchuk, was lucky he even made it to the NHL in 1950.
At the age of 12, while playing hockey with his buddies, the future great broke his right arm at the elbow, but didn’t tell his mother. Left untreated, the arm fused in such a way that he was unable to straighten it for the rest of his life. That fracture was the start of an extraordinary string of injuries Mr. Sawchuk, who stood 5-foot-11, would suffer during his NHL career.
Playing at a time when goalies wore no helmets or masks, his face was, as Mr. Schur describes it, “Frankensteined” with some 440 stitches, including three in his right eyeball.
“Sawchuk typifies the pigheaded, proud, underdog North End Ukrainian Winnipegger with a little bit of a chip on his shoulder,” explains Mr. Schur. “He didn’t complete high school, so he felt the only thing he could do was play hockey and clung to that career for dear life.”
Even if it meant dealing with constant pain, both physical and psychological.
To better see pucks coming toward him and to improve his sense of gravity, Sawchuk would bend very low in the net and keep his back parallel to the ice – an impossible posture that resulted in ruptured spinal discs and a permanent stoop.
He also struggled with depression, a sign of weakness in the mid-century Mad Men-era when the North American male mainly masked his internal demons. So Sawchuk self-medicated with booze and became an alcoholic.
“A cousin of his told me that he was a very dark, brooding, non-smiling guy,” says Mr. Schur.
However, he explains, for his time, Sawchuk was “an icon in the hockey world” and revered by hockey fans in the same way Wayne Gretzky would be decades later.
Sawchuk’s raw talent was undeniable. In 1997, The Hockey News ranked him number 9 (the highest for a goaltender) on its list of The Top 100 NHL Players of All-Time. But his popularity was likely as much a result of his common-man background with roots in the rough-and-tumble neighborhoods of North End Winnipeg, where he was born, and East Kildonan, where he was raised in an often volatile home environment.
“He was a journeyman hockey player who made $18,000 a year playing for Detroit, and there was a blue-collar respect between him and his fans,” Mr. Schur explains.
In his film, “Made in Winnipeg: The Terry Sawchuk Origin Story,” Mr. Schur explores the Winnipeg backdrop to the early hockey career of the “Big Uke,” as his Red Wings teammates called him.
Winnipeg-born, Vancouver-based Ukrainian Canadian Markian Tarasiuk, plays Sawchuk between the ages of 18 and 24.
Although the 22-year-old only played a bit of hockey before, he could skate and, according to Mr. Schur, he “nailed it” in portraying Sawchuk.
When Mr. Schur sent the hockey legend’s sons Terrance and Jerry – two of Mr. Sawchuk’s seven children, both of whom live in Detroit – a video clip from the Winnipeg winter shoot with Mr. Tarasiuk, one of the sons’ colleagues thought Mr. Schur had sent them archival footage of their dad in color.
The two sons also appear in the film and visit some key touchstones in their father’s life, including his boyhood home, the elementary school he attended and the rink where he played hockey.
Another rink, the Terry Sawchuk Arena, is where Mr. Schur premiered the 30-minute film, at ice level, on September 26. He hopes to air the $30,000 (about $23,000 U.S.) docu-drama – which received $8,500 ($6,400 U.S.) from the Shevchenko Foundation – on television, or at the very least post it online, to share the largely untold story of a remarkable goaltender’s beginnings 45 years after his untimely passing at the age of 40.
The Red Wings officially retired Sawchuk’s No. 1 jersey in 1994. Through his filmic homage, Mr. Schur’s goal is to ensure that knowledge of Sawchuk’s primacy as a player is not lost on future generations of hockey fans.
“I hope this movie brings more awareness of how great an athlete Terry Sawchuk was and what he did for the sport of hockey,” says Mr. Tarasiuk, who collected Terry Sawchuk hockey cards as a child. “I was extremely happy to bring him to life on the screen and hopefully my performance will also make Winnipeggers more proud of his legacy.”