Former Winnipeg Jet and Chicago Blackhawk and Hall of Famer Bobby Hull stands on the field during the NHL Winter Classic between the Chicago Blackhawks and the Detroit Red Wings at Wrigley Field on January 1, 2009 in Chicago, Illinois. (Photo by Jonathan Daniel/Getty Images)Jonathan Daniel/Getty Images
Aside from Hull, the Jets looked like most of the WHA clubs. Their lineup featured three types of players. The first were established NHLers who took on bigger roles with the Jets than they had with their old clubs. They were collecting money and, what's more, offered an opportunity. They jumped as a career move. Christian Bordeleau, who was going to centre Hull, fit that profile. Others had their troubles at their last stops and needed a fresh start. Veteran goaltender Joe Daley was "disillusioned" in Detroit and told the Wings that he had played his last game for them before signing with Winnipeg.
Then there was the plurality: career minor-leaguers who could get a good payday, which described Norm Beaudin. Hull had often been underwhelmed by the surrounding talent on his Black Hawks team – or at least bemoaned the players at the bottom of the roster. But when he started skating in the Jets' training camp, he could look around as hard as he wanted and he'd see no one possessing the skill of Stan Mikita, no blueline unit that could match Pat Stapleton and Bill White, no netminder you'd mention in the same breath as Tony Esposito.
Hull had always been a group of one as talent with Chicago – Mikita was a legit Hall of Famer but a lesser one to be sure. With the Jets there was a precipitous drop down to the next player.
"I'm not going to sugarcoat it," goaltender Daley said. "We were a line, a pair of defencemen and a goaltender above a good AHL team. Bobby, Christian and Norm were an NHL-quality first line and we had a couple of defencemen who could play but not star in the NHL, and Ernie Wakely and I were NHL goaltenders. After that, it was the American Hockey League or the old international league [in quality]"
When Hull stepped onto the ice for the Jets' first practice in their first training camp, he must have had a "we're not in Kansas anymore" moment. He was, in fact, in Kenora. And if the Jets' training camp was the logging town's biggest hockey event since its Thistles won the Stanley Cup in 1907, the town wasn't any promoter's idea of the ideal site for rolling out the next big thing.
Instead of banging the drum the team was in virtual hiding. The team later moved on to do the last prep work at the Winnipeg Arena.
In August, Hull had sat in the arena's stands and watched the best players in the world, competing in the Summit Series. In September, he was on the ice with a few players who might have struggled to make a decent minor-league club. Said one former teammate: "He never said so, but when he looked around he must have had buyer's remorse."
If the Jets looked like semi-pros at the bottom of the roster, they looked like rank amateurs in the front office. Hatskin hired friends and nephews and assigned them duties that he determined they were least under-qualified for. He hired a friend from his football days, Annis Stukus, to be the Jets' general manager even though he had no hockey background.
"It was strictly on the basis that Stuke could sell ice to Eskimos and BS anybody and everybody," Joe Daley said.
Hatskin hired Nick Micoski as Bench coach, which, given Hull's minimalist criteria, meant he stayed out of the star's way and acted as travel secretary when necessary. Later he'd bring in Hull's coach from his days in St. Catharines, Rudy Pilous, a Winnipeg native who was a decent enough junior coach in his prime but long past it.
A few behind the scenes were effective – Billy Robinson, the director of player personnel, would do some excellent work beating the bushes looking for prospects and recruiting them into the fold.
But the professionally competent were a minority. Hatskin was a jovial presence and he did come up with the million-dollar cheque (with the Simkins doing a lot of the lifting) but he didn't inspire confidence that he could make a business fly.
At the start of their first season, the Jets were operating at a considerable disadvantage: Hull couldn't play. The case was still playing out in Judge Higginbotham's court in Philadelphia. What should have been a glorious league debut when the Jets went to New York to open the WHA's first season was an opportunity denied by the court – Hull was reduced to sitting in a chair beside the Jets bench and signing autographs.
In fact, his best moment in the game was an autograph signing. A boy came down to Winnipeg's bench early in the game and asked Hull for an autograph, which he happily signed, but an usher was annoyed and frog-marched the kid back to his seat to the boos of the crowd. After the first intermission, Hull walked up into the stands and escorted the boy down into his seat next to the team where he watched the rest of the game. The crowd cheered but the league couldn't get by on Hull's goodwill alone.
Excerpted from The Devil and Bobby Hull: How Hockey's Original Million-Dollar Man Became the Game's Lost Legend. Copyright (c) 2011 by Gare Joyce. Excerpted with permission of the publisher John Wiley & Sons Canada, Ltd.