An old goalie remembers Jon Susag

Rick Beresford writes:
The JHS - '65 site acknowledged the passing in October of Jon Susag (' 62), who was the brother of Dick and Dave Susag.
This triggered a lot of memories for me, memories of playing with Jon and the high school hockey team from 1960 to 1963.
In 1960, I was in 7th grade and had just moved from Winnipeg where I had grown up playing hockey, and now practically lived at the rink behind Central.

North, south
One day the goalie of the Alex team, Gordy Ziegelmann (' 64), took a puck in the mouth and split his lip wide open. Arne Benson (' 63) caught me in the warming house and said, "You're from Canada….put the pads on". Drafted at age 12!
That first couple days scrimmaging with the team was amazing. But by far the most amazing was watching Jon Susag shoot the puck. He would cross the blueline with the puck, then somehow shift his feet so he was skating sideways with his heels pointing together as he wound up for a slapshot.
It was the oddest thing I had ever seen, one toe pointing north, the other south, until I heard the thunder of the puck hitting the boards behind the goal. A bullet could not travel as fast as a Susag slapshot! I ended up playing hockey for a lot of years, but Jon is the only guy I ever saw whose powerful shot actually broke the boards behind the net!

Intimidation
Oh, that's another unusual thing about Jon's style….he kept his eyes on the puck and rarely looked at where he was shooting. Consequently, he missed the goal a fair amount of the time. But as it turned out, that didn't really matter. His shot was the intimidation factor!
We played in Fergus one very cold day and between periods, we climbed onto our school bus while the Fergus team used their warming house. I had a friend from Fergus who told me right before the 2nd period that their goalie was scared of Jon's shot, so their plan was to stick close to him so he wouldn't have the time to set up that odd stance. In that sense, Jon was like the cross-eyed discus thrower….he always had the crowd's attention!
Jon, we'll miss you, but your memory is much alive.
Those were great years!
More on hockey later.
Rick Beresford