Why not? He gets well-paid to do these events and a more "gentlemanly" gentleman you could not meet. And hilarious! I haven't laughed that hard in a long time. One of 12 kids from Ste Anne, Ontario, Dennis was the youngest of five boys and Bobby the eldest. "I never slept alone until I got married," he said. Brought the house down. Except for his final year, he played for Chicago throughout his 14-year career, which ended in 1978. The uncle of hockey great Brett Hull, Dennis quipped, "If I had made the kind of money Brett made ($18 million), I would have quit by Christmas my first year!" Man, he was so funny.
"It's always nice to be introduced by a nobody," was his opening line. He was a member of the highest-scoring line in the history of the Blackhawks and over his career scored 303 goals in more than 1,000 games. Talking about one of his coaches, he said, "My coach said, 'Man, of all the millions of sperm from your father, you were the fastest?!'" Lots of his remarks were vintage sixties -- something B and I completely related to. Come to think of it, I bet we were the oldest people in the audience, B being three years older than Dennis.
He and B talked about B's several run-ins with the legendary Bobby in his heyday -- mostly in bars in Toronto back in the day. Bobby was always swarmed by women. Have you seen pictures of Bobby Hull at his peak? Yeah, that's why. Talking about Bobby's 600th goal, which Dennis assisted on, he said, "I could have scored it, but I gave it to that spoiled bastard."
The "Smith brothers" refers to the late Brian, murdered by a madman in Ottawa in 1995, and Gary. Both hockey stars, Brian was the one I dated in the late sixties. We had a ball.
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| Dennis and me. |
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| Got his autograph. |
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