Unmasking Vancouver Canucks Legends: A Conversation with John Garrett

I’ve always been interested in goalie masks since I was a kid and always wondered why they chose the designs they did. There was a mysteriousness to it and yet the art seemed to live through each goalie. From Corey Hirsch’s haunted house to John Garrett’s skate logo’d shell to the sleek, speedy looking Kirk Mclean cage; I wanted to explore them all.

My first interview was with the man, the myth, the legend: John Garrett. Before Cheech was the colour man for the Canucks television broadcasts, he was backstopping the Vancouver Canucks through some of the less memorable years of the franchise. Although simple in design, Garrett’s mask is one of the more iconic ones in Canucks’ history.

There wasn’t much to it aside from straps and a hollowed-out fiberglass egg, but I’ll let John describe what it was like.

John Garrett: I mean, that’s why the goalies flinched. That was the thing, you could tell when a goalie was terrified of certain shooters. When you taught goalie schools and worked at hockey schools you kept telling the kids “you have to keep your chin on the ice” and that was because when you got hit in the head it was like getting punched because the mask sits flush to your face and you get pressure cuts and stuff, but it wasn’t like the puck was ripping open your flesh.

I remember getting hit by Mark Howe in practice one day with a shot and it hit me right in the forehead, it didn’t cut me but it knocked me right down and I had a goose egg so big I couldn’t put my mask on the next day so I couldn’t play.

I also remember playing one night in St. Louis and Lars Lindgren went down to block a shot and Guy Chouinard was the guy and he shot it just above his pad and I didn’t see it and it hit me just above the left eye and it cut me for 28 stitches just from a pressure cut because it was right above the eye hole.

JG: We had none, we had the fiberglass straight to your face.

JG: Nope, Greg Harrison who made a lot of guys masks out of Toronto, he did mine. I got traded on a Thursday and I was going to Toronto to join the Canucks and it just so happened he had time to fit it in. So he just painted over the Nordique logo, he just painted over that and put the skate there and did a nice job, that was all him. Very creative guy.

You look at his collection and google Greg Harrison, his collection, he has a lot of nice masks in his stable.

JG: Well it is, it’s the skate logo that everybody seems to like and Thatcher Demko wore one that was pretty close to it this year when they had the skate sweaters on, that brings it back.

It’s the team identity, more than the guy that’s wearing it. People say “OK that’s the Canucks mask and Oh yeah, John Garrett wore that one” but it’s the team logo more than anything else. I like my Nordique mask too, and the Nordique fans still send me my Nordique cards it’s because of the mask more than anything else.

JG: Uh, I don’t think so. It had the skate and the flying V in it. I don’t think I would have done anything different with it. It was so much easier to do good designs on those full-face ones rather than the cages ones, the cage ones are broken up because of the cage.

Brian Heyward’s shark mask was good, there are some that stand out but they’re just not the same because they’re broken up by the cage. Guys are getting very creative now with pictures of rock bands and famous people on their mask and city skyscapes but it doesn’t look the same because they have the cage in front.

JG: Yeah, exactly.

JG: You look at the holes in it, strategically placed but it would drip down through the mask. The mouth hole was so you could spit out of it and it was designed to drain the sweat through the bottom.

I look back and there was absolutely no throat protection at all. None. It goes under your chin and your neck is completely exposed. I look back and I thought “Man was I lucky I never got hit in the throat”.

JG: Yeah, oh yeah. Well, you look at guys like Bobby Hull on Eddie Giacomin. Every time Hull would come down he’d waste one early in the game and Eddie would be pulling up and the next time he’d come down he’d wire one six inches off the ice and catch the far corner and Eddie would be standing right straight up and try to get out of the way.

JG: Mmmm… I like the Gary Simmons one, the cobra, that was pretty darn good. Gary Bromley’s was very creative too! Gary’s a great guy. He looks like a skeleton in person and then he puts the skeleton mask on.

His nickname was “Bones” being that he was so skinny because he looked like a skeleton.

(Gotta miss the old nicknames, those guys were creative)

We chatted briefly about my love for goalie masks growing up and how goalies had a personality through their mask and how it’s changed for goalies being able to wear multiple lids in a season.

JG: It wasn’t like now where you can have unlimited budgets and you can switch masks for every occasion. Back then, Greg charged, I think $500 for a mask and that was a pretty big-ticket item for the trainer so you had one mask.

JG: And then you put somebody’s cage on until they fixed the mask.

I’d like to thank John Garrett for his time in this venture. It was a lot of fun. John has always had a fun personality and getting to know a bit more about him and the thing that kept that stache of his from getting damaged was just the break I needed.

Hockey may not be on TV but there is plenty of hockey happening off the ice.

Stay tuned for my next guest!