Gene Collier: It's Lemieux and Crosby together at Mellon Arena

Everybody is eagerly watching to see how it plays out

Thursday, September 15, 2005
By Gene Collier, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Production of ESPN's real-life high school football show -- what is it? Make Room For Butkus? -- continues at Montour High School, but the far better reality show is very likely unfolding across the river at Chez Lemieux.

There, a bona fide star-is-born teenage NHL prospect (Sidney Crosby as himself) moves in with an aging hockey legend (Mario Lemieux) and his large suburban family to see if together they all can scare up the kind of atmosphere necessary to launch a career, burnish an icon, rescue a franchise (again), hunt down the Stanley Cup, command by raw popularity that funding fall into place for a new arena, resurrect the public confidence of a city and a region and maybe have some ice cream before bedtime.

Working titles: "El Sid & Le Magnifique Do Sewickley" and "One And A Half Men."

In the premier episode yesterday, an unusually frisky press corps, swollen to about five times its usual training-camp size, asked Lemieux directly about life at the mansion. Usually, Mario is about as expansive as frozen brick on such inquiries, but this time he was startlingly candid. For him.

"It's a normal life," said 66. "I get up the same time as him. We have breakfast. Don't say too much in the morning. We got to practice. Go home. It was tougher for me when I was first here. I didn't speak the language. I was a little bit shy. He's very mature. He's very chatty. He likes the kids. He's very good at French. He makes a few phone calls in French on the way home. He lives on the second floor, which he has pretty much to himself."

Lemieux described his relationship with the gifted Canadian protege as "buddy-buddy" when media probers tried to get him to confirm some presumed Uncle Mario role. You might have seen Sidney described as a kid brother, which is choice three, I guess. No one proposed a hypothetical crazed cousin-thin skinned lactose intolerant stable boy relationship, but it's early.

I haven't been out to the house, but I'm guessing it's a little more like father-son. When I was 18, my father was 40. Sidney is 18, and when the Penguins open the season on Lemieux's birthday, Oct. 5, he'll be, let's see, 40. Furthermore, when someone asked Lemieux yesterday if Sidney could have girlfriends over, he said exactly what my father said when I was 18.

"No sleepovers."

Asked not 15 minutes later how he viewed Lemieux's no-sleepovers policy, Sidney yipped, "no comment."

See, now here's a kid bound for glory. Is that title taken?

One day into practice for the most intriguing Penguins season in more than a decade, all that is perfectly evident about the club's brightest star since Lemieux was that he is absolutely unruffled by the very compelling reality show into which he has been thrust. Well spoken and bilingual, with both bemused and sincere smiles at the ready, Crosby handled the surreal milieu yesterday like a perfect pass.

"I know he's had some training with the media," said Penguins vice president Tom McMillan, "but I don't care what kind of training you've had, you either have his kind of poise or you don't."

Sidney admitted to some jitters.

"I was a little nervous, maybe the first five minutes," he said, "my first NHL camp, the first time skating with these guys, but once I got on the ice for a few minutes, you know, it's the same game out there."

The same prodigious skills with which he plays it are what Pittsburgh figures will re-ignite the franchise, but Crosbyfaces a learning curve steeper than Polish Hill.

"He's going to be a real good player, a superstar in this league," said John LeClair, the veteran forward and precisely the kind of decorated free agent who might have signed elsewhere had that pingpong ball not fallen Pittsburgh's way July 22. "It's a great opportunity for him to learn what's going on, on and off the ice. He's played a lot of hockey, so I think he knows when and where he's got to be careful. It's everybody's job to help him out."

Helped by the city's warm reception, Crosby has been excited by Pittsburgh's doubly excited reaction to him. He has been recognized at a Steelers game and said he'd like to see PNC Park, meet fellow Canadian Jason Bay, and, as a former baseball player, wouldn't mind taking batting practice with the Pirates.

I don't know if dad should allow that. They might want to start him at third the same night.

(Gene Collier can be reached at gcollier@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1283.)