Watch Patrick Kane---the Black Hawk's 18 year old rookie, This kid seems to have stardom in his future!!! Now that owner, Arthur Wirtz, has passed on, maybe the team's front office will finally do what is necessary t build a team worth watching. It's a long time since Bobby Hull took a million dollar bribe to leave Chicago. And, from where I sit, it has always seemed that that started the huge salaries of today.

Was that the first big million dollar salary??? I think it might've been the very first in all of sports...

Art Thieme

I could be mistaken, but I think the first "Million Dollar" athlete was Pele(of soccer fame). At the beginning of the 1971-72 season, Bobby Orr signed a contract with the Boston Bruins worth a reported $200,000 per season over five years. So he made a million dollars, but spread over five years.

Derek Sanderson and Bobby Hull are widely remembered as hockey's first millionaires because of the sensation they caused in 1972, when they left the NHL to sign big contracts with the new World Hockey Association.

Sanderson was only a millionaire on paper. His five-year, $2.65 million deal with the Philadelphia Blazers briefly made him the world's richest athlete. But he played only a few WHA games before returning to the NHL, so he never collected his millions.

Hull's WHA contract was worth $2.75 million over ten years, with $1 million of that paid up front. So Hull qualifies as the first guy to make $1 million in a single year. No NHL salary came close to $1 million a year back then.