Forward per million – Newspaper Kommersant No. 17 (7462) dated 01/31/2023

One of the greatest forwards in the history of the National Hockey League (NHL), Bobby Hull, has died at the age of 84. In the 1960s, Hull was the benchmark hockey sniper, and in the early 1970s he was the first of his kind to be given a contract worth more than $1 million a year. He got it by running away from the NHL to try to compete with her new championship – the World Hockey Association (WHA).

In 1998, a pre-season tournament, traditional for those times, the Spartak Cup, was held in Moscow, and among its guests of honor was a man who looked like an archetypal rustic American farmer grandfather – the way he is portrayed in Hollywood films: a plaid shirt, a kind smile , wrinkles on a face scorched by the sun, beaming with the joy of simple everyday worries of the eye. Actually, the guest himself did not hide the fact that he was interested in agriculture no less than hockey, and even asked to take him on an excursion to a farm near Moscow.

However, the public, of course, still associated him exclusively with hockey, and she reacted surprisingly lively to the announcement of the name of this person. It turned out that in Russia at the turn of the century they still knew about the Canadian, whose peak of fame came in the 1960s.

In that era, Bobby Hull was a very special figure in the NHL, even compared to other very special figures like Bobby Orr, Phil Esposito, Gordie Howe, Frank Mahovlich. In any case, it was with Hull that the image of the reference sniper was associated for a long time.

The nickname Golden Jet quickly stuck to him. He, blond with golden hair, really moved around the ice at the pace of a jet fighter. In the NHL, there were already quite advanced gizmos that could, for example, measure how fast a player moves on the ice. So, once such a device recorded how Hull accelerated to almost 48 km / h – a monstrous speed. And another device showed that the puck accelerated to 190 km / h after its click. And this is also a huge number. Especially when you consider that, as it was believed, Bobby Hull’s click was weaker than the throw, for the sake of which he learned to bend the straight hook of a wooden (before the use of composite materials was still far away) club into an arc for the sake of whipping: a common trick now, but then – in fact, a breakthrough.

Slick legs, strong arms, a goal-oriented approach and a great rapport with Chicago Blackhawks teammate Stan Mikita, the thin and generous center, earned Hull a plethora of prizes.

They took the Stanley Cup with Mikita, however, only once – in 1961, but the Chicago striker received a bunch of individual awards. In 1960, 1962 and 1966, he became the leading scorer of the NHL championship, in 1965 and 1966 – the most valuable player, in the second case – after he was the first in league history to score more than 50 goals in the regular season . And the alternative to the position of the left winger in the symbolic team following the results of the championship throughout all fifteen seasons of Hull in the NHL was extremely rare for him: in total, he had ten hits in it.

The last happened in 1972, that is, on the eve of the main hockey battle of all time, in which the USSR national team for the first time fought with the real Canadian team, made up of professionals. Bobby Hull was supposed to play in it, but, unlike Mikita and brother Dennis, also a striker, he did not play.

Simultaneously with the Super Series, the World Hockey Association launched its championship, deciding that it could compete with the NHL, and poaching players from there. Most stars refrained from jumping into the unknown. Hull agreed, saying, when informed of the interest in him in the WHA, as it seemed to him, as a joke, that he would go there only for a million. $1 million – in the early 1970s, that was a fantastic amount for hockey, the equivalent of maybe today’s $50 million or something like that.

Ben Hutskin, the owner of one of the clubs that formed the splinter league, agreed to give Hull a ten-year contract for $1.75 million a year. he does not remember where the name so successfully coinciding with his well-known nickname throughout Canada came from.

Well, it seems that the fact is that everyone then sang Elton John’s “Benny and the Jets”, and the name of the owner, it turns out, played a decisive role. But the fact is that the sticky hit came out a little later than the hockey team was formed.

The segment of Bobby Hull’s career in the short-lived and financially ruined WHA turned out to be quite good. The Avco Cup, the local analogue of the Stanley Cup, he won three times, and also added personal trophies to his track record decently. And at the very least, he filled a gap in his biography, about which he was worried, having seen in 1972 in the status of an ordinary spectator how good the mysterious Soviet school was. He fought her in 1974. In that Super Series, the USSR national team was opposed by the WHA team. She was, of course, weaker than Enkhael and lost to her opponent, having won only one victory in eight matches and achieving a draw in three meetings. But Bobby Hull himself, now a veteran, came out of it as a hero, being at the top of the list of both scorers (nine points) and snipers (seven goals) of the confrontation. Ten years later, Hull was included in the Hockey Hall of Fame, and in 2009, his son found himself in it, who, in a rare case, inherited an outstanding sniper gift from his father.

Alexey Dospekhov