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Only two other men in N.H.L. history—Richard and Montreal's Bernie ("Boom Boom") Geoffrion—have scored 50 goals in a season; each hit 50 on the nose and did it only once. Hull scored 50 in 1961-62, then 54 in 1965-66 and 52 last season; his game-winning goal against the Seals last week was his 41st of this year, with 15 games still to play. Bobby holds a bagful of assorted other records, including most seasons scoring 40 goals or more (five), and most points—counting both goals and assists—scored in a season (97), a mark he set in 1965-66. Hull has led the N.H.L. in goals five times; he has won the overall scoring title three times; and he has twice been voted the league's Most Valuable Player.
If he did not score so often (an average of two goals every three games), Bobby Hull would still be fearsome. There is not one ounce of excess baggage on his 5-ft. 10-in., 195-lb. frame; physiologists have called him "the perfect mesomorph." He is the fastest skater in the N.H.L. (28.3 m.p.h. with the puck, 29.7 m.p.h. without), and by far the fastest shot: his "slap shot," delivered from a full windup, has been clocked at 118.3 m.p.h., nearly 35 m.p.h. above the league average, and his "wrist shot," fired with just a flick of the stick, zings along at 100.7 m.p.h.
In the second period at Oakland last week, Bobby drew an awed gasp from the crowd with a blast that hit a defender's stick—and ricocheted all the way up to the 34th row of the stands. Not every opponent who crosses the path of a Hull missile gets off so lightly. Montreal Goalie Lome ("Gump") Worsley caught one in the face three years ago, firmly believes that the only reason he was not killed was that he was hit by the flat side rather than the edge of the puck. Last October, Minnesota Goal Tender Cesare Maniago was knocked silly for several minutes by a Hull shot that glanced off the top of his head; he now wears a face mask against Chicago. Bobby is aware that he could permanently injure somebody, but he cannot permit himself to brood about it. "I'm certainly not out to maim anyone," he says, "but the goalies take their chances."
So does Hull. His front teeth sit out the game on a locker-room shelf, and his once handsome profile looks as if it had been rearranged in a demolition derby. His nose has been broken twice, and at last count 200 stitches have been taken to close all the various cuts and slices in his face.
"Ho-gee! Ho-gee!" All that is expectable — indeed, part and parcel of a game that puts knives on grown men's feet and clubs in their hands and sends them out to do battle on that most inhospitable of mediums: ice. No one knows precisely when the first hockey game—field or ice—was played. The enameled design on a 14th century French cruet shows figures playing a game with sticks and a stone or ball, and there are historians who claim that the field variety originated in ancient Greece or Persia. The actual name hockey was born, so goes one tale, when French explorers pushing into the St. Lawrence Valley in 1740 came upon a band of Iroquois Indians whacking away at an object—and each other—with murderous-looking sticks and shrieking "Ho-gee! Ho-gee!" The word, as it turned out, meant "It hurts!"