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That kind of performance was bound to attract the attention of pro scouts sooner or later. In Bobby's case, it was sooner—lots sooner. He was all of eleven when the Chicago Black Hawks' chief scout, Bob Wilson, saw him and decided to sew him up then and there. A quiet chat with Papa Hull did it. Without telling Bobby until a year later, his father gave Chicago permission to draft him. In the curiously medieval world of Canadian hockey, Hull from that day on was indentured to the Black Hawks. They gave him three years to mature, and at 14 he was shipped off to Hespeler, Ont., 170 miles from home, to live with a strange family, go to a strange school and play hockey for a Junior B Chicago farm club. All for $5 a week. "I wrote him every day," says his mother, "but I didn't talk much about what was going on in Point Anne because I was afraid of making him homesick." One day Bobby wrote back: "Gee, Mom, keep all those letters coming with nothing in them."
Hull had his problems over the next four years. Chicago moved him from Hespeler to Gait to Woodstock to St. Catharines. He attended four high schools, was briefly expelled from one (for insubordination), and graduated from none. He had an appendectomy, and he had trouble in hockey: Rudy Pilous, Bobby's coach at St. Catharines, accused him of hogging the puck and suspended him for "indifferent play." What happened next comes straight out of Jack Armstrong. One September day in 1957, Hull spent the morning working out on the St. Catharines rink, and played a high-school football game in the afternoon. Back at his boardinghouse, in the middle of dinner, he got a phone call from Chicago Scout Wilson. The Black Hawks were playing an exhibition game in St. Catharines that night against the New York Rangers, and Wilson wanted Bobby to suit up. Hanging up the phone, Hull finished his dinner. Then, with a full stomach and a full day of sports under his belt, Bobby went out on the ice and slammed in two goals against the Rangers. His parents were hastily summoned to St. Catharines, and that night, at 18, Bobby Hull became one of the youngest players ever to join the N.H.L.
Slide & Swing. Bobby's first year with the Black Hawks hardly hinted at the coups to come. Unused to the huge, animal-throated N.H.L. crowds, bounced around by older, wiser defensemen, he did not score his first big-league goal until the seventh game of the season, and then it was one that he would just as soon forget. "It was against Boston," recalls Bobby. "Somebody rapped me a good one, and down I went—right on top of the puck. All I did was slide into the net with the puck underneath me." From then on he scored from a more upright position. Black Hawks Coach Rudy Pilous shifted Bobby from center to left wing, where his tremendous left-handed shot could be put to better use, and by the end of the 1959-60 season, at the age of 21, he had his first scoring title, 39 goals, 42 assists, beating out Boston's veteran Bronco Horvath by a single point.