National Post (National Edition)
Hockey’s Dark Secret: (Some) fans despise Sidney Crosby
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.
Continued from A1
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 just like Sid: these 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 concussions 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.