Considering his stellar hockey career and tragic personal life, Terry Sawchuk should have been attractive to a whole host of biographers. On the contrary, it’s been 25 years since the premature death of one of the greatest goaltenders of all time, and Shutout, by Toronto author Brian Kendall, is the first full-length account of his life.

From Kendall’s fine work emerges a goaltender who shared his crease with pain and tragedy. During a 20-year career that began with the Detroit Red Wings in 1950, Sawchuk suffered a staggering number of serious injuries and illnesses on top of the usual punishment a goalie received – some 350 stitches to his face and more bruises than a truckload of ripe peaches. Off the ice he endured his share of pain, too. He lost two siblings while growing up and was estranged from his wife and seven children when he died at 41 after a drunken fight with a teammate.

Kendall admits at the outset that although he spoke with several friends and former teammates, Sawchuk’s family did not co-operate with his research. As a result, Shutout only occasionally reveals the intimate details of Sawchuk’s troubled home life; his drinking and womanizing, for example, are only superficially described. Kendall’s chronicle of the goaltender’s on-ice career, however, is well paced and dramatic, taking the reader through Sawchuk’s stellar early years with the Red Wings, his last Stanley Cup with the Toronto Maple Leafs in 1967, and finally his rapid decline as his battered body simply shut down.

As a good biography should, Shutout describes its subject within a vivid context. Kendall nicely works in observations about goaltending in the era before high-impact equipment: the stress and fear endured by bare-faced netminders were tremendous and go some way in explaining Sawchuk’s moody behaviour. Combining insights like these with an engaging narrative, Shutout illuminates many of the dark corners of Sawchuk’s enigmatic life and career.