No. 268: BOBBY HULL'S BRAIN / I was labelled an armchair expert. "He's no neurologist." Years later, the forensics finally caught up to my biography of hockey's disgraced star.

I wasn't crawling out on a thin limb when I suggested Hull might have brain damage. Nor am I taking a victory lap with yesterday's reports confirming what I wrote back in 2010.

Robert Marvin Hull in his heyday & in his dotage.

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Back in November of 2010, I sat down with Bobby Hull for more than three hours while he signed copies of his coffee-table book and various memorabilia at Wayne Gretzky’s, No. 99’s bar which used to be down the street from the Rogers Centre. I had let him know that I was working on a book about his playing days and I’m not sure he really believed me. “Lots of luck with that, pal,” he said.

I didn’t want to tell him that the title of the tome was going to be The Devil and Bobby Hull.

Over the course of the afternoon Hull threw back several drinks, repeat several. Conversation can go in fits and starts once beer and wine start to flow, but still I picked up a weird cadence in his speech, some grinding halts and struggles for words. I put it right in my notes—came up so frequently it prompted me to circle the instances.

Something to follow up and report. Family. Experts.

And when I did just that, sounding out his children, friends and neurologists I felt I had enough to run with many would consider radioactive: the idea that Hull might have brain damage. There was no writing that he definitely had brain damage, only that it would be on the range between possibility and likelihood. To me, that was fair comment, given that reporting I had done. To the libel lawyer who read my manuscript, there was nothing sending up a red flag.

Did I think Bobby Hull had brain damage? Damn right. I got as close to the line as I could without writing something that would get me sued into financial ruin and render me utterly unemployable.

Nonetheless, I expected to get called on it when my book came out in the fall of 2011. And that’s how it played out.

I took it in the neck from Hull’s fans and defenders for every chapter, whether it covered divorces, domestic violence, drunkenness or sundry depravities. For them, what I wrote about brain damage was worst of the all. Yeah, I knew that was coming.

But even those who liked the book were uncomfortable with my connecting of the dots on this count. Stu Hackel of Sports Illustrated gave The Devil and Bobby Hull a very flattering review. You can find it in full linked here: Two Minutes for Booking. After praising “fine writing and strong sense of narrative” and calling the book “excellent” and even “exceptional,” Stu took me down for what I’ll just call “the brain stuff.”

Some of the directions Joyce takes in discussing Hull's personal life go a bit further than warranted by the evidence he presents. For example, he wonders if Hull's occasional forgetfulness is evidence of CTE, the degenerative brain disease that can be triggered by multiple concussions. Considering Hull's age (he was 71 at the time of their meeting) and the hard-drinking lifestyle he's led, there can be any number of explanations for his behavior.

After a story that came out yesterday, all I can say, “Hey Stu, want a do-over?”

It wasn’t one of those damage-control news dumps that we’re accustomed to, the unflattering stuff released late on a Friday afternoon before holiday weekend. Still, the timing couldn’t have been better for the NHL.

Let the story about the tragic toll on stars from bygone days go out just hours away from the biggest game in more than a decade. Yeah, turn the volume up on the anthems (or variations thereof) and that will drown out anyone talking about the commissioner’s party line, denying any link between concussions and CTE.

(Remember Gary Bettman trying to chum the waters when he was interrogated by pols in Ottawa?)

Lawyers gotta be lawyering.

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What I suspected talking to Hull and interviews with more than 100 friends and associates and several neurologists was confirmed yesterday.

For those who missed it, here’s yesterday’s story from UPI:

Feb. 19 (UPI) -- NHL icon Bobby Hull, who spent 15 years with the Chicago Blackhawks and struggled with symptoms of chronic traumatic encephalopathy before his death, was officially diagnosed with the disease, his family said Wednesday.

Hull died in 2023 at age 84. His cause of death was not provided at the time. His family donated his brain to the UNITE Brain Bank at the Boston University CTE Center. Researchers diagnosed Hull with stage 2 of CTE, which has four stages.

His widow, Deborah Hull, released results of her late husband's post-mortem brain tissue analysis Wednesday through the Concussion Legacy Foundation.

"Seeing the pain and heartache suffered by his lifetime friend Stan Mikita's family, Bobby felt strongly no other family should have to endure CTE," Deborah Hull, who was married to Bobby Hull for 39 years, said in a news release.

"He insisted on donating his brain, feeling as though it was his duty to help advance research on this agonizing disease."

Deborah Hull said her late husband experienced short-term memory loss and impaired judgement -- symptoms of the progressive degenerative brain disease -- for the last 10 years of his life.

Have a look at this chapter from The Devil and Bobby Hull, here in its entirety, and you can judge for yourselves if I was fair or prescient or professionally reckless even if proven right.

(You needn’t think that I’m trying to drum up sales for the book. I don’t see any royalties for it and it’s long out of print. The Audible version I can’t recommend—I wasn’t involved in its recording and its rife with mispronunciations. You’d think a book about Bobby Hull should be read by someone who knows how to pronounce “Mikita.”)

STAGGERED

By late afternoon at Gretzky’s, Bobby Hull enthusiastically switches over to red wine. “I tell my wife, ‘Red wine is good for you,’ and she says, ‘By the glass, not by the bottle,’” he says. I’m not altogether sure this is going to be a good thing for the interview. It comes at the risk of clouding memories that already might have been elusive.

I had heard Bobby Hull on radio the day before. The hosts of the drive-time show on the sports-talk radio station brought him in studio. Hull took questions from them, the usual stuff. He didn’t bother trying to get the two names straight. He just stuck to “Pal” for both. At one point they asked Hull about his training in playing days and they asked him to compare it to the contemporary NHLer’s regimen. “I never lifted weights,” Hull said. “The only time I tried was at one of those things where there’s a bunch of events …”

And here memory and words failed Hull. There was an awkward pause and then the hosts chimed in.

“A triathlon?” one asked.

“Yeah, that’s it,” Hull said, and carried on with his story. He talked about how he worked all summer on the farm and that was the source of his strength.

Of course it wasn’t a triathlon. Weight-lifting has never been an event in the triathlon. What Hull was referring to was Superstars, a junk-sport novelty that was a staple of the ABC Sports schedule back in the ’70s. Superstars pitted the biggest names from different games in a series of events to determine—in a way—the best all-around athlete.

When Hull competed on Superstars, he was the oldest competitor in the field. He gave a fairly respectable performance in his preliminary group, sixth in a field of 12 that included the eventual champion, American soccer player Kyle Rote Jr. Hull had one win, tying David Hemery for first in the half-mile bicycle race. He placed second in rowing, third in swimming, fourth in the 100-yard dash (ahead of John Havlicek, the Boston Celtics’ fast-break greyhound). Hull ended up finishing one spot ahead of Denis Potvin and took home $2,450 for his exertions.

Athletes in the weight-lifting event had to raise the bar not from the floor but rather from a shoulder-high stand. Hull had a successful lift at 200 pounds, pressing it overhead. He had the worst form of anyone in the field: narrow grip, arched back, legs rigid. He didn’t even draw a breath before the big push. Potvin made a successful lift at 220 but Hull’s attempt went sideways and he begged off. Hull ended up fourth in the competition. Brian Oldfield, the world-record holder in the shot put, won barely taxing himself and would later set a Superstars record with a lift of more than 300 pounds. Potvin finished second and Hull fourth.

The Superstars competition wasn’t a life-defining event for all involved. For Hull, who had known two decades’ worth of glories and disappointments, it was neither great nor awful enough to burn indelibly into his memory. It might have been surprising that the Baby-Boomish radio hosts wouldn’t have known or had forgotten the Superstars program with the hints that Hull dropped and it was more problematic that they would think that weight-lifting was an event in a triathlon. It was a little jarring that Hull couldn’t come up with the name of Superstars, but not so very significant.

It wasn’t as if Hull had forgotten that it was Jacques Lemaire who had fired the long shot that beat Tony Esposito in Game 7 back in ’71 or that it was Henri Richard who had peeled by Keith Magnuson. It wasn’t like he had forgotten the white 1960 Oldsmobile convertible with a black rag top that he bought with his Stanley Cup bonus, “A real muscle car … they could hear me coming miles away when I’d be driving to our place on Big Island.”

Apparently the big things from the height of his career were still vivid. What struck me about the sequence on the radio show, though, was Hull’s readiness to accept the hosts’ suggestion that he had competed in a triathlon. It seemed like, with their prompting, he had recovered a false memory. Or it might have been a practiced behavior, that when lost for words or when losing his place, Hull would look for or solicit that prompting. That same sequence played out several times over our conversation. He lost his place, conversation stalled and he either asked for a word that would fit or waited for me to jump in.

I mention to Hull that I saw a TSN program that nominated the 10 “most skilled players of all time” and that he didn’t get so much as an honorable mention. His linemate from the Canada Cup, Gil Perreault, was No. 5 on the list and deservedly so. One of his teammates from Winnipeg, Kent Nilsson, was just behind Perreault on the list, and that might have been fair, a comment on the talent that he squandered and a Hall of Fame career that had been within his reach.

I tell Hull he wasn’t the only one passed over from his era. Rocket Richard and Stan Mikita didn’t make the cut. Jean Beliveau did receive honorable mention, a bone thrown to Montreal fans—there had to be some skill on the teams that won all those Stanley Cups in the ’50s, ’60s and early ’70s.

I tell Hull that the producers favored fancy stick-handling over all else, that they seemed to consider the ability to unleash a 100-m.p.h. slapshot in flight a matter of brute force. Hull shrugs it off. No words, just an expression that says “always misunderstood.”

What bothered me the most about the TSN program, though, was the ranking of Alexei Kovalev at No. 4. Kovalev has always been an enigma. “He’s a fourth-liner in Ottawa now,” I say to Hull. “He’s older now, but not as old as you when you scored a hat trick against the Soviets in Winnipeg.” Again, no reaction other than a look that says “no denying it.”

I fill in the rest of the top 10 for Hull. Orr, Lemieux and Gretzky at the top, Pavel Datsyuk at No. 10. Jaromir Jagr at No. 9. Pavel Bure at No. 8. Denis Savard at No. 7.

“Three Russian players in the all-time top 10 and I’m not sure that they’d be among the three most skilled Russians,” I say to Hull. “Which Russian players that you faced should be in there? Kharlamov? Yakushev?”

Hull goes in another direction entirely.

“I told them that the Russians were going to be good back then,” Hull says. “I knew that because it was the only …”

His words shut off like a faucet. Not even a letter drips off. The thought seems to disappear down the drain. A few uncomfortable seconds pass.

“What’s the word I’m looking for?”

I try to fill in the blanks like it’s a game show.

“Competition that they were pointing to?”

“No.” An emphatic shake of his head. Not even close.

“Point of pride? Tool for propaganda?”

“No.”

“Aspect of culture … of their society?”

These aren’t the words he’s looking for but he feels like he can run with it.

“… the only aspect of their culture that showed their system worked.”

At least five times over the course of our conversation Hull grinds to a dead halt in midsentence, as if the pause button had been pressed during a recording. A couple of times his face betrays a discomfort that would come from something more than just losing his train of thought. At the risk of being overly dramatic, he seems to lose where he is.

It wouldn’t stand out if Hull were a circumspect character, if he were someone who had trouble saying anything at all. That’s not the case. When he’s on a comfortable topic he’s voluble. And if he were uncomfortable with interviews or unpracticed in them, it would be likewise understandable. But he has given thousands of interviews over the years. The night before my meeting with Hull at Gretzky’s I screened extended interviews with Hull in the ’80s, with the actor Ken Howard in California and with Bobby Orr poolside in Florida. Hull was at ease, never stuck for a word like he is 30 years later.

Is it the drinks piling up? That has to be a contributing factor, but it already occurred a couple of times before he finished his two small drafts. Is it fatigue? Possibly. It goes beyond what those with septuagenarian friends or family would charitably categorize as “a senior’s moment.”

The other thing that jumped out in that radio interview was that Hull called the interviewers “Pal.” It seems like a small point, but their names would have been on his itinerary. He would have been reminded of their names by his beleaguered publicist. Just five minutes before, at the top of the segment, they introduced themselves on-air. Just two names to remember but they became “Pal” by interview’s end.

Sitting at the table, I don’t expect to be anything more than “Pal,” I suppose. I’m a face in the crowd. When Tom Bitove, one of the owners of Wayne Gretzky’s, comes by our table, Hull can’t remember my name or the media outlet I work for. Fine. But he can’t come up with Bitove’s name either, although they have met dozens of times. Names escaping, thoughts lost, short-term memory erased: I’ve seen it with my father, age 90. I could put it down to the vagaries of age but it was right there in the divorce papers from 30 years before, the judge saying that Hull’s memory was very poor.

What causes these lapses? What unleashed those demons in his troubled family life? There’s no knowing exactly what they are. There’s no discounting the possibility that they are related. Sitting across from Hull, I keep coming back to what Jim Pappin said: that Hull had absorbed more punishment than any player in history.

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Dr. Charles Tator sat in his office in the neurology wing of Toronto Western Hospital and had his pen and notepad out. He wasn’t interviewing or examining a patient across the desk from him. He was in front of a computer screen, watching and listening to a gaunt man talking on his deathbed to his son who trained a video camera on him.

“How long have you been in here, Dad?”

“Two years,” the father said. Each word was a strain. His voice was weak. He looked blankly beyond the camera, a thousand-yard stare into the darkness.

“What do you think about?”

“When I get out,” the father said.

“When is that?” the son asked.

“I have no idea,” the father said, followed by a long silence.

Dr. Tator wound the video back.

“What was your favorite place to play?” the son asked.

“Chicago,” the father said.

“What did you like about the city?” the son asked.

“The people, the city,” the father said.

The son kept prompting the father with a connected line of questions. In the fewest possible words, the father answered the questions but he was becoming fatigued and agitated even with one-word replies.

“What did you like about the people in Chicago?”

“Their comfort … they made it easy for me to make a living.”

“What else?”

“Jobs … I was able to get a job. My future was good.”

Later the son asked the father about his favorite moment.

“We won the Stanley Cup. I scored a goal in the last game of the season … of playoffs. They treated me real good.”

“Who was your favorite player?”

A pause.

“Bobby Hull ...” the father said.

Dr. Tator stopped and started the video as he took notes. “No helmets in those days,” he said with a sigh.

Dr. Tator reviewed his notes. “He’s had a stroke,” Dr. Tator said. “You can see that his left arm doesn’t move at all, that the left side of his face doesn’t move either.”

He restarted the video and reached a graphic scroll where the son listed incidents in his father’s medical history. He had a stroke. He had suffered his third heart attack. He had a pacemaker. He was on dialysis every other day. His gallbladder had been removed. He could not walk or even move. The son didn’t list the most obvious condition of all: his father’s near-total memory loss. Over the course of a half-hour interview the old man offered just a few vague details and but two names, Bobby Hull’s and Stan Mikita’s.

“He is very concrete in his memory. It’s not rich in detail,” Dr. Tator said. “It’s quite superficial, maybe even practiced. It was long-term memory. That’s characteristic of Alzheimer’s disease. In initial stages the person remembers all the old stuff. The ability to register recent memories disappears much earlier. Eventually you lose all memories, both in the deep and recent past.”

The man on his deathbed had been a journeyman hockey player. His name had been engraved above Bobby Hull’s and other teammates from the ’61 Hawks but otherwise he was all but forgotten—he hadn’t worked in the game in 30 years. He achieved in death greater fame than he had ever achieved in the arena.

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Reg Fleming was known in his youth and up to his middle age as a tough guy in hockey. In the video Chris Fleming, his son, asked his father about his nickname, Mr. Clean. “Because I used to clean up … in fights … beat up on people,” he said haltingly.

The numbers bear that out. In his best-behaved season, as a teammate of Bobby Hull on the 1961–62 Black Hawks, he recorded 71 penalty minutes in 70 games. In his 10 other NHL campaigns, he averaged more than 140 penalty minutes per season. Hockey historians—actually hockey-fight historians—have compiled an approximate dance card for the one-time Mr. Clean. By dropyourgloves.com’s numbers, Reg Fleming was involved in 104 fights in 900 games in the NHL and WHA. With dates, colorful description and sometimes vintage video, the webpage lists a generation of hockey’s fiercest fighters as Fleming’s opponents: Keith Magnuson, Bugsy Watson and Dan Maloney, among others. Fleming fought Montreal’s undisputed heavyweight champion, John Ferguson, four times. The website’s number accounts for Fleming’s fights in the highest levels of pro hockey, but not those bouts in his seasons in junior hockey and the minor leagues. Across three years in junior and his first season in the minors, Fleming racked up 500 penalty minutes. He ended up in the low minors where records were either lost or never kept. By a conservative estimate, Fleming fought 50 more times than dropyourgloves.com’s stats. The website’s numbers might reflect half his career’s fights.

Memories of scores of fights died with Fleming. In fact, they died some time before him. One that lives on is a fight Reg Fleming would rather not have waged.

The Winnipeg Jets came to Chicago to play the Cougars on December 22, 1972. It was Bobby Hull’s first game in something other than a Black Hawks sweater in the city where he had gained his fame. The Cougars won 3–2 and the game itself was nothing special. The most memorable moment survives in a minute-long video clip of a fight between Reg Fleming and the player he called his favorite teammate. It’s as hard to watch as Chris Fleming’s video in the hospital. If you go to dropyourgloves.com you can find more dramatic fights but none more decisive and, with Fleming’s passing in 2009, none more haunting.

The sequence begins innocently enough. Hull was skating along the boards behind the net and one of the Cougars’ defensemen was holding onto him, almost bear-hugging. The defenseman was outmatched, and what he was doing was more desperate than cheap. Hull didn’t wait for the referee to call a penalty. The puck moved around the boards and, behind the play, Hull dropped his wrestling partner with a clinical, cynical elbow. The referee blew the whistle and Fleming skated over, as he had a hundred times before, to stick up for his teammate.

Fleming announced his intentions without words. He tried to cross-check Hull in the face. Hull blocked the incoming shaft of Fleming’s stick with his forearm and then dropped his gloves. He pushed Fleming backward and pounced. Hull may have taken more physical punishment than anyone in the history of the game, but he was also quite capable of dishing it out. He fought infrequently, only 29 times across a 20-year career, but the guys he took on were more often than not some of the game’s toughest, including Ferguson and Orland Kurtenbach, who might have been the most feared puncher in the league. In a Canadian Magazine story in the late ’60s, George Chuvalo, the first boxer to go 15 rounds with Muhammad Ali, ranked Hull among the 10 best fighters in the NHL. Against Fleming, Hull looked like he would have given Chuvalo a fight.

Hull threw Fleming around like a bale of hay, twisting him down to the ice until he was on his knees. Hull rained blows down on the back of Fleming’s head, the nape of his neck and un-helmeted temples. Hull had perfect leverage and punched away with full force. The linesmen jumped in, trying to peel Hull off Fleming. When the two were finally separated, Hull emerged, his comb-over asunder, and tried to skate around officials to get at his former teammate again before being escorted to the penalty box.

It might have seemed like an extraordinary event. It was more like a day at the office. After the game Hull and Fleming were just a few feet apart, staying with other players on the ice for 10 minutes, autographing programs for kids who passed them over the Plexiglas. Hull and Fleming reprised the roles of the sheepdog and Wile E. Coyote, the Looney Tunes characters who fought almost to death and then came to a dead halt, punching the clock at the end of their shift.

When Reg Fleming challenged Hull he was past his peak but not close to the end of his career. He finished up in the low minors, playing until he was 42. If the video of Hull driving Fleming’s head into the ice doesn’t dispel the notion of these fights as mere sweater-tugging wrestling matches, Earl McRae’s account of Fleming being beaten up with the Kenosha Flyers in the minors will.

“Harris slams him in the face with a right, a left, drives a right deep in to Fleming’s belly,” McRae wrote in “Requiem for Reggie,” a story in Canadian Magazine in 1975. “Fleming gasps, doubles over and Harris slams his head back with an uppercut … Fleming swings blindly at Harris but Harris moves in, punches him furiously in the face and head and hurls him against the boards. Harris pulls Fleming’s jersey over his head, tosses him to the ice, jumps on him and flails away … Fleming is helpless. It’s brutal and sickening to watch and finally it’s broken up … blood pouring down his battered face. He heads to the dressing room, alone, closes the door softly behind him, and sits on the bench … He turns back, closes his eyes for a few seconds. He opens them and looks at his hands, turning them slowly. They’re trembling.”

At that point Fleming had eaten thousands of punches, been knocked cold several times and had his bell rung many more. By then, when he was sucking up punches like a sponge absorbing a kitchen-counter spill, Mr. Clean couldn’t be counted on to clean up.

After Fleming had been pounded, McRae sought him out in the dressing room after the game. McRae wrote that Fleming spoke “haltingly” and that his words ran out in midsentence. “Sometimes … Sometimes I wish ... I wish I could control myself just once. It’s ... it’s the kids. I go home and they see the cuts and bruises and—”

Fleming struggled for words, as he would on his deathbed. As Hull did on the radio show and in the interview at Gretzky’s.

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When Reg Fleming died in 2009, his family donated his brain to Boston University’s Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy. Neurologists and pathologists there determined that Fleming had suffered from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative neurological condition brought on by concussions and head injuries. “This case also points out that individuals who suffer from CTE are often misdiagnosed during life and may be told that they are suffering from a psychiatric disorder, such as bipolar disease, or later in life, from Alzheimer’s disease,” Dr. Ann McKee, a neuropathologist at BU, told the New York Times.

Dr. Charles Tator is the leader of a team at Toronto Western Hospital that is pursuing a line of research like the BU group’s, collecting the brains of athletes who have suffered head trauma and injuries. Several hockey players whose careers were impaired or ended by concussions have committed to donating their brains to Toronto Western. Dr. Tator prefaced any statement about CTE by saying that research into the condition is still in early stages. He also said that research is limited by the fact that it afflicts those who have had multiple head injuries. “Other than people who’ve been in several car accidents or workmen who have fallen off a ladder several times,” he said, it is almost exclusively the territory of athletes, particularly football players, whose heads have been either targets or weapons or both. In the limited sample, however, researchers have identified symptoms associated with CTE: memory loss, aggression, confusion, depression, loss of impulse control and addiction. They also believe that CTE routinely triggers depression and, in the worst cases, homicide and suicide.

Dr. Tator said that the partial list of markers of CTE reads like the short-term effects of post-concussion syndrome. The immediate effects of a concussion also include dizziness, headaches and nausea, and all the symptoms of post-concussion syndrome are exacerbated by alcohol and what neurologists call “co-morbidities,” conditions that amplify the effect of the CTE. Often cases of CTE are diagnosed as Lou Gehrig’s Disease, Alzheimer’s, dementia and Parkinson’s. To what degree CTE is the cause or by-product of these conditions remains a gray area in the research. In Fleming the co-morbidities were clear and documented: his stroke, his heart attacks, kidney failure and Parkinson’s among other ailments. While the science of substance abuse and CTE is still emerging, like all science in the field, it’s a safe bet that Fleming’s alcoholism contributed to the acceleration and impact of his CTE. “Just by itself alcohol causes the brain to shrink,” Dr. Tator said. Alcohol made his CTE symptoms worse; CTE fuelled his alcoholism: alcohol and CTE are, as Dr. Tator described it, alternately “gasoline and fire, fire and gasoline ... with potential short-term and long-term effects.”

Chris Fleming said that his father’s symptoms fit the CTE profile on almost every count. On behavior: “During and after his career he would have frequent violent outbursts,” he said. “He’d get road rage—I saw him once get out of his car and smash another driver face-first against the hood. He was charged with assault in an airport for attacking a man with a baseball bat—the man had made the mistake of calling my father a bastard, and my father grew up never knowing his father. But it took less than that to set him off. Once, when I was playing football at a small college our team was penalized for fifteen yards for unsportsmanlike behavior when my father ran down out of the stands and onto the field and chased a referee.” On cognitive function: “He had almost no short-term memory at all. He would forget what we had talked about five minutes before, even two minutes before. He would lose a thought in midsentence and just go silent.”

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Bobby Hull never missed a game because of a concussion. In newspaper and magazine accounts of his career back in the ’60s and ’70s concussion is never mentioned. Yet, by current criteria, it’s safe to bet that he suffered several, maybe upwards of a dozen, that went undiagnosed and untreated. “In the ’50s and ’60s, when I was in med school, we were told that you had to be knocked out to get a concussion,” Dr. Tator said. “Now we know that a loss of consciousness takes place in one out of twenty concussions. And that was the basic rule into the 1970s. We automatically missed ninety-five percent of concussions.”

Dr. Tator said the force needed to cause a concussion is approximately 100 Gs. “Susceptibility is very variable,” he said. “Suffice to say that the force that’s great enough to break a nose would in all likelihood result in a concussion. And in the case of someone who has suffered a concussion—who has reported it and is untreated [the recommended treatment is to remain inactive for a week at minimum and until symptom-free] it might not take any contact at all to cause a concussion. It could be something as seemingly minor as a hard shake or a whiplash effect. It took the profession forever to come to grips with that fact. In the ’60s and ’70s, players would go back into the same game when they had ‘their bell rung.’ And when they did this they were harming themselves, stressing their brains before they had fully recovered. Beyond that, they were putting themselves at mortal risk—we’ve seen instances in a variety of sports of athletes at various levels who have returned too quickly and suffered fatal brain injuries.”

Bobby Hull has always joked that he has lost count of the times he suffered a broken nose. By the end of his career it didn’t much resemble the one on his rookie card. He also suffered significant head injuries. The most famous: Toronto’s Mike Pelyk leveled Hull with an elbow that broke Hull’s jaw. Hull was back in the lineup within the week with his jaw wired shut and a helmet fitted with a facemask. A couple of games later, against the Canadiens in Montreal, John Ferguson flung Hull around in a brawl. By linesman Matt Pavelich’s account, Ferguson gave Hull “a bad beating [then] pulled back and said, ‘I’m not going to hit you anymore.’” At a time when, by Dr. Tator’s reckoning, nothing more than a hard shake could have caused a concussion, Hull was trying to trade blows with the league’s No. 1 enforcer. This was an extreme but not unique example of what would have been a strategy for teams taking on the Black Hawks or the Jets when Hull was wounded: when Hull was most vulnerable to a concussion or needed time for recovery, they would be most likely to take physical liberties with him.

“My father was and is ridiculously stubborn and he really doesn’t have much use for doctors,” Bart Hull said. “One time he suffered a fractured orbital bone, a real serious injury, and the doctors told him that he was going to be out of the lineup for weeks—that he would be taking real risks if he tried to get back in the lineup. He checked himself out and made his way to Detroit and played the next night.”

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Michelle Hull said that she “has had discussions with my family members about the concussions my dad may have suffered.” A former elite figure skater, she believes she suffered undiagnosed concussions on at least two occasions in training. On the record, Michelle Hull won’t offer any details of those conversations about her father’s health, his possibly undiagnosed brain injuries or any chronic conditions, including CTE. Her accounts of her father’s physical and emotional abuse of her mother given to ESPN’s SportsCentury series caused hard feelings that, after more than a decade, haven’t healed. She remains estranged from her father and her contact with her brothers is hit-and-miss, though she talks fairly regularly with Bart. A lawyer in the state of Washington, Michelle Hull works frequently with victims of domestic abuse. She expressed concern that lawyers for men accused of domestic crimes are mounting defenses that advance the theory of CTE as the root cause of their actions.

Bart Hull is more forthcoming. The fourth son of Bobby and Joanne, Bart played football at Boise State University and briefly in the CFL, and minor-league hockey with the Idaho Steelheads. Bart Hull is sure he suffered concussions during his own sports career. Likewise he’s sure that his father suffered undiagnosed concussions during his playing career. Bart Hull believes, however, that those concussions did not impact his father’s behavior during his playing career or in retirement. He also said that any injuries his father suffered have not impaired his cognitive functions. “When you talk to him he still remembers, still sharp as a tack,” Bart Hull said. He does say that he and his brothers have detected “a tremble, a head wiggle” when they’ve seen their father in recent years and that it’s a cause of concern. He suggests that this might be a reaction to medication that doctors have prescribed for his father’s arrhythmia. He also suggests that it could be nothing more than his father “getting old.”

It’s easy to believe that your father is just getting old when he struggles for words. Dr. Charles Tator, however, noted that struggles in self-expression can be a significant marker for CTE. “Inability to assemble sentences, get the words out, both physically and mentally [are among] the accompaniments of CTE,” Dr. Tator said. He suggested those who suffer from this sort of impairment can be aware of the problem and even develop strategies to avoid embarrassment, including avoiding the use of proper names or any discussion of past events that are cloudy in memory.

The nanny who worked for the Hulls in Chicago doesn’t suggest that Bobby Hull has CTE or any other chronic brain injury. She will say, however, that his worst and most violent episodes came “after games when he was tired, or maybe frustrated and after drinking,” which is consistent with Dr. Tator’s description of the fire-and-gasoline relationship between CTE and alcohol. And she also will say that Hull was remorseful when sober later. “The next day, it seemed like he’d realize what he did and that it was wrong and he’d apologize, almost be embarrassed by what he did,” the nanny said.

By the medical criteria of the ’60s and ’70s, Bobby Hull might have never suffered a concussion. He might never have been knocked out and thus he fell short of that era’s diagnosis of concussion, a diagnosis that required a loss of consciousness. That’s to say that he might never have suffered any concussion that rose to the level of the five percent of actual brain injuries that were diagnosed at the time. Given current criteria, however, it seems highly improbable that Bobby Hull didn’t suffer concussions on the ice.

The science of CTE is still emerging. It may never be possible to determine what, if any, impact brain injuries might have played in the wrong turns of Bobby Hull’s life. It’s tempting to draw lines between memory loss as a symptom of CTE and a man who doesn’t remember names or years or games. It’s tempting to draw lines between a loss of impulse control as a symptom of CTE and a man who cheated on his marriage at every turn. It’s tempting to draw lines between aggression as a symptom of CTE and a man who has pleaded guilty to a charge of assaulting a policeman and almost pounded Reg Fleming through the ice in Chicago. It’s tempting to draw lines between depression as a symptom of CTE and a man who went into hiding after his divorce and was “the most depressed guy I have ever talked to,” according to CBC Radio commentator Peter Gzowski. The lines, faint or not, would be drawn when the siblings discussed the possibility that their father suffered concussions during his playing career.

It’s clear that Reg Fleming and his loved ones paid an awful price for the brain injuries he suffered playing a game at a time when those injuries were neither diagnosed nor understood. That his life was ruined and shortened by those injuries is a tragedy. Other teammates and opponents might have suffered similar injuries, perhaps not as dramatically, perhaps not as frequently, and they might not have paid such a high price. They might be categorized as lesser tragedies, but tragedies nonetheless.