Joyce - Devil and Bobby Hull How Hockeys Original Million-Dollar Man Became the Games Lost Legend

Bobby Hull is sitting in a booth at Wayne Gretzky's restaurant in Toronto. He doesn't notice that he's sitting beneath a Chicago Black Hawks sweater, No. 9.* Memorabilia collectors would designate it game-used. It hangs from the ceiling and is preserved between two sheets of hard plastic, like a prehistoric fly in amber. And even if you knew it was somewhere in the restaurant you'd have trouble finding it among all the sweaters and sticks and pucks and photos that hang on the walls or are displayed behind glass in showcases. Hull doesn't see the sweater. More troublesome to him, he doesn't see fans lining up to buy The Golden Jet, an authorized coffee-table book that captures his playing days in Chicago. He has a Sharpie in hand but no purchases to sign. He's pissed off that the publicist assigned to promote this signing has somehow made it a well-kept secret, one known only to Hull, four guys familiar to him from signings at memorabilia shows and me, the guy sitting across the table from him. Between us are two glasses of draft, both his, a plateful of sliders, all his, and a data recorder, mine.

Hull's 71 years old and, frankly, looks it. Aging isn't a crime but for Hull it's unimaginable. Those photos in the book show him in his 20s and early 30s, when he was a Canadian Adonis, something close to physical perfection. Yeah, his blond locks were thinning but his eyes were bluer than Paul Newman's. Broken nose, broken jaw, cuts: nothing marred his Hollywood-quality looks. The man sitting across from me is only somewhat recognizable from those images. Now he wears a rug that clashes with his temples. His face has thickened. He trembles. When he reaches across the table for a plate, his left hand steadies the right at the wrist. After a bout with pneumonia his heart went out of rhythm a couple of winters ago. Even before that, though, years in a hard game and a harder life than he could have imagined have caught up to him.

Hull is in Toronto for a limited book tour, nothing beyond driving distance of the city. He'll show up on a couple of television shows, go to studios for radio interviews and make appearances in book stores to sign copies of this glossy nostalgia tour in hardcover. It's the perfect Christmas gift for the fan of a certain generation, someone who either remembers his 71st birthday or is close enough to plan for it. And the book is well-timed, what with the Blackhawks still celebrating their Stanley Cup win the previous spring, their first championship since 1961. The 49-year drought came to an end two seasons after Hull and the Blackhawks set aside hockey's ugliest grudge. Hull was brought in as an ambassador for the team in December 2007, not as a hockey man charged with a role in management or the hockey side of the operation but no matter; events suggested that it could be viewed as the lifting of a curse.

To Hull's mind any curse has not lifted but just transferred to this book tour. The stop at Wayne Gretzky's is a disappointment. The midweek lunchtime crowd isn't enough to keep one waiter busy and the bartender is wiping down the taps. Hull ridicules the publicist. The posters for the signing weren't hung because they just said Gretzky's, not Wayne Gretzkys, which is what the owners want, Hull says. I mean, what's the point of that? Does somebody honestly think it's Keith Gretzky's place?

His voice is testosterone aged in oak kegs. It's growl and rasp. Even when he says please and thank you he sounds gruff. Maybe it's the by-product of 25 years of yelling for the puck, yelling to be heard above the cheers. Maybe it's hard living. No matter. When he wisecracks about Keith Gretzky, it's not clear whether he's making a joke of having to attach a given name to No. 99 or taking a shot at management burying the poster because of the publicist's oversight.

I try to get the conversation back on the rails. I tell Hull that the first thing I think about when I hear his name is a book I was given as an academic prize in fifth grade, back in Centennial year: Great Canadian Sports Stories. I remember that photo of you with a pitchfork and a bale of hay, I say.