He appears to have been a serial domestic abuser as alleged by two of his three former wives, the first of whom, Joanne, described an attack in harrowing detail in a 2002 ESPN documentary. That was 16 years after Hull pleaded guilty to assaulting a police officer who intervened in a dispute with his second wife, Deborah. He was quoted in a Moscow paper in 1998 expressing views about Adolf Hitler that might have come out of Ye’s (Kanye West’s) mouth. In the same interview, he expressed vile thoughts about the black population in the US. He claimed he was misquoted and later sued the publication. But those who had spent time around him had reason to doubt his denial.
I don’t have much to say about Bobby Hull one way or the other, but it astounds me that these psychopaths used play goalie with no face or head protection.
And I’ll add that it makes no sense that any of the other lunatics flying around the ice at that time had no head protection, either. I played ice hockey in pickup leagues as a young man and it was about as much fun as I’ve ever had playing any sort of sport. There were basically three levels of players - the terrible, who were mainly the guys who couldn’t skate at all, the guys who had played in high school or college and who were so much better than everyone else it seemed they were playing a different sport altogether, and then the rest of us dumbasses, and, as is often the case in my life, I was among the better of the group of dumbasses. I could actually skate a little bit and I scored more than my share of goals, but if I was up against a guy who actually knew what he was doing I just got smoked.
Anyway, the friend of mine I usually went with, he and I always set it up to play on opposing teams. We divided ourselves into two squads by the sort of jersey we wore. I always referred to it as shirts and skins because the alternative was whites and coloreds and I don’t know, that just doesn’t sound great to me for some reason. My friend shows up one day with a helmet that doesn’t have a full face cage, just an eye shield. I mean, it’s not my teeth and maybe I’m a worrier by nature, but I was immensely uncomfortable every time he was on the ice.
“The shorthand version of him is that he’s something to do with easy listening,” Elvis Costello, who wrote the 1998 album “Painted from Memory” with Bacharach, said in a 2018 interview with The Associated Press. “It may be agreeable to listen to these songs, but there’s nothing easy about them. Try playing them. Try singing them.”