Hockey: Hawk on the Wing

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It is a shame that Charlie Hodge could not have been sitting in a front-row box at the Oakland Coliseum one night last week—instead of crouching in the nets, tending goal for the National Hockey League’s Oakland Seals. Then he might have had a good look at the shot that beat him. For 57 frantic minutes, while a record crowd of 12,025 howled itself hoarse, the improbable Seals—an expansion team that played its first game only last October—battled the fearsome Chicago Black Hawks to a 0-0 standoff. Outmanned, outskated, outshot, the Seals somehow hung on, checking viciously as Goalie Hodge blocked, caught and kicked away no fewer than 26 Black Hawk shots.

At last, the inevitable caught up with Oakland. The scoreboard clock read only three minutes to play when Chicago’s Bobby Hull swooped in from left wing and scooped up the puck. Whoosh! he flashed across the Oakland blue line. Wham! he absorbed a brutal check from Seal Defender George Swarbrick that seemed to stagger him. Hull’s shoulders sagged, his curved stick came up, and for the briefest instant, Swarbrick relaxed. Whap! Hull’s stick slashed downward; 25 ft. away, Goalie Hodge could not even begin to react as the rock-hard rubber disk, traveling at better than 100 m.p.h., whistled past his knee into the net.

A groan rose from the heartbroken Oakland crowd. But it was a groan almost equally mixed with cheers. If their favorites had to go down, how better than at the hands of Bobby Hull? For the sight of Robert Marvin Hull, 29, leaning into a hockey puck is one of the true spectacles of sport—like watching Mickey Mantle clear the roof, or Wilt Chamberlain flick in a basket, or Bart Starr throw that beautiful bomb. It is the thing that hockey fans go to see—whether in Chicago, Montreal or Oakland. And it is the thing that makes Bobby Hull the superstar of his blazing sport. A legion of partisans call him “the Golden Jet” and “Mr. Hockey,” regard him as the greatest player of this or any other day—and rare is the expert who says them nay.

Bag But No Baggage. Hockey has its full measure of memorable heroes: Howie Morenz, the Montreal Canadiens’ great center of the ’20s and ’30s; Eddie Shore, the old Boston Bruins star; Maurice (“the Rocket”) Richard, who scored 544 goals for Montreal before retiring in 1960; and Gordie Howe, who at 39, in his 22nd year with Detroit, has scored 678 goals. Yet over eleven incredible seasons, during which the game itself has flourished as never before, Bobby Hull has established himself as the most dominant figure hockey has known and left his indelible imprint on the record book.

Only two other men in N.H.L. history—Richard and Montreal’s Bernie (“Boom Boom”) Geoffrion—have scored 50 goals in a season; each hit 50 on the nose and did it only once. Hull scored 50 in 1961-62, then 54 in 1965-66 and 52 last season; his game-winning goal against the Seals last week was his 41st of this year, with 15 games still to play. Bobby holds a bagful of assorted other records, including most seasons scoring 40 goals or more (five), and most points—counting both goals and assists—scored in a season (97), a mark he set in 1965-66. Hull has led the N.H.L. in goals five times; he has won the overall scoring title three times; and he has twice been voted the league’s Most Valuable Player.

If he did not score so often (an average of two goals every three games), Bobby Hull would still be fearsome. There is not one ounce of excess baggage on his 5-ft. 10-in., 195-lb. frame; physiologists have called him “the perfect mesomorph.” He is the fastest skater in the N.H.L. (28.3 m.p.h. with the puck, 29.7 m.p.h. without), and by far the fastest shot: his “slap shot,” delivered from a full windup, has been clocked at 118.3 m.p.h., nearly 35 m.p.h. above the league average, and his “wrist shot,” fired with just a flick of the stick, zings along at 100.7 m.p.h.

In the second period at Oakland last week, Bobby drew an awed gasp from the crowd with a blast that hit a defender’s stick—and ricocheted all the way up to the 34th row of the stands. Not every opponent who crosses the path of a Hull missile gets off so lightly. Montreal Goalie Lome (“Gump”) Worsley caught one in the face three years ago, firmly believes that the only reason he was not killed was that he was hit by the flat side rather than the edge of the puck. Last October, Minnesota Goal Tender Cesare Maniago was knocked silly for several minutes by a Hull shot that glanced off the top of his head; he now wears a face mask against Chicago. Bobby is aware that he could permanently injure somebody, but he cannot permit himself to brood about it. “I’m certainly not out to maim anyone,” he says, “but the goalies take their chances.”

So does Hull. His front teeth sit out the game on a locker-room shelf, and his once handsome profile looks as if it had been rearranged in a demolition derby. His nose has been broken twice, and at last count 200 stitches have been taken to close all the various cuts and slices in his face.

“Ho-gee! Ho-gee!” All that is expectable — indeed, part and parcel of a game that puts knives on grown men’s feet and clubs in their hands and sends them out to do battle on that most inhospitable of mediums: ice. No one knows precisely when the first hockey game—field or ice—was played. The enameled design on a 14th century French cruet shows figures playing a game with sticks and a stone or ball, and there are historians who claim that the field variety originated in ancient Greece or Persia. The actual name hockey was born, so goes one tale, when French explorers pushing into the St. Lawrence Valley in 1740 came upon a band of Iroquois Indians whacking away at an object—and each other—with murderous-looking sticks and shrieking “Ho-gee! Ho-gee!” The word, as it turned out, meant “It hurts!”

That tale is as good as any, because everything that happened to ice hockey up till the 1880s is strictly prehistoric. By then amateur teams had begun springing up all over eastern Canada, and in 1893 the first game was played in the U.S., either (there is some dispute) at Yale or Johns Hopkins University. Pro teams made their appearance about the same time, but it was 1917 before the N.H.L. was formed, with four teams, all located in Canada. The league’s early years were mercurial at best: it was anybody’s guess how many clubs would take to the ice each season, and the players were rubes and roughnecks who counted themselves fortunate to draw a salary of $750 a year. Discipline was nonexistent: booze flowed freely in the dressing rooms, and the players amused themselves on road trips with gamy practical jokes. For years, one Montreal sportswriter was tormented by the Canadiens whenever he was assigned to travel with the team—forced to drink out of toilet bowls and watch helplessly as his clothes were tossed off a train in midwinter.

Gordie & the Rocket. Pro hockey finally became a profession of sorts by the 1930s, thanks largely to the efforts of Toronto Maple Leafs Owner Conn Smythe, a tough ex-army major who banned drinking on the job, insisted that his players wear pajamas to bed on public trains, and paid them a living wage in return. Interest picked up, and the sport spread, as minor-league teams set up shop in cities well below the Canadian border. But the big boom hit after World War II, when fans jammed N.H.L. arenas to watch Gordie Howe and Rocket Richard. What they saw hooked most of them for good: 60 satiating minutes of nonstop action—the fastest game in the world.

Baseball might have its subtleties and football its science, but an average baseball game offers spectators no more than 16 min. of spasmodic action, a football game 14. N.H.L. gate receipts soared, salaries climbed to respectable levels—although as late as 1959, when baseball’s Ted Williams was earning $100,000 a year, Richard got only $25,000. Pro hockey, at least on the minor-league level, became a regular attraction even in the Deep South, where ice was something to pour bourbon over.

The game itself underwent a radical transformation in 1944 with a rule change that for the first time permitted passing from one zone of the rink to another. Instead of being forced to carry the puck, shinny fashion, out of his defensive zone, a player could rifle it out to his teammates already winging far down the ice near their opponents’ blue line, hoping to catch the defensive team out of position. Just as basketball’s fast break made fancy dribbling obsolete, so hockey’s two-or three-man dash, up the rink all but obviated the art of tricky stick handling. Then, in the late ’50s, Bobby Hull and Montreal’s Bernie (“Boom Boom”) Geoffrion first demonstrated the full potential of the slap shot—a deadly weapon even from center ice. Speed and strength became supreme, the sport became infinitely more exciting, and the stage was set for today’s superstar—a muscular acrobat with flashing feet and a slingshot for an arm.

Migration West. Fans loved the new game—those who had a chance to see it. At its best, in the N.H.L., it was still played in only six cities, the southernmost of which was New York, the westernmost Chicago. And just try to find a ticket. Toronto’s Maple Leaf Gardens (capacity: 15,591) has not had a single unsold seat for an N.H.L. game since 1946. In Montreal, scalpers demand—and get—as much as $30 for a pair of $5 tickets to Canadiens’ home games. Despite six cellar finishes in seven years, the Boston Bruins consistently outdraw pro basketball’s nine-time World Champion Boston Celtics.

With all that money rolling in (the Toronto Maple Leafs alone have turned a profit of $6,000,000 over the past six years), the N.H.L. was in no particular hurry to chance the risks of expansion. That attitude hardly pleased hockey-hungry Western fans, who had got a taste of the game with minor-league teams and now wanted to see some big-league action; it also did nothing for the morale of up-and-coming young players, hundreds of whom languished in the minors, waiting for somebody to retire or be sent down so they could get their crack at the N.H.L. Finally, the league owners relented, and this year there are not one, not two, but six new franchises—doubling the size of the majors in a single stroke.

Cynics talked sourly of impending catastrophe. The expanded league, they insisted, was too big, financially shaky (think of all those extra travel bills), badly unbalanced in the quality of play. Stocked with castoffs, minor leaguers and even non-Canadians (four Americans, one Scot, one Pole), the new West Division teams in St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Minnesota, Los Angeles and Oakland could hardly be expected to furnish much competition for the established East Division clubs. And when they were slaughtered by scores of say 15-0, who would come out to see them play? Auditoriums would empty, franchises would fold, and the N.H.L. would be the laughingstock of U.S. pro sports.

No one is laughing now. Quality? In the last 34 games between East and West, the East has won 17, the West has won 13, and four have ended in ties. Finances? Four weeks ago in Pittsburgh, 12,563 fans turned out to watch the fledgling Penguins tie the old Toronto Maple Leafs 3-3—although the seating capacity at Civic Arena is only 12,507. The Philadelphia Flyers have been averaging 9,000 paid admissions per game; General Manager Bud Poile beams happily: “This game has really arrived in Philadelphia. The fans have started to boo us and the refs.” In St. Louis, Blues Vice President Sid Salomon III says: “We were prepared to wait three years before making any money—but we stand a good chance this first season.” In Bloomington, Minn., the North Stars play their home games in a brand-new, 14,400-seat auditorium, dress in a carpeted locker room that is equipped with a sauna bath and pool table. The Los Angeles Kings are drawing 7,600 paving customers per game, and the only expansion club that is experiencing any real financial woe is the Oakland Seals. The Seals discovered the cure for that last week, when those 12,025 fans turned out to welcome Bobby Hull to town. “I wish,” sighed General Manager Frank Selke Jr., “that we had him all the time.”

Paying the Debt. So does everybody else. Black Hawks President William Wirtz calls Hull “the best public relations man the N.H.L. ever had.” He should be; he works hard enough at it. “Every professional athlete,” he says, “owes a debt of gratitude to the fans and management, and pays an installment every time he plays. He should never miss a payment.” Hull rarely does—whether it means visiting a Chicago hospital to say hello to ailing Black Hawks fans or hanging around the arena until the last autograph is signed. Last month in Toronto, he shook hands and signed autographs for a full 50 minutes. A Toronto lawyer recalls arriving at that city’s airport at 5 a.m. to find the Black Hawks dozing in chairs while they waited for a delayed flight home. “I was with a friend who had four boys, ranging from about six to twelve years old,” he says. “One of the kids spotted Hull and started up to him. His father said, ‘Hey, you can’t do that.’ But quick as a flash Hull was awake and, by God, there he was with a kid on each knee.”

To paraphrase W. C. Fields, anybody who loves small children can’t be all good. The public image aside, Bobby Hull is a pure, all-wool, elemental man, a stogie-chomping, beer-drinking, four-letter guy who said “I do” to a hasty marriage at 18. His second wife, Joanne, is a onetime figure skater; in eight years of boisterously happy marriage, the two of them have worked up a boffo routine. He comes home growling like a bear. She roars back.

He marches out of the house, and she turns the lock. He puts his brobdingnagian shoulder to the door and opens it by the hinges. “It happens all the time,” grins Bobby. Smiles Joanne: “You tell ’em, Star.”

Hull can also be stellar in a Keller. “One day after a White Sox game,” he says, “a bunch of us were sitting around a Michigan Avenue bar having a few, when this guy comes up and starts getting pretty obnoxious. I tell him, ‘Get lost, creep,’ and he looks at me and says, ‘You know something, buddy? You’re a —,’ I reach across the table, grab his tie, give it a half-turn, and cork him one. Then I slam his head down on the table, and it breaks a couple of beer bottles. The last I see of him, he’s crawling out the door on his hands and knees. Later I find out he’s a small-time hood and packs a gun. I’ve never been back there since.”

Nobody who has ever known Bobby Hull could doubt the story. It was, remembers the senior Robert Hull, 57, “a cold son-of-a-gun of a night” in Point Anne, Ont., when the doctor delivered his fifth child (of eleven) and announced: “The only difference between your son and you is that he doesn’t eat so much.” Bobby weighed 12 Ibs. at birth. His father, a 240-lb. cement worker, could lift the front end of a car, and he was also a fair country hockey player—which is what folks do to keep warm in the long Ontario winters.

Situated 100 miles east of Toronto, Point Anne boasts two schools and three churches, but no bars, movie theater or shops. Now that MacDonald’s general store has closed down for lack of business, people get their supplies at Belleville, five miles down the road. The population, according to Bobby’s sister Judy, 20, is “about 1,000, if you count the dogs. And about 100 if you don’t.” The only industry is the cement plant. And the only dash of color in the grey landscape—since Bobby left—is a huge red, white and blue billboard that proudly proclaims: POINT ANNE, BIRTHPLACE OF BOBBY HULL, WORLD’S GREATEST HOCKEY PLAYER.

Come Home, Bobby. It was either that or the cement plant. All the Hulls learned to skate before they learned to read. Judy was such a hard-nosed hockey player that the boys around Point Anne once told her parents they wouldn’t play with her any more because she was too rough. Dennis, 23, followed his older brother to Chicago, where he also plays left wing for the Black Hawks, and could some day make a name for himself. Bobby got his first pair of skates the Christmas he was four; by day’s end, he was maneuvering on his own. “From then on,” he recalls, “I went back every day and skated until I was exhausted. I would get up in the morning and put on the porridge pot, then go out to skate until breakfast was ready. I used to skate all morning and afternoon, and only come home for meals. After dinner, I always went out again, and Mum would have to send my sisters out to bring me home to bed.”

One thing he remembers about that time was that he was constantly shoveling snow. “I was usually one of the first ones out there for a game of shinny,” he says, “and it was up to the first arrivals to clear a skating area.” By the time Bobby was eight, recalls Dr. Don Pringle, a childhood friend who now practices medicine in Montreal, “he had muscles rippling all over him,” and Papa Hull was already spending hours on the ice, endlessly drilling his son on the technique of stick handling. “He was sometimes impatient,” says Bobby, “but he liked to skate with me. ‘Let’s try it again, Robert,’ he would say. ‘Keep your head up. If the stick blade is angled properly, the puck will feel right on it.’ ”

From Bantam to Pro. In Canada, where hockey precocity is commonplace, Bobby Hull was a stick-out from the day he played his first Bantam League game, in Belleville, at the age of ten. There are seven levels of competition in Canada—Peewees, Bantams, Midgets, Juveniles, Junior B’s, Junior A’s and Professionals; Hull skipped the Peewees, Midgets and Juveniles. Officially. Actually, confides Pringle, who played against him in the Bantams, Bobby freelanced. When the Bantam game ended, he would tighten up his laces and join a Midget team in the next game. After that was over, he would skate back on the ice with the still older Juvenile League players. “He used to play hockey practically all Saturday morning,” says Pringle. “Some mornings he’d score 25 goals in four different leagues.”

That kind of performance was bound to attract the attention of pro scouts sooner or later. In Bobby’s case, it was sooner—lots sooner. He was all of eleven when the Chicago Black Hawks’ chief scout, Bob Wilson, saw him and decided to sew him up then and there. A quiet chat with Papa Hull did it. Without telling Bobby until a year later, his father gave Chicago permission to draft him. In the curiously medieval world of Canadian hockey, Hull from that day on was indentured to the Black Hawks. They gave him three years to mature, and at 14 he was shipped off to Hespeler, Ont., 170 miles from home, to live with a strange family, go to a strange school and play hockey for a Junior B Chicago farm club. All for $5 a week. “I wrote him every day,” says his mother, “but I didn’t talk much about what was going on in Point Anne because I was afraid of making him homesick.” One day Bobby wrote back: “Gee, Mom, keep all those letters coming with nothing in them.”

Hull had his problems over the next four years. Chicago moved him from Hespeler to Gait to Woodstock to St. Catharines. He attended four high schools, was briefly expelled from one (for insubordination), and graduated from none. He had an appendectomy, and he had trouble in hockey: Rudy Pilous, Bobby’s coach at St. Catharines, accused him of hogging the puck and suspended him for “indifferent play.” What happened next comes straight out of Jack Armstrong. One September day in 1957, Hull spent the morning working out on the St. Catharines rink, and played a high-school football game in the afternoon. Back at his boardinghouse, in the middle of dinner, he got a phone call from Chicago Scout Wilson. The Black Hawks were playing an exhibition game in St. Catharines that night against the New York Rangers, and Wilson wanted Bobby to suit up. Hanging up the phone, Hull finished his dinner. Then, with a full stomach and a full day of sports under his belt, Bobby went out on the ice and slammed in two goals against the Rangers. His parents were hastily summoned to St. Catharines, and that night, at 18, Bobby Hull became one of the youngest players ever to join the N.H.L.

Slide & Swing. Bobby’s first year with the Black Hawks hardly hinted at the coups to come. Unused to the huge, animal-throated N.H.L. crowds, bounced around by older, wiser defensemen, he did not score his first big-league goal until the seventh game of the season, and then it was one that he would just as soon forget. “It was against Boston,” recalls Bobby. “Somebody rapped me a good one, and down I went—right on top of the puck. All I did was slide into the net with the puck underneath me.” From then on he scored from a more upright position. Black Hawks Coach Rudy Pilous shifted Bobby from center to left wing, where his tremendous left-handed shot could be put to better use, and by the end of the 1959-60 season, at the age of 21, he had his first scoring title, 39 goals, 42 assists, beating out Boston’s veteran Bronco Horvath by a single point.

That was the year, too, when Bobby met his figure-skater wife, Joanne. Music, maestro, please. “It was at Christmas time. Joanne was performing in an ice show in Chicago. I showed up at the arena one day for practice, and there she was, swinging on the ice.” Married two months later, the Hulls now have three children, all boys, all blond, all boisterous: Bob, 6; Blake, 5; and Brett, 3.

Hull’s most vivid recollection of the 1960-61 season is the night Chicago beat Detroit 5-1 and won the Stanley Cup for the first time in 23 years—or, at least, the party afterward. “It was snowing so hard we couldn’t get back to Chicago. We guzzled champagne in the locker room and on the bus ride to the airport, where they turned us away and we had to go back to the hotel in Detroit. The last thing I remember I was drinking beer out of somebody’s hat and got sick as a dog.” Hell-raising was S.O.P. for Hull in those days; on a wild train ride from Boston to Montreal, Bobby and Teammate Ron Murphy broke into a case of railroad flares, lit them and threw them into the other Black Hawks’ roomettes. Several frantic hours and $599 worth of damage later, General Manager Tommy Ivan called a team meeting. “All right,” demanded Ivan, “who did it?” “I decided somebody better say something,” says Bobby, “so I piped up: ‘I did, sir.’ Ivan just said, That’s all I wanted to know,’ and walked away.”

Ivan has long since forgotten that episode. “The incident that sticks most in my mind,” he says, “is the ’63 Stanley Cup playoffs against Detroit.” It sticks in Hull’s, too: every time he looks in a mirror he gets a reminder. In the first game against the Red Wings, Bobby scored two goals. In the second, charging the Red Wings’ net, he was about to pass off to a teammate when Detroit’s Bruce MacGregor spun around suddenly and caught Hull flush on the bridge of the nose with the heel of his stick. “People in the stands later said it sounded like a rifleshot,” says Bobby. “It knocked me to my knees, but I was able to make it to the dressing room under my own power. When the doctor finally got there, I was bleeding all over the place. ‘Son,’ he said, ‘I was on duty for the Zale-Graziano fight, but I’ve never seen a nose like that.’ He didn’t get through with me until after midnight.”

Five days later, after the Red Wings had beaten the Hull-less Hawks in Detroit, Bobby was back on the ice. His nose was packed with medicated gauze, his eyes were swollen almost shut. He still played, and scored a goal, though Chicago lost. “Worse yet,” says Bobby, “I got elbowed in the nose, so I had to go back to the doc next day when we returned to Chicago and get my nose set again.” He played the next night, and scored another goal, but Detroit won again to take a 3-2 lead in the best-of-seven series. Finally came the sixth game, and with it, one of the most astonishing one-man shows in hockey history. At this point, Bobby turns laconic: “They scored, and I went out and got one. Then they got another, and I got another. And so on. They eventually wore us down and won 7-4.” By then, packed nose, blood-filled eyes and all, Hull had assisted on one goal and scored three of his own—for a record-tying total of eight in the series.

Fit for the King. More than any of his other records, more than his skating speed or the velocity of his slap shot or his indifference to the way opponents knee and trip and hook him, that performance in Detroit explains why Hull’s peers as well as his public regard him with something approaching awe. Yet respect, even adulation, are intangibles. Hockey has also given Hull the tangible trappings that befit its reigning king. Chicago is paying Bobby $40,000 this season, and if the second-place Black Hawks can overcome the Montreal Canadiens’ eight-point lead in the East Division—or better yet, win the Stanley Cup—there will be some fancy bonus money as well. Next year, Hull says, he will demand $100,000, more than twice what any player has ever received before. But it still will not match his outside income. Endorsements (Ford cars and tractors, Jantzen sportswear, Supp-hose) and manufacturers’ royalties (Bobby Hull sticks, pucks, T shirts) will net him at least $50,000 this year, and he has just signed a several-year “six-figure” contract with a Canadian firm to produce a whole new line of Bobby Hull hockey gear.

Plus, of course, the farm. “I’m no city boy,” says Hull, “and never could be. As soon as the season is over, I want nothing but my farm.” Yes, but which farm? Bobby owns a 150-acre spread near Millbrook, Ont, two more of 100 and 110 acres outside Demorestville, the 330-acre Hullvue Polled Hereford Farms near Picton, and a half interest in the 240-acre Golden Hawk Hereford Ranch near Demorestville. Around those various properties are scattered his 540 head of cattle, including a prize Polled Hereford bull named Hardean Woodrow Masterpiece—one of whose heifers sold at auction last year for $2,500. Hull does not really expect to get that much for any of the 57 head he will put on the block at his annual auction next August; he’ll be satisfied if he clears $50,000 for the lot.

There are times when Bobby talks of retiring, of breeding the best Polled Hereford herd in the world. He probably will, some day. But not at 29, not when the winds turn chill, not when the pucks start flying and the artificial ice coats the pipes of arenas around the N.H.L. “Nobody loves hockey more than I do,” he says. When the ice freezes, Bobby Hull is that kid from Point Anne, Ont., who got up in the dawn, put on the porridge pot, and skated until he was finally dragged home to bed.