He’s Bobby’s Son, but Brett Hull Has Own Style

It is a gorgeous day for winter -- a soft breeze, a clear, blue sky, golden sunshine. Brett Hull’s hands are tapping the steering wheel of his chocolate-colored Infiniti Q45, Led Zeppelin is throbbing on the radio and the sun roof is sliding open. Hull slips on a pair of shades and flashes a smile about as wide as a rink, and just as white. “Hey,” he says, “is this awesome, or what?”

It’s hard to argue with Hull these days, seeing how he has scored 70 goals, totaled 108 points, become a big star, signed a four-year, $7.1 million contract with the St. Louis Blues and, finally, stepped out of the shadow of his famous father, Bobby, which is a story in itself. Today, though, Hull is 26 going on 16, looking like a schoolboy uncaged for spring break. He turns the corner, tires squealing and heads turning, and cranks up the music.

This may come as a surprise, but off the ice Hull never sees a red light.

“People say that I’m too laid-back for a hockey player,” he said. “That I’m too easygoing. But I like me the way I am. I like being different. I’m, like, in that 1 percent of hockey players. I’m not real intense. I’m not intense at all. The last time I was intense was a few months ago, at a rock concert. Neil Young. It was excellent.”

You probably get the picture by now: Hull kicking off his sneakers, lacing up his skates and slapping pucks into the net, like he was born to it. Hull joining Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux as the only players ever to score 50 goals in fewer than 50 games and the only ones to have back-to-back 70-goal seasons. Hull taking a run at Gretzky’s one-season record of 92 goals, hardly seeming to break a sweat.

Laid-back? Why, Hull’s mother, Joanne Robinson, remembered that as a pee-wee, “Brett would line up pucks at the red line and wrist them into the net, and how many 10-year-olds could do that? How many National Hockey League players could do that? But then he’d always sit on the bench during the warmups. He thought they were a waste of energy.”

When the coaches wanted to light a fire under Hull, they threw him out on right wing and watched him score at will and the rest took care of itself. Through midgets, through his parents’ messy divorce, through the lower rungs of junior hockey when word spread that Bobby Hull’s chubby kid wasn’t much of a player, Hull fought back by scoring goals. It gave him an identity, you might say.

“There’s nothing I enjoy more than scoring goals,” Hull said. “Especially a big goal. Like, you’re in a tight game, you know the guys are looking for you, thinking, ‘He’ll get it, he’ll get it.’ And then I get it and it’s, like, ‘Yessssss.’ ”

He is sitting in a restaurant, stickhandling chopsticks through a plate of stir-fry chicken while the waitresses are lined up like bowling pins waiting for autographs. He is a hero, wealthy, a good catch, so that it all just seems to have landed in Hull’s lap, considering that two years ago he earned $125,000 and was not sure where he was heading.

Why, even Blues General Manager Ron Caron, who delivered Hull from the Calgary Flames in a landmark deal in 1988, recalls the first time he saw Hull. It was at a junior game in Penticton, British Columbia, in Tier II -- a notch below the Junior A leagues, where all the blue-chip prospects play.

“I like to tell people that he played with a lot of skill and a little enthusiasm,” Caron said.

It’s a polite way of saying that Hull wasn’t like the old man, who revolutionized the position of left wing for the Chicago Blackhawks and later the Winnipeg Jets in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Bobby, the Golden Jet, had that booming slap shot and that fierce, cold glare and that blond hair flowing behind him, like the trailer on an airplane.

Brett was -- and still is -- blocky and barrel-chested, not at all sleek like Guy Lafleur or Mike Bossy or the other great snipers he grew up idolizing. Mike Sertich, who coached Hull at the University of Minnesota-Duluth, said: “My first impression of him was, he’s a roly-poly kid who’s out of shape who can really shoot the puck.”

Naturally, everyone started drawing all sorts of comparisons to Bobby, but the truth is this: Brett’s strength is his ability to shoot quickly, even in traffic, rather than the raw power that was his father’s greatest weapon. Brett tiptoes around pileups; Bobby roared into the corners. Bobby, in fact, once described Brett’s checking as “slovenly,” and all Brett will say about that is, well, you know how fathers can be.

They are reconciled now, although there was little contact between the two for more than 10 years following the divorce in 1975. Bobby stayed on his farm an hour’s drive outside Toronto while Brett, his sister and three brothers moved out west to Vancouver, British Columbia, with their mother, who remarried. Brett may have his father’s rugged looks and iron jaw, but one thing can be said for sure: He has his mother’s dimples.

“People expect my dad and me to be alike,” Brett said. “But we’re totally different. I come from a totally different world. He was aggressive, strong. He played that way. Me? I go with the flow.”

Naturally, the poise was mistaken for indifference. Hull was not drafted by the Flames until the sixth round of the 1984 entry draft, was sent to the minors, scored 50 goals, was recalled, scored 26 in 52 games, and then -- with the Flames already loaded on right wing -- was dealt to the Blues three years ago.

He had 41 goals for St. Louis in 1988-89, thought it could not get any better than that, and was just warming up to his sudden popularity when Coach Brian Sutter summoned him to the office after the season. Sutter did not ask Hull to work harder. He more or less demanded it.

“He just didn’t know how hard he had to work to reach his potential,” Sutter said. “He thought he was already at his potential, but he wasn’t. So we put some responsibility on him to work harder. Sometimes funny things happen when you put responsibility on people.”

Hull said: “I felt like he cared.”

So he scored 72 goals last season, restoring solvency and excitement to a franchise that teetered on bankruptcy and nearly folded in 1983. This season, Hull has scored goals in 13 successive games, recorded hat tricks two consecutive nights and registered back-to-back five-point games. He has not gone more than two games without scoring a goal.

“I figure it isn’t a good shift for me unless I score,” Hull said. “And when I do, I see those 18,000 people in their seats and I know they’re cheering for me. It gives me goose pimples -- look, I’m getting them just talking about it. It makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck. It’s awesome. Right away, you want to go back out there and score another goal, just to have that feeling again.”

Hull could not have planned it any better than this. When he was in college, he and the guys used to stay up late watching David Letterman and then, lo and behold, he was asked to appear on the show earlier this season. Hull got to meet Ginger Baker, the legendary drummer and also a guest that night. He got his makeup done right next to Tony Randall.

“It was the coolest,” Hull said, “but I don’t think Tony had a clue who I was.”

And now Hull, who went from 41 goals to 72 to, well, whatever, sees no end in sight. Life has all sorts of possibilities. Life is just a fat goalie, legs spread open like a croquet wicket.

“Like, I think it would be the coolest thing to be a movie star,” he said. “It’d be great. Doing a love scene -- now that could be weird. But, yeah, I could be a cowboy. I could do a western. That would be awesome.

“Yeah, think about it. Me and Clint.”