By Cam Cole, Vancouver Sun columnist
http://www.vancouversun.com/sports/index.html
January 15, 2010
Sidney Crosby was 17 years old when he skated for Canada at the 2005 world junior championship on a team that decimated the opposition. Five years later and the Cole Harbour, N.S., native will help lead Canada at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver.Photograph by: Jeff Vinnick, Hockey Canada, Vancouver Sun files
Maybe there’s such a thing as a Buzzmeter, an all-purpose sensor that can pick up the hum of excitement and anticipation in a city as a sporting event approaches, and attach a number to it.
If so, the machine might have assigned a Level 9 to the pre-Christmas visit by Alex Ovechkin and the Washington Capitals. Bad hair, missing teeth, enthusiastic but fractured English, a face only a mother could love? Didn’t matter. That boy has charisma.
For Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin and Marc-Andre Fleury, and the defending Stanley Cup champion Pittsburgh Penguins? Hard to say. Less than 9, anyway.
Malkin has an Art Ross Trophy, a Conn Smythe and a Stanley Cup, but lacks Ovechkin’s devil-may-care elan, and he’s a tough nut to crack in any language. Fleury broke the ring finger on his catching hand Thursday night in Edmonton, and is questionable for what had shaped up as a goaltending duel of Olympic teammates-to-be with the Canucks’ Roberto Luongo.
And Sid the Kid? Always willing but ever cautious as an interview subject, he might turn out to be the best all-around hockey player of his generation – the jury will be out for another 10 or 15 years – but the cocoon of privacy that surrounds him is nearly Tiger Woods-like.
“It’s just one of those things “he told reporters in Calgary. “Everyone has camera phones and the Internet. Things aren’t as private as they used to be. But that’s all I know. I’ve grown up around it.
“I’m a homebody, anyway,” he added Friday. “I don’t go anywhere.”
Kristyne De Mott, wearing a wedding, dress holds up a sign for Pittsburgh Penguins' Sidney Crosby(notes) before an NHL hockey action between the Penguins and the Calgary Flames in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, Wednesday, Jan. 13, 2010. (AP)
So the interesting personal things we know about the 22-year-old Crosby so far are: (a) he still lives in Penguins owner Mario Lemieux’s guest house, and … well, there really was no (b) until fans carrying “Will You Marry Me, Sidney?” signs proposed to him on consecutive nights in Alberta arenas – first a stunning blond Calgary woman dressed as a bride and then, in a neat twist of the Battle of Alberta, a hairy-chested, unshaven Edmonton man attired in a women’s white tank top and skirt, batting his eyelashes at the Penguins superstar.
Act III tonight at GM Place?
“I mean … probably,” said a grinning Crosby. “I don’t know what you could do, really, to one-up Edmonton.”
This is Vancouver, Sid. You’d be surprised.
He might be surprised, too, a month from today, when Team Canada awakens from its first night in the Olympic Village to feel the full intensity of a nation’s hunger for hockey glory. Crosby won’t be the captain, but he will surely be the team’s centre-piece.
Denied a chance to play in Turin when Wayne Gretzky’s selection team famously decided he and Eric Staal were too young to help the cause – and with NHL owners and GMs loath to disrupt another season in 2014, for Games in Sochi, Russia that will air in early afternoon over here – Crosby might have just one shot at an Olympic legacy. This one. Bigger than a Stanley Cup, if not harder to win.
“I don’t think you want to think about that a whole lot,” Crosby said. “There’s probably enough pressure as it is to want to do well.
“It’s pretty hard to compare. I’ve never gone through it. I like to think all the things I’ve gone through before will help me prepare for that, and we have a team with a lot of players who are used to that. [Pressure] will come into play, but the game doesn’t change. The expectations don’t change.
“I look back even at the first time I went to the Cup final. We lost, and I thought that was it. Luckily we got back, but I know from that experience that these are not opportunities that come along all the time.”
It’s not as though Crosby lacks a sense of hockey’s place in his homeland, even if only two of the 23 members of Team Canada – Luongo and Calgary’s Jarome Iginla – actually play on Canadian-based teams.
(“Yeah, but they’re the two best players,” cracked the Canucks’ captain.)
Two months after the Turin Olympics, Crosby made a rather emphatic statement by winning the scoring title as an 18-year-old, playing for Team Canada at the world championships. He hasn’t looked back.
And if his anticipation of the coming Olympic experience sounds muted, well, that’s just his style. He ran in the Olympic torch relay in Nova Scotia in November, and the amount of Olympic-related construction and decoration going up around Vancouver has not escaped his notice.
“At our camp in the summer time for Team Canada we saw some pictures, some views from up top, so we could see where things were being put up – where the athletes’ village and stuff were going,” Crosby said. “It’s coming together quickly, and it looks great.”
In a month, he and Luongo will be teammates. In a month, he and Malkin will suspend diplomatic relations. In the meantime, he’s on pace for his first 50-goal season in the NHL, having decided in the off-season to correct one of the very few holes in his resume, and that sort of commitment to excellence is reflected in just about every aspect of his life.
Pittsburgh’s sporting community may have its share of rounders who end up with their photo galleries on www.drunkathlete.com – Steelers kicker Jeff Reed is a hardy regular, and quarterback Ben Roethlisberger is a more recent featuree – but somehow, Crosby doesn’t seem likely to join them.
Asked if the marriage offer from the Calgary blond was tempting, he actually blushed.
“Oh, no,” he said. “Not even … no.”
After all this time in the limelight, he’s still a remarkably good kid.
ccole@vancouversun.com
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