| It is too
obscene to print, what Bobby Hull called Terry Slater that last dramatic moment they stood
face to face, sneering. But Bobby says he meant it, and means it still. He says Slater is
a guy who's ruining the game of hockey by inciting unnecessary violence, and by employing
low-talent players whose only purpose is to harass real players and disrupt games. "I blame Slater," Hull roars. "He's one of those who cause all
these bad things to happen. You can't blame the players. They're just trying to do what
they're told. You have to blame the people who tell them." Hull is in Cincinnati for
the third in a series of genuine hockey feuds against the Slater-coached Stingers. The two
previous meetings produced international shock waves.
After the first game in Winnipeg, during which Jets' player Perry
Miller suffered a minor eye injury in a fight with Cincinnati players Ron Plumb and Bernie
MacNeil, Hull went on a one-man strike to protest violence. His widely publicized remarks
seemed to single out the Stingers as being particularly guilty. In the second game, Slater
assigned forward Dale Smedsmo to shadow Hull around the ice all evening. As the game
ended, Hull skated over to the Stingers' bench for that short confrontation with Slater.
"I called him a _ _ _," Hull freely admits, "because
he is. That isn't the way you play hockey, by rassing you all night. What good does it do
the game? Why do you want guys skating around jabbing someone with their sticks, hooking,
slashing? All it's going to do is get someone hurt and end his career. When he (Slater)
had the Los Angeles Sharks, that's the way they played. They shoved everyone around
because they didn't have enough talent to play the game. Now that's what he's trying to
get this new team to do. Ask the players if they want to play like that. I guarantee they
don't. Everyone wants to be known as a good offensive hockey player, not some dumb
goon."
"What Slater did was allow some guy to make a fool of himself,
embarrass himself, by trying to skate around with me. Everyone was laughing at him. It;s a
terrible thing. Hockey is good skating, good passing and puck handling, and if someone
can't do that, or isn't allowed to do that, he shouldn't be on the ice."
Of the first game, which sparked Hull's strike, he says, "Perry
Miller got hit from behind and all he was trying to do was protect his own player who was
being pushed around by someone for no reason after he'd already scored a goal. He was
blindsided and he almost lost an eye. I wasn't trying to pick on Cincinnati especially. It
just came to a head in that game. I decided something had to be done. Hockey is
deteriorating and not improving. This is filtering down to the kids who are seeing all
this fighting and arguing on TV. They're forgetting about executing the fundamentals, the
skating and the passing. We need to set a better example."
"I'm not saying we want to take all the hard hitting, the
checking and the flamboyance out of the game. And if two guys want to fight, one on one,
with their sticks and gloves lying on the ice, that's all right too. I'm against players
with little or no talent being hired to play the game the way it shouldn't be played, to
fight and harass and disrupt games, to impede better players. The Stingers don't have to
play like this. They have the talent to play the game right if they were allowed."
Despite all the bad feeling, Hull says he's looking forward to game
three, the Jets' first in Riverfront Coliseum. "I expect this one to be a good game,'
he proclaims. "It might be a rough game, but we don't care about that. Nobody is
afraid of roughness. It's the sticks and gloves that are dangerous, but we don't expect
any of that stuff. There's only so much a coach can get players to do for him". |
