BLATCHFORD ON BOBBY HULL.
Hall induction recognizes a great athlete
He is 77 years old now, and Wednesday night he missed the party that was being held in his honour.
No one knows why Bobby Hull decided to skip his induction into the brand new Winnipeg Jets Hall of Fame, and Hull himself isn’t talking. He has issued only a polite statement and declined to speak to Postmedia via a kindly Blackhawks PR guy.
But the betting is he wanted to avoid a repeat of the sort of attention that greeted the original Jets’ announcement last July that the members of the “Hot Line” — Hull, Anders Hedberg and Ulf Nilsson — would be the first inductees.
The trio took the Jets to two championships in the old World Hockey Association and were honoured in a ceremony before the team played Toronto.
But it was Hull, with his storied National Hockey League Hockey Hall of Fame career with the Chicago Blackhawks — he played more than 1,000 games for the Hawks, led the NHL in goals 13 times, won the Hart Trophy twice and was named an all-star 10 times — who gave the upstart league instant cred.
The Jets’ announcement of the Hot Line’s induction was mildly controversial because of Hull.
Shortly afterward, a local columnist named Colin Fast — he writes for the Winnipeg Metro giveaway, usually about urban affairs — reminded readers of Hull’s “well-documented troubles” off the ice, particularly the allegations of domestic abuse made by his former wife, Joanne.
She had accused him originally in the context of their divorce, and while their daughter apparently confirmed the abuse in an ESPN documentary, Hull wasn’t charged criminally. His second wife, Deborah, also once called police and claimed he was beating her, but she later dropped the complaint. Hull pleaded guilty in 1986 to taking a swing at one of the arresting officers, and was fined $150 and placed on six months’ supervision. The two remain married. Hull was also quoted in 1998 in a Russian newspaper, the English-language Moscow Times, as saying that the black population in the United States was growing too fast and that genetic breeding wasn’t all bad.
“Hitler, for example, had some good ideas,” he reportedly told the paper. “He just went a little bit too far.” Later, Hull adamantly denied making the remarks.
Clearly, the Golden Jet, as he was always called for his blond hair and tremendous speed, is not without flaws. It appears, inferentially, that most of his difficulties were tied to his drinking.
As Allen Abel wrote for Sports Illustrated in 1998, in a delightful piece about the World Hockey Association, even at the age of almost 60 Hull was “roaring merrily in the parking lot of a mock-Tudor tavern while a friend of one of his innumerable sons drives golf balls into the heavily populated night.”
Hull was credited or blamed, depending on your view, for being one of those who “opened the portal,” as Abel called it, to everything that is hockey now — the astonishing money for players, the power of their union, etc. He had been fighting the Blackhawks’ ownership for years, and when the WHA was looking for superstars, they offered Hull $1 million to sign.
(In a delicious bit, Abel asked in that piece, “What lunatic would pay him 10 times what he was earning,” and then recounted the story of how the saintly Joanne had asked Hull, unaware that she could be heard by the late Ben Hatskin, the 300-pound owner of the spanking new team, “Why would you ever want to live in Winnipeg and play for that fat Jew?”)
My point is only, we are all deeply flawed. Hull is, too. That surely comes as no surprise. The Jets honoured a man whose accomplishments on the ice — and off it, too, for by many accounts he was a good ambassador of the game — are balanced by the mistakes and failures in his personal life. I can hardly think of anyone that description doesn’t fit, more or less.
No one was turning a blind eye to the allegations made against him in the past; no one was dissing the problem of domestic abuse. His induction was an acknowledgment of his greatness as an athlete, nothing more.
The real shock, to anyone who’s been there and wonders what else there might be to do in the bitter long winter, is that Hull managed to put Winnipeg on the hockey map.