2011 Hockey Book of the Year

Congratulations to author Gare Joyce and the fine folks at publisher Wiley. HockeyBookReviews.com has named their book The Devil and Bobby Hull as the 2011 Hockey Book of the Year!

2011 proved to be a tough year to choose a winner as there was no real runaway leader. Runner up was Jason Farris' Behind The Moves. Others that were seriously considered were The Lives of Conn Smythe by Kelly McParland,  The Lost Dream: The Mike Danton Story by Steve Simmons, Wayne Gretzky's Ghost by Roy MacGregor, Cornered by Ron MacLean with Kirstie McLellan Day,  Extraordinary Canadians: Maurice Richard by Charles Foran and Hockey Hall of Fame Book of Treasures.

I gave The Devil and Bobby Hull because it was the one new book that I just could not put down. The content was rich and well researched. Gare Joyce's characterization of Hull was fascinating. The book was also entertaining with stories of the NHL's Original Six and the wacky WHA.

Previous winners of the prestigious HockeyBookReviews.com Book of the Year award include:

2008 - Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems by Randy Maggs
2009 - Playing With Fire by Theo Fleury with Kirstie McLellan Day
2010 - The Day I (Almost) Killed Two Gretzkys by James Duthie

Here's more on the 2011 Hockey Book of the Year!

The Devil and Bobby Hull

As the epic battles between Rocket Richard and Gordie Howe reached their zenith in the 1950s, another superstar arrived in the same stratosphere. Bobby Hull - hockey's Golden Jet - was every bit as good as his counterpart #9s. In fact, he was kind of a hybrid of the two. He had Howe's size and strength, and Richard's flare for the dramatic.

He may have been the greatest player of his era, the 1960s, carrying the torch from Howe and Richard until Bobby Orr came along. Hull was pro sports first million dollar man, and he had the million dollar smile to go with it. Not unlike Wayne Gretzky after him, his personality was contagiously appealing, almost as important as his athletic prowess. He transcended the game to almost Hollywood proportions

But, for a variety of reasons, Hull's lasting legacy does not measure up with the likes of Howe or Richard or Orr or Jean Beliveau. Instead he is painted as a more dastardly character. His key role in jumping to the WHA ruffled many feathers, leaving him estranged for decades with the Chicago Blackhawks, the team he is most associated with and won the Stanley Cup with. The Wirtz family, owners of the team, held a deep grudge and did what ever they could to keep Bobby out. Of course the narcissistic Bobby also has himself to blame in his tainted legacy, thanks to a very messy and very public divorce (Tiger Woods could relate) that swirled with domestic violence.

Gare Joyce offers a look at one of hockey's greatest players in The Devil and Bobby Hull: How Hockey's Original Million-Dollar Man Became the Game's Lost Legend. As Joyce says, "the world of hockey glory was his to lose. And he did."

Buy The Book: Amazon.ca- Chapters - Amazon.com

Read the full HockeyBookReviews.com review.

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Beautiful Hockey

In the mid-1970s Winnipeg's Bobby Hull teamed together with Swedish imports Anders Hedberg and Ulf Nilsson to create one of the greatest lines of all time. The trio instantly clicked and they wowed audiences everywhere with their "beautiful hockey." Transition offense based on speed and creative play making.

They were so much better than everyone else in the WHA that they were immediately targeted everyone else with violence. Yes, some things are eternal in hockey. Let the lesser players beat up the stars rather than protect the stars so they can demonstrate hockey at it's best.

Gare Joyce talks about in his new book, The Devil and Bobby Hull.

"If Hull had little protection against the goons, Hedberg and Nilsson had none at all - they were victims of a slow-to-evolve culture of the '70s dressing room, full of resentment toward Europeans coming in and taking the jobs of Canadians, teammates from past seasons, friends.

"Even the refs had it in for us, letting guys get away with murder going after us, when they could have called penalties if it had been anyone else on the end of it," said Nilsson.

It got so bad that in the 1975-76 season Bobby Hull sat out a WHA regular season game to protest the failure of referees around the league to enforce the rules and the coaches, managers and league itself for encouraging "brutality and savagery."

Here's Hull's quote from Joyce's book:

"It's becoming a disaster. The idiot owners, the incompetent coaches, the inept players are dragging the game into the mud. They're destroying it with their senseless violence. You talk to some of these idiots at the top and they say, 'It's the nature of the game. It has always been that way and always will be.' They're full of bull. It's worse than it ever has been and it's going to end up ruining hockey. They ought to take all these incompetents, these idiot owners, coaches and players and put them in their own league so they can kill each other."

Ouch! Now I'm not going to suggest things have not improved since the low days of the 1970s.  But in many ways things have not changed. Bobby Hull's sentiments have been echoed time and time again since then, including quite famously by his own son Brett Hull and arguably the greatest player in the history of the game, Mario Lemieux. Heck, even in 2011 the Sedin twins, the Hedberg/Nilsson of today, have been treated in similar ways, made to suffer stoically instead of being able to demonstrate "beautiful hockey."

The NHL still does not take this seriously enough. It's always open season on the superstars. look at all the great players we've lost to injuries - Lemieux, Lindros, Bossy, Orr. The greatest player of current time (Sidney Crosby, in case you forgot about him by now) has not played in 10 months because of his head shot.

And that is a shame.

Why does the NHL condone such "useless violence?". Simply because allows lesser teams and players to compete. That allows those markets to sell tickets - not necessarily because of the violence itself, but because it allows them a chance to win. I think that is as big as any reason as to why hockey condones such violence.