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Bruce Arthur: Bobby Hull was a great hockey player and a miserable human being. His legacy isn’t complicated

You can’t write hockey history without Bobby Hull, though for a time hockey tried. 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. His slapshot echoed through history, and Bobby’s shot was devastating if erratic. You never knew where it might go.

He was erratic, too, or maybe the word was consistent, and it became apparent over time. Hull died Monday at the age of 84. And he left a huge hockey legacy and a hell of a mess behind.

The hockey was indelible. Michael Farber, formerly of Sports Illustrated, has called Hull the first modern hockey player and you can see that argument. The WHA deal was seismic, and Hull ushered in the new era of big money in the game. 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.

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. 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. 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.

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. 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.

He was famously cheap: Bobby Hull room service was Bobby patrolling hotels and picking food off plates in the hall. 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. But he was a folk hero, fitting in between Maurice Richard and Bobby Orr.

And behind closed doors was the other Bobby, and there lay demons that spilled out into the open. He drank. His second wife Joanne, the mother of his five children including Brett Hull, said in 2002 that he abused her for years. 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. She also said Bobby threatened her with a loaded shotgun in 1978.

They divorced in 1980, and one time after that he came by their house in North Vancouver and kicked in a door. There were other stories beyond that, nasty ones. Hull was arrested in 1986 when he was involved in a reported altercation with his third wife, Deborah, and when the police came he took a swing at the officer. The battery charges against Deborah were dropped, because she didn’t testify. He pled out the assault on the cop.

As Joanne told Farber in the Montreal Gazette in 1980, after the divorce: “He was a true gentleman in the rink; I don’t know if it was good that he carried that appearance all the time. At home, he had to let his hair down. So he kept the public image of being a golden angel, and I think it was unfortunate. Sometimes I think the children and I paid for it.”

Brett became a Hall of Famer in his own right, sure, but he seems to have done it despite his dad. And Bobby’s daughter Michelle became an attorney who specializes in cases of domestic violence because of what happened to her mother. Then there were the comments to a Russian newspaper praising Hitler — it is never good when that phrase appears in your obituary — in which Bobby said the Black population was growing too fast in America, and that “Hitler, for example, had some good ideas. He just went a little bit too far.”

Bobby first sloughed off the comments, then denied them and sued. But Michelle later told ESPN, “that’s exactly like him.” Bobby wrote in his autobiography that if he had to do it all over again he’d do more drinking. Michelle said that when he was drinking, his kids didn’t want to be around.

And he was exiled. For a long time, Bobby Hull wasn’t welcome in hockey.

“Bobby was the athlete that everybody loved,” says Dave Hodge, former host of “Hockey Night in Canada” and “The Reporters” on TSN, who has a deep knowledge of the game and its personalities. “But when you knew more about him, you had to stop loving him. Or you should have.”

Except the Blackhawks brought him back as an ambassador in 2007, and the NHL trotted him out regularly, too, as if the past was far enough away that it could be left there. The NHL jammed Bobby and Brett together even though he was never around when Brett was a kid, despite the history of domestic violence, despite their distant relationship. Early in Brett’s career, he would tell people he didn’t even have his dad’s number.

Once Bobby Hull retired all there was was the booming echo of his slapshot, the memory of his greatness, and the reality of a miserable man who beat his wife and abandoned his kids and praised Hitler, and hockey decided to value the former over the latter until the Blackhawks finally cut him off as an ambassador last year. It was embarrassing.

Bobby Hull’s legacy isn’t new, but it’s this: There can be a gap between your sports hero and the person behind the myth, and sometimes that chasm is sitting in plain sight. Bobby Hull was a great hockey player and a cripplingly miserable human being, and he was the second for a whole lot longer than he was the first. You can, and should, remember both.

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