A trip to Hawaii in 1966 was a really bad one, where she said Bobby beat her bloody with a steel-heeled shoe and dangled her over a balcony. His second wife Joanne, the mother of his five children including Brett Hull, said in 2002 that he abused her for years. But he was a folk hero, fitting in between Maurice Richard and Bobby Orr.Īnd behind closed doors was the other Bobby, and there lay demons that spilled out into the open. He was stubborn: When the WHA move kept him off the 1972 Summit Series team, Bobby sat in the stands for Game 3 in Winnipeg. He was famously cheap: Bobby Hull room service was Bobby patrolling hotels and picking food off plates in the hall. Hull was also known for charity work, for winning a Lady Byng, for protesting the sport’s goonery - he sat out a single game in the 1977-78 season in reaction to on-ice violence - and for signing every autograph. Hull was a two-time Hart Trophy winner, won three scoring titles and led the NHL in goals seven times, won two more MVPs in the WHA, brought a Cup to Chicago and won two WHA titles, scored 913 goals between the two leagues and is a huge reason why Winnipeg currently has a team.
He and Stan Mikita were pioneers in curving blades back when goalies didn’t wear masks, and Hull’s hulking power and errant accuracy must have been sheer terror: he once told Sean Fitz-Gerald, then with the National Post, that the puck went top corner or second balcony. He was a giant, an icon: the big-skating blond with the almost mythical strength of an Ontario farm boy, turning hockey into a dramatic one-on-one gunfight with the goalie rather than a messy scrum out front. Hull may have ignored the other end of the ice, but he was probably the greatest left-winger in history until Alexander Ovechkin came along. Winnipeg’s free-flowing offence with Ulf Nilsson and Anders Hedberg and Hull was a precursor to Edmonton of the 1980s Glen Sather built the Oilers with that kind of skating and puck control and skill in mind. The WHA deal was seismic, and Hull ushered in the new era of big money in the game.
Michael Farber, formerly of Sports Illustrated, has called Hull the first modern hockey player and you can see that argument.
And he left a huge hockey legacy and a hell of a mess behind. He was erratic, too, or maybe the word was consistent, and it became apparent over time. His slapshot echoed through history, and Bobby’s shot was devastating if erratic. The first man to exceed 50 goals in a season, a Chicago Blackhawks great, the man who jumped to Winnipeg and the World Hockey Association for a million bucks, the Golden Jet. You can’t write hockey history without Bobby Hull, though for a time hockey tried.
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