THE GAME’S GREATEST PLAYER IS EASY TO HATE
Sidney Crosby was lying face down on the ice. He wasn’t moving. It didn’t look good. Crosby had been thwacked in the back of the head by Alexander Ovechkin’s stick before being cross- checked to the side of it by Ovechkin’s Washington teammate, Matt Niskanen. It was a combination of blows that, among hockey fans in Pittsburgh and in the world beyond, had time standing still Monday night, if only briefly.
But then time moved on, in a blink, and out it poured. Not in a torrent, exactly, but in a steady trickle — on Twitter. Expressions, not of genuine concern for the Pittsburgh Penguins star, the greatest player of his generation, but of frontier justice being done.
“Stop crying every time Crosby gets hurt,” came a tweet. “Crosby is hurt, time to cancel the playoffs,” came another. And another: “So Crosby is allowed to stick people in the nuts and chop people’s fingers off, but the second he gets cross-checked everyone loses it.” And another: “karma.”
One of hockey’s dark secrets is that the player known as the Kid is a hated man, in some corners. One of life’s dark truths is that the Twitterverse is one of those corners.
Twitter is our Roman Coliseum, a place where we, the palookas of sport, drinking beer and watching the game at home, get to be participants in the action, and where the sight of blood elicits cries for more blood — and where the image of the best hockey player on the planet lying face down on the ice is met with snickering Tweets, and worse.
“Sid is an ultra-competitor and that can get misconstrued by some people — because he is so competitive,” says Paul Coffey, the Hockey Hall of Famer, explaining Crosby’s uncanny ability to irritate opponents and bystanders alike.
“I played seven years in Edmonton with the game’s best ever ( see: Gretzky). Nobody competed harder than Wayne. Nobody cared more about the game — and Wayne was j ust l ike Sid: t hese guys want to win. Some people just don’t understand that drive.”
Crosby, we learned Tuesday, suffered a concussion on the play. He has had concus- sions before. So is this just the next, or could it be the end, and if it is the end, then what are we left with?
Wayne Gretzky was hated, too. Gretzky was a diver, said the critics. Gretzky couldn’t skate. The referees had one set of rules for Gretzky and another set for everybody else.
Gretzky didn’t fight. Of course, Gretzky didn’t need to fight, back in the Golden Age of the Goon, because if an opponent messed with him his Oilers teammates, Dave Semenko and l ater Marty McSorley, would tear their arms off.
One of the commandments of the hockey code used to be: rough up our best player — we punch you in the face. Now we live in a more enlightened hockey age, or at least we’d like to think we do. The goons are gone, largely. But the great players, like Sidney Crosby, are still targets, and without a Semenko- style deterrent lurking nearby to protect him, the Kid is left to protect himself.
He accomplishes this to great effect by hacking and hooking and spearing and chopping opponents with his stick, occasionally targeting them in ungentlemanly places, for example: the groin region of Buffalo’s Ryan O’Reilly.
Crosby also yaps and chirps, barks at the officials and plays every shift as though it may be his last. He is easy to hate, if you are a Washington fan, say, or a relative of Ryan O’Reilly’s, but he is even easier to love.
“Years ago, t here was Bobby Clarke, and Bobby was as good — and as dirty as it came — but when it got too hot in the kitchen he had some guys that could handle it for him,” Coffey says. “The game is different now, and that is what makes the game so great. You don’t have to be 6- foot- 3. You just have to play hard.”
You just have to play like the Kid, and that is something only he can do, and in losing him — we all lose — even the Crosby haters with their nonsense tweets.
THESE GUYS WANT TO WIN. SOME PEOPLE JUST DON’T UNDERSTAND.