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It is a shame that Charlie Hodge could not have been sitting in a front-row box at the Oakland Coliseum one night last week—instead of crouching in the nets, tending goal for the National Hockey League's Oakland Seals. Then he might have had a good look at the shot that beat him. For 57 frantic minutes, while a record crowd of 12,025 howled itself hoarse, the improbable Seals—an expansion team that played its first game only last October—battled the fearsome Chicago Black Hawks to a 0-0 standoff. Outmanned, outskated, outshot, the Seals somehow hung on, checking viciously as Goalie Hodge blocked, caught and kicked away no fewer than 26 Black Hawk shots.
At last, the inevitable caught up with Oakland. The scoreboard clock read only three minutes to play when Chicago's Bobby Hull swooped in from left wing and scooped up the puck. Whoosh! he flashed across the Oakland blue line. Wham! he absorbed a brutal check from Seal Defender George Swarbrick that seemed to stagger him. Hull's shoulders sagged, his curved stick came up, and for the briefest instant, Swarbrick relaxed. Whap! Hull's stick slashed downward; 25 ft. away, Goalie Hodge could not even begin to react as the rock-hard rubber disk, traveling at better than 100 m.p.h., whistled past his knee into the net.
A groan rose from the heartbroken Oakland crowd. But it was a groan almost equally mixed with cheers. If their favorites had to go down, how better than at the hands of Bobby Hull? For the sight of Robert Marvin Hull, 29, leaning into a hockey puck is one of the true spectacles of sport—like watching Mickey Mantle clear the roof, or Wilt Chamberlain flick in a basket, or Bart Starr throw that beautiful bomb. It is the thing that hockey fans go to see—whether in Chicago, Montreal or Oakland. And it is the thing that makes Bobby Hull the superstar of his blazing sport. A legion of partisans call him "the Golden Jet" and "Mr. Hockey," regard him as the greatest player of this or any other day—and rare is the expert who says them nay.
Bag But No Baggage. Hockey has its full measure of memorable heroes: Howie Morenz, the Montreal Canadiens' great center of the '20s and '30s; Eddie Shore, the old Boston Bruins star; Maurice ("the Rocket") Richard, who scored 544 goals for Montreal before retiring in 1960; and Gordie Howe, who at 39, in his 22nd year with Detroit, has scored 678 goals. Yet over eleven incredible seasons, during which the game itself has flourished as never before, Bobby Hull has established himself as the most dominant figure hockey has known and left his indelible imprint on the record book.