Motivation Quote by Brett Hull

Hull’s line punctures the sport’s favorite myth: that toughness is measured by how little you feel. Coming from an NHL star whose job description once included absorbing pain and dishing it back, “Sometimes guys need to cry” lands as a permission slip from inside the fortress. It’s not a therapist’s platitude; it’s a teammate talking across the locker room, insisting that emotional release isn’t a betrayal of grit but part of staying functional.

The phrasing matters. “Need” frames crying as maintenance, not weakness. Then Hull pivots to “Some hockey players think they’re too tough to cry,” and that “think” does quiet work: the problem isn’t toughness itself, it’s the performance of toughness. He’s calling out a culture where masculinity is policed through stoicism, where vulnerability is treated like a penalty you can’t afford. The subtext is blunt: the real fragility is being so scared of appearing soft that you deny basic human pressure valves.

Contextually, hockey has long rewarded silence - play through injury, keep your head down, don’t give opponents (or media) anything. Hull’s comment fits into a larger late-20th/early-21st-century shift in pro sports, where mental health, grief, and trauma have become harder to dismiss as “off-ice issues.” It also reads as a subtle critique of the locker-room hierarchy: veterans set the emotional rules. When a Hall of Famer suggests tears belong in the game’s ecosystem, he’s not just normalizing crying; he’s redefining what “tough” is allowed to look like.