In the June 21 Tribune, Bill Wirtz was quoted as saying he could not afford to pay Tony Amonte what he was asking. That may or may not be true, but at the end of the article he states that back in the early `70s the Blackhawks could not afford to pay Bobby Hull more than the $250,000 a year they offered him when he went to the World Hockey Association.
I was Hull’s agent at the time, and two points need to be made.
1) They did not make the offer of $250,000 until after we had committed to Winnipeg; their offers prior to that were much lower.
2) The idea that Hull, one of the two best players in hockey along with Bobby Orr, and the player still voted the NHL’s top left wing of all time, was not worth $250,000 a year should tell you all you need to know about the Blackhawks organization and its lack of success since that time.
Hockey experts have estimated that the decision cost the Blackhawks somewhere between $50 million and $100 million and the league much more than that, first from lost attendance and second (and most important) from the failure of their lawsuit in federal court, which then did away with the “contract in perpetuity” (reserve clause) and started players’ salaries on a dramatic spiral upward.
