Bobby Hull, a charismatic Hall of Famer who was one of the National Hockey League’s superstars in the 1960s and whose blonde hair, lightning-fast slap shots and furious offensive rushes on the rink earned him the nickname “The Golden Jet,” died Monday. He turned 84.
The Chicago Blackhawks, for whom Hull played 15 seasons, announced his death but did not say where he died or give a cause.
The great strength of Hull’s upper body gave power to a terrifying punch shot that has been measured over the years at between 97 and 120 miles per hour. Glenn Hall, a Blackhawks goalkeeper who faced Hull in practice, once said, “The idea wasn’t to stop that thing, but to keep you from getting killed.”
Ed Giacomin, a New York Rangers goalie, told The New York Times in 1988 that Hull’s shot “would rise or fall. You would stop if you actually had to duck. It played games with your mind.”
Hull was the third player in NHL history to score at least 50 goals in a season, behind Montreal Canadiens Maurice Richard and Bernard Geoffrion. He scored 50 goals or more with the Blackhawks five times, peaking at 58 during the 1968–69 season.
With Stan Mikita, Hull helped turn the Blackhawks’ fortunes around, that had been a largely moribund franchise for about a dozen seasons until they joined in the late 1950s. In 1961, Chicago won its first Stanley Cup championship in 23 years – Hull scored 14 points in the playoffs against the Canadiens and Detroit Red Wings — and the team remained competitive throughout their time there.
Hull had scored 604 goals for the Blackhawks by the time he became the first NHL superstar to defect to the upstart World Hockey Association in 1972 and sign a 10-year contract with the Winnipeg Jets worth at least $2.5 million. including a $1 million signing bonus, to be the team’s player-coach.
A temporary restraining order issued by a Chicago judge barred him from joining the Jets until after the start of the 1972–73 season. But once he was back on the ice, he continued to confuse and terrify goalkeepers. He scored 51 and 53 goals in his first two years, then 77 in the 1974–75 season.
Overall, he added 303 goals to his career tally with the WHA
While playing with the Jets, he sat out a game in 1975 to protest the brutal violence in the sport and promoted a merger between the NHL and WHA.
And he said he didn’t regret leaving the Blackhawks for the starting Jets.
“When I came here I knew it would be very hard work,” he told The Times in 1977. ‘We’ve come a long way. In some cases, it hasn’t been as fruitful as we thought it would be. But it still created a lot of good things for hockey.
“We’ve developed some good players and some good cities,” he continued. “And we have opened a way for the European players.”
The merger came in 1979, but only four WHA teams, including the Jets, joined the older league, amounting to expansion franchises. Effectively returning to the NHL due to the merger, Hull scored four goals for the Jets before being traded to another former WHA team, the Hartford Whalers (now the Carolina Hurricanes), for whom he scored two more. It was his last season and he got to play part of it alongside another former NHL superstar, Gordie Howe.
Robert Marvin Hull was born on January 3, 1939, in Point Anne, Ontario, to Robert Hull, a cement company foreman, and Lena (Cook) Hull. One of 11 children, Bobby took up skating at a young age. (One of his brothers, Dennis, played 13 seasons with the Blackhawks.)
“We got Robert a pair of ice skates for Christmas when he wasn’t even 3,” his father told Sports Illustrated in 1960. “I took him to a frozen pond near home, and I’d be damned if he didn’t take a few steps in half an hour.”
Bobby played hockey at home and at school until he was spotted by a Blackhawk scout at age 11.
“I was very lucky”, Hull told NHL.com in 2017. “I found that ice shelf on the Bay of Quinte when I was no bigger than a hockey stick and fell in love with the game. I spent as much time there skating as I did in bed.
He was soon playing on amateur teams, including a top junior club in Ontario, the St. Catharines teepees, where one of his teammates was Stan Mikita. Hull played there for two years, scoring 33 goals in his second season, before joining the Blackhawks for the 1957–58 season.
In 1964, two years after his first 50-goal season, Hull’s physical prowess was tested by the Sports College of Canada and Fitness Institute. The college determined that Hull was the fastest skater in the NHL at 28.3 miles per hour and the hardest shooter at 118 miles per hour, which probably came as no surprise to anyone. At 5-foot-10½ and 194 pounds, he was proclaimed the “perfectly muscular mesomorph.”
Told about the scientific findings, his colleague Howe told Time magazine“Someone should be limping him.”
Elected to the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1983, Hull was a 12-time NHL All-Star. He also won the Art Ross Trophy as the league’s top scorer three times, the Hart Memorial Trophy as Most Valuable Player twice, and the Lady Byng Trophy for men’s play once.
Half a dozen seasons after Hull retired, his son Brett started playing in the NHL In three consecutive seasons, starting in 1989 with the St. Louis Blues, Brett Hull scored 72, 86 (third most in league history) and 70 goals. He ended his career with 741.
Information on Bobby Hull’s survivors was not immediately available.
Hull’s time in retirement was marked by a number of difficult incidents. In 1987 he pleaded guilty to charges of assaulting a police officer who intervened during a dispute between Hull and his third wife, Deborah. She accused him of punching her in the face and filed a battery complaint; later she dropped it. According to a 2002 ESPN documentary, his second wife, Joanne McKay, had been physically and mentally abused during their marriage.
In 1998, The Moscow Times, an English-language newspaper in Russia, where he attended a hockey tournament, was quoted as saying that “Hitler had some good ideas,” but “just went a little too far,” and that the Black population in the United States grew too fast. The paper reported that, when asked if he was a racist, Hull said: ‘I don’t give a damn. I am not running for political office.”
Hull denied the statements; his lawyer said that before the interview he was told by the translator that Hull never mentioned Nazis or black people in the United States.
In 2008, after a long estrangement caused by his jump from the Blackhawks to the Jets, Hull was welcomed back to the team as an ambassador by its owner, Rocky Wirtz.
“We had a love affair when I was playing,” Hull told The Chicago Tribune, referring to Blackhawks fans. “We didn’t need the mighty Montreal Canadiens to fill our tent. We didn’t need Howe to fill our joint. They came to see their Chicago Blackhawks.
But he was dropped after 14 years when the team said it was redefining the ambassador’s role.