Last season Pilote was banished from the ice more often than any other player in the National Hockey League, drawing a total of 165 penalty minutes. Not long ago he was asked, "How does it feel to be the league's bad man?"

"The what?" Pilote said.

"The bad man. You led the league in penalties last season."

"I did?" Pilote exclaimed. "I thought it was one of the other guys on our club."

Pilote's assumption was neither unreasonable nor surprising. On the Black Hawks nearly every player is something of a "bad man." Four of Pilote's teammates--Reg Fleming, Eric Nesterenko, Murray Balfour and Stan Mikita--each were in the 100-minute bracket last season, and the team as a whole set a new National Hockey League record of 1072 penalty minutes.

Excessive belligerence ordinarily sabotages hockey success, because when a player is sent to the penalty box, his team has to play shorthanded. The Black Hawks, however, seem to thrive on crime. They are the defending world champions of professional hockey, and a gashouse gang on and off the ice.

They are the beefiest team in the league, too. They have eight players of more than 190 pounds, and the squad average is a hefty 188 pounds.

As Tommy Ivan, the club's dapper little general manager puts it, "We don't want to have anybody who gets pushed around." Ivan needn't worry. His Black Hawks do most of the pushing. They weren't the best club in the six-team league during the regular season last year--the same was true in the early stages of the current season--but as time went on, their strength and roughness began to tell. After finishing third last season, they bullied their way right through hockey's world series, the Stanley Cup play-offs. In the process, they drew a whopping 162 penalty minutes, and there were those who felt that the Black Hawks still hadn't been policed properly.

In the semifinal play-off they so battered Montreal, which had held the Stanley Cup for five straight years, that Frank Selke, the managing director of the Canadiens, charged, "The Black Hawks deliberately racked up five of our best players." Surveying his blood-splattered players after one punishing game, Montreal coach Hector (Toe) Blake observed sardonically, "We must be cutting ourselves with our own sticks."

There is a theory that the Black Hawks get away with some of their rough stuff unpunished because the referee can't call every infraction. "That's true to some extent," agrees Carl Voss, the league's referee-in-chief. "The policy in hockey officiating is not to call twenty penalties against one team and two against the other. But there are certain players you keep an eye on."

One of these is the most inflammable of the Black Hawks, a utility man named Reg Fleming. He is nicknamed Mister Clean, but because of his bullnecked, crew-cut appearance rather than his competitive style. Fleming is used chiefly as a penalty-killer--a player who specializes in disrupting the opposition's attack while a teammate is sitting out a penalty. All too often, however, Fleming winds up in the penalty box himself. He spent 145 minutes there as a rookie last season, an implausible figure for a spot player.

Fleming established himself as a "bad man" early in the season when he was assessed thirty-seven minutes--a one-game record--after throwing punches at three different members of the New York Rangers. First he slugged it out with Dean Prentice. This resulted in a five-minute major penalty for fighting. Upon returning to the ice Fleming crashed into the boards with Eddie Shack--now with Toronto--and both came up swinging.

After that brawl was broken up, Fleming quietly glided toward Ranger goalie Jack McCartan, the former United States Olympic hero, who is now in the minor leagues. Thinking that McCartan had deliberately whacked him on the leg with his extra-thick stick. Fleming threw a left hook to the jaw that dropped the unsuspecting McCartan to his knees.

When the smoke of the battle finally cleared, Fleming drew a two-minute minor penalty, two more five-minute penalties and a ten-minute misconduct penalty, plus a game-misconduct penalty which exiled him for the duration of the game. All this cost him $75 in automatic fines and another $100 in a personal fine that was levied by league president Clarence Campbell.

The previous season Campbell had cracked down on another member of the Black Hawks, star left-winger Bobby Hull, after Hull and the Rangers' Lou Fontinato--now with Montreal--chopped at each other several times with their stick blades. They missed, but both were ejected for a "deliberate attempt to injure." It cost them $100 apiece.

Ordinarily the blond, handsome Hull is a comparatively peaceful player. He possesses the most massive muscles in hockey--his biceps measure fifteen and a half inches, compared to fourteen for ex-heavyweight champion Rocky Marciano--but he prefers to use his strength to score goals.

Two years ago Hull, then only twenty-one, led the league in scoring with eighty-one points, registering forty-two assists and thirty-nine goals. The record for goals in a season is fifty, set by the fabled Maurice Richard seventeen years ago and tied last season by Bernard (Boom Boom) Geoffrion of Montreal; "In my heart," says Hull, "I know I can score fifty-one someday."

One of Hull's most dramatic goals came late in the third period of a game with the Rangers last season. Bobby was battling for the puck along the boards when a stray stick suddenly was in his face. The sharp-bladed tip ripped through his lower lip and jammed between two of his lower teeth. When the stick was yanked away, there was a chunk of ashwood, resembling a miniature cigarette butt, protruding from his blood-splotched mouth. Moments later, Hull was sitting in the first-aid room at Chicago Stadium.

"I never saw one like this," the doctor said. "We've got to get the wood out and then you'll need some stitches."

"Just get the wood out for now," Hull said. "You can put the stitches in later. The game's almost over anyway."

The doctor agreed, but the wood was wedged tightly in Hull's gum. Finally the wood loosened and Hull returned to the ice. In the final minutes of the game he scored his third goal of the night to defeat the Rangers, 3-2.

Later nine stitches were needed to close the ugly wound. Recalls Hull with a shrug, "It hurt--but hell, we get paid to play."

Such a statement may sound like bravado, but this attitude is typical of hockey players in general and of the Black Hawks in particular. They possess some of the game's most durable performers, notably goaltender Glenn Hall, whose job involves exceptional pressure. Now in his seventh big-league season, the thirty-year-old Hall went into the current campaign with the remarkable achievement of never having missed an N.H.L. game. By early December his streak had reached 442 games.

The record for consecutive games played is 580, held by Johnny Wilson of New York. However, as Black Hawk general manager Ivan points out, "Wilson is a forward. It's a lot different when you're a goalie. The last two seasons, Hall was the only goalie in the league to play the full seventy-game schedule."

Hall shrugs off his streak with, "I've been lucky." He has also been tough. He once was carried off the ice unconscious after being hit in the mouth by the puck. Half an hour later, with twenty-five stitches in his upper lip, he skated back and finished the game.

Hall has acrobatic skill to match his durability. Many observers consider him the best goal tender in the National Hockey League. Says Lorne (Gump) Worsley, the veteran New York goalie, "Hall has been terrific with both good teams and bad teams. That's the test."

During the 1959-60 season, for example, the Black Hawks finished fifth, but Hall was voted the league's all-star goalie. In Chicago it is not unusual for the public-address announcer to introduce him as, "Mister Goalie, Glenn Hall."

This sort of boosterism fits in very well with the revival of fan enthusiasm that has taken place at Chicago Stadium, the largest arena in the league. Organized in 1926, the Black Hawks won the Stanley Cup in 1934 and 1938 to the delight of overflow crowds. After World War II they took a virtually permanent lease on the league cellar, but at first their devoted fans didn't waver. Despite a last-place team during the 1946-47 season, the Black Hawks drew a total attendance of 521,831 for thirty home games--a record 17,394 average. Since then, stricter fire regulations have limited Chicago Stadium capacity to 16,666.

Less than six years after the peak season, a succession of losing teams reduced attendance to the point where the Black Hawk management scheduled some of its "home" games in Indianapolis, and later in St. Louis and Omaha. Multimillionaire Jim Norris, a controversial figure as head of the now defunct International Boxing Club but a dedicated hockey man, became co-owner of the club in partnership with ice-show owner Arthur Wirtz. During the 1953-54 season, when the Black Hawks won only twelve of their seventy games, Wirtz proclaimed, "I'd like to pull the team out of Chicago. We've lost $300,000 already."

Within six weeks, the N.H.L. board of governors called a "Help the Hawks" meeting. But first the Black Hawks had to prove that they were willing to help themselves. Norris turned to the Detroit Red Wings--owned by his brother and sister--and hired the businesslike Tommy Ivan, who had never played pro hockey but had coached Detroit to six straight pennants and three Stanley Cup titles.

In Chicago Ivan was elevated to general manager beginning with the 1954-55 season and given carte blanche with the checkbook. It is said today that Norris has invested nearly $2,000,000 in the Black Hawks. Whatever the exact figure, Ivan began spending money for established players and, more important, for a farm system that eventually produced Bobby Hull, Pierre Pilote, huge defenseman Elmer Vasko and scrappy center Stan Mikita. Ivan says proudly, "They are the nucleus of our Stanley Cup team."

There was, however, no overnight miracle. The Black Hawks remained in the cellar for three seasons, but, man by man, Ivan was building a championship squad. Although hockey is a six-man game, the fast pace calls for frequent rotation of players, and N.H.L. teams carry seventeen men. Ivan pounced on surplus talent from the Montreal dynasty to obtain such productive scorers as Ed Litzenberger (now with Detroit), Bill Hay, Murray Balfour, Ab McDonald and Reg Fleming, as well as defenseman Dollard St. Laurent. Ivan traded shrewdly to get goal tender Hall from Detroit and left-winger Ron Murphy from New York. He also reached into hockey's grab bag, the annual league draft, for defenseman Jack Evans and right-winger Eric Nesterenko--each a $20,000 bargain.

The 195-pound Evans perhaps was Ivan's best buy. Says coach Rudy Pilous, "He's our cop"--meaning the man who keeps opposing "bad men" honest. "He's a helluva fighter, but the fans don't realize it, because none of the other players want to get mixed up with him."

Nearly every N.H.L. player was born in Canada, but the Black Hawks have an exception in Stan Mikita. Born in 1940, Mikita grew up in Sokolce, Czechoslovakia, during the Nazi occupation. "The Germans didn't bother us," he says. "There wasn't any fighting where we were." As a boy, Mikita skated on nearby ponds with what he calls, "screw-on skates--like roller skates, only with blades. I didn't have a hockey stick. I'd just grab a branch off a tree and trim it down."

When he was eight, he left Czechoslovakia, with his parents' blessing, to live with his uncle in St. Catharines, Ontario. Ignored at first by the Canadian children, he soon discovered the town hockey rink. "It's been my life ever since," he says.

Possibly as a result of his early years of war-torn poverty, he developed into a steel-eyed spitfire who asks no quarter and above all gives none.

Teammate Bill (Red) Hay, a 195-pound center, is another rarity in the National Hockey League--a player with a college degree. Imported from Canada on an athletic scholarship by Colorado College, he was graduated as a geology major in 1958. Two years later he was the N.H.L.'s rookie of the year, after being installed on a line with scoring champ Hull and another rookie, Murray Balfour, whose background is strikingly different from Hay's. Reared in the tough North End of Regina, Saskatchewan, Balfour says guardedly, "Hockey kept me out of a lot of trouble." Balfour, Hay and Hull clicked so well that Rudy Pilous, their phrase-making coach, began to call them, "The Million Dollar Line."

The bushy-browed, forty-seven-year-old Pilous--pronounced "Pil-us"--took over the Black Hawks in midseason four years ago with perhaps the strangest background of any coach in N.H.L. history. As a boy in Winnipeg, he exercised race horses with famous jockey Johnny Longden. In hockey he was regarded as too slow for the big league. Settling in St. Catharines, Ontario, he spent some time as an automobile shipping foreman and later as a promotion man for the nearby Buffalo Memorial Auditorium.

The Buffalo job included troubleshooting for the hockey club there. This led him to a brief career as a minor-league coach in Houston, San Diego and Louisville. Then Pilous made his hockey name as the organizer and coach of the successful St. Catharines Teepees of the Ontario Junior Hockey Association--one of the best teen-age leagues in Canada. There he polished the skills of Hull, Pilote and Vasko. He was polishing Mikita's when general manager Tommy Ivan, then doubling as a coach, offered him the Black Hawk coaching job during the 1957-58 season.

Pilous was skeptical. Chicago, he knew, was a graveyard for coaches. Over the years eighteen different men had come and gone--not counting Ivan, who was filling in reluctantly while searching for another replacement. Pilous decided to turn down the offer. Then co-owner Jim Norris taunted him, "You've proved you can coach kids, but I was hoping that you might be ready to handle the men."

Pilous accepted the challenge. At first he made more of an impression with his homespun humor and dialect jokes--he's a master storyteller--than he did as a coach. The Black Hawks finished fifth. In his first full season, however, they climbed into third place. This put them in the Stanley Cup play-offs--which are staged among the top four teams--for the first time in six years and only the second time in thirteen years.

They finished third again the following season. Last year they stormed to the Stanley Cup. Suddenly Pilous was a genius--to the amazement of at least one of his players. This was right-winger Eric Nesterenko, an intense individualist, who once told a reporter, "Pilous couldn't coach a girls' basketball team."

Pilous privately blew his top but publicly laughed off the incident. "Handling men," he says, "is the most important phase of coaching in the N.H.L."--and this was his was of handling the high-strung, fiercely opinionated Nesterenko.

With all his eccentricities, however, the 199-pound Nesterenko--he swings two of the sharpest elbows ever honed--is a talented player. he has averaged fifteen goals a season with the Black Hawks while shackling some of the league's best scorers.

When the big, bad Black Hawks won the Stanley Cup last year, somebody asked Nesterenko, "What about Pilous and the girls' basketball team now?" Answered Eric, "This is a pretty good girls' basketball team."