No. 244: SIDNEY CROSBY & CONOR BEDARD / The critics are doubting the latest generational player. Remembering when they buried No. 87 (& this humble biographer).

Yup, the first pick in the 2023 draft is slumping & the media's reflexive response is to deem him over-rated, all hype, a bust. You think scribes learn from past mistakes? Good luck with that.

“WHY don’t you write about Sidney Crosby?” a subscriber asked the other day.

This line of interrogation seemed to come out of leftfield—a strange question to ask a scribe who has written not one biography but two.

For my second book about Crosby, I stipulated in my contract that my name on the cover had to be in larger type than Sid’s.

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Then, I gave it some deeper thought. In fact, as far as this SubStack goes, I haven’t written that much about the best player of his generation. On further review, another realization: I never dropped Sid’s name in my memoir for Audible, not once in the eight-hour reading of my career’s myriad excruciations. Likewise, in the press-box confidential I just wrapped for ECW, his name remains unmentioned.

Something more had to be in play

If any SubStack should offer up content on Sid it should be this one—if I wanted to give a nod to his numerological bent, I could have reserved the appropriate slot for him, No. 87. That would have required some planning I guess and if you’ve read enough of the 243 previous entries on this SubStack, you’d know that such forethought is in short supply. (For a Crosby hat-trick column I could have scheduled No. 261, i.e. 3 X 87.)

I looked back on a couple of years of this SubStack and found only two entries with the pride of Cole Harbour in the subject line.

The first one is linked here for paid subscribers and industry types with comps: No. 73: SIDNEY CROSBY / More like "Least Valuable." My library reading in Sid's backyard, The story didn’t quite make the cut for my Audible memoir, judgment call. No one showing up for a book reading is an indignity that haunts many writers on a promo tour, but no one showing up for a reading of a Crosby bio in Cole Harbour is truly the nadir. Extra points for the librarian leaving the building just as I stepped up to the microphone. More extra points for the library being part of the public complex that includes the rink where Crosby played his first game back in Timbits days.

Reliving that misery for your pleasure was traumatic enough to scare me off writing about Crosby for a year. I revisited my first eyeful of the phenom going back to the week after his 16^th birthday when he was playing for an underager playing for Canada at the summer under-18s in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Check out the story linked here: No. 170: SIDNEY CROSBY / Before the famous victories that everyone watched, the brutally tough loss that no saw.

The photo on the cover of this first edition of my first Crosby book was Sid in a Rimouski uniform stepping out onto a frozen patch of the St Lawrence. The image originally appeared in ESPN The Magazine.

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I thought Crosby would be a fitting subject for this SubStack entry based on a couple of stories in the news in the week just gone by.

One: Line-ups for the Four Nations tournament were announced the other day, but we already knew that, barring injury or some unforeseen circumstance, Sidney Crosby will be representing Canada once again. He was in the first group of players named to the team back in June. The last time the hockey’s best skated in an international in-season tournament was Sochi in 2014. The Four Nations isn’t ideal—you don’t have to be Czech or Slovak or Swiss or Russian to gripe about being short-changed. Those nations’ exclusions means we won’t get to see as many of the game’s brightest talents as we did at the pre-season supposed classic World Cup back in 2016. That iteration of the World Cup didn’t really capture the imagination like the five Olympics stocked with the NHLers had—the game was ridiculously high speed, but the physical play was in short supply and you had the suspicion that some professional courtesy more than consuming desire was in play. Good for Sid, no matter. .

Two: Conor Bedard didn’t make the cut for the Canadian team and that was a disappointment, though not much of a surprise, given that he’s on pace to score 20 goals this season if, feeling generous, you round up. Bedard had won the Calder as the league’s best rookie last season and in his highlight-reel moments, he lived up to his designation/anointment as a generational player, which dated back to Hockey Canada granting him early entry into the WHL. It only seemed like his name had been in news forever—he in fact turned 19 only last summer. Everything seemed to be falling into place for him at the start of the season, at least in the minds of fans and particularly media, which had launched into clickbait speculation about Bedard’s possible inclusion in Canada’s Four Nations line-up. Yes, the scribes’ fever-dream scenario would have Bedard skating with Crosby and Connor McDavid.

Then came this flatline through the first third of the campaign with Chicago—you might even deem it a fall-off given that he’s minus-13 in the plus-minus column and the Blackhawks have won just eight of their first 27 games. And in turn, some are saying he’s “struggling” or “over-hyped” or even “a bust.”

(Sidenote: I had a long visit with Bedard. Check out this link to the SubStack entry from January 2023. complete with a 45-minute audio interview with the wunderkind, No. 55: CONOR BEDARD / This year's phenom, will become the latest generational player to generate skepticism. Yeah, this has proven pretty predictive as far as the media goes. Hey, when we played pool, we always had to call our shots and so that carries over into real life.)

Reader, you may ask: How do I get from Bedard to Crosby? Well, on bare facts, you can draw a parallel between Bedard’s being left off the Canadian line-up for the Four Nations and Wayne Gretzky’s passing over Crosby for the Olympic team in 2006, which happened midway through his rookie season. I’ll take it one step farther, though: Back in 2005, those media types considered themselves experts and insiders deemed Crosby a bust and, moreover, made me out to be a clown for having written a book about him.

Here are sample of it that I excerpted from a third edition of my first Crosby book updated in 2008, after Crosby raised the Stanley Cup for the first time.

Before he made it into the league and in his first season, Crosby had critics in the media, led by Don Cherry on Hockey Night in Canada. And some seemed to take special delight when Alexander Ovechkin of the Washington Capitals won the Calder Trophy as the NHL’s top rookie in Crosby’s first season, like Crosby was an over-hyped media creation. The low point that season might have been an appearance I made on Off the Record on TSN back in February of ‘06. I sat across from an “enforcer” from the Hamilton Bulldogs of the American Hockey League who told me that Ovechkin was always going to be the better player than Crosby and that I wasn’t entitled to have an opinion because I wasn’t a player. It seemed lost on him that he was professing to know something that Wayne Gretzky didn’t. I haven’t been able to get in touch with him to see if he would like to re-consider. I didn’t hear back from the East Coast league team he played for last season.

And later this:

In his rise to the top of the game, Sidney Crosby’s initial struggles with the Penguins have been largely forgotten. For instance, who remembers that the Penguins lost their first eight games of the 2005-06 season? And while it’s now the conventional wisdom that he’s the game’s top young player and the best to come along since Mario Lemieux and Wayne Gretzky, reporters and commentators judged him harshly in his rookie season.

There was a faint echo of the media’s hue and cry in Crosby’s last year of junior. Back when he was with Rimouski, leading up to the Memorial Cup Globe and Mail writers Stephen Brunt and David Shoalts opined on sports-talk radio that Crosby was “not another Gretzky” and suggested that any mention in the same breath as No. 99 was either heretical or hysterical. (Thankfully, such opinion are eligible to instant revision. Upon seeing him for the first time at the Memorial Cup, Brunt noted that Crosby had succeeded in “erasing the doubts of the few remaining skeptics.” The first-person plural would have seemed to apply.)

Not all doubts were erased, mind you. Steve Simmons, a columnist with the Toronto Sun, stated categorically on TSN’s The Reporters talk show that Phil Kessel, a fleet winger with the U.S. under-18 development program, was a better pro prospect than Crosby.

Upon his arrival in Pittsburgh for his first professional season, there was a subtle shift in the coverage. Just a glance back at the clippings doesn’t reveal it. It takes a little reading between the lines. There was respect but it was grudging. Any praise came with qualifiers.

The coverage of Crosby’s first game in a Penguins uniform in Canada is instructive. After that pre-season tilt with the Senators in Ottawa, his performance was roundly panned. The Ottawa Sun rated his play as “ordinary” and almost struck a sympathetic chord by noting that “he looked like an 18-year-old still trying to find his way.” The Globe and Mail’s account just as dismissive, stating that he “looked pretty much like any other player on the ice.”

That Crosby couldn’t stop the Penguins’ awful slide at the start of the season was his personal failure. Reporters and commentators, most notably Don Cherry, went off on him for diving, whining to officials, being “yappy,” and backing the firing of coach Ed Olczyk. “He just can’t act the way he acts,” Cherry said. “[Then Flyers coach] Ken Hitchcock said the same thing I did. Buffalo said the same thing I did. [Peter] Forsberg said the same thing I did. That’s pretty good company.”

Okay, sometimes “subtle” did not apply, like in the case of this screed from Erin Hicks, again from the Ottawa Sun: “I don’t like the kid, okay? You might, I don’t. I don’t like his attitude. I don’t like the preferential treatment he receives. I don’t respect an 18-year-old on any team being made an assistant captain.”

There’s more, but the point here is made. Crosby was completely shit-talked by the media and me collaterally. I dug up one heated exchange of emails I had with a media type mentioned here: Steve Simmons of the Toronto Sun.

I didn’t expect a reply—especially after letting him know upfront that I didn’t mind making this exchange public—but Simmons did get back to me, not out of etiquette so much as his irresistible urge to correct me and again prove himself the smartest man in the room.

If you have trouble reading the tiny type I’ll reprint it here:

the absurdity of the book seemed to be the consensus on the panel today - including your former teammate Naylor

for the record, the rather weak lanny mcdonald bio (he cut all the good stuff out before it went to print and I basically walked away disgusted) sold 40,000 in hardcover - and was written at the end of his career, not at beginning

suggested the phil kessel thing in one of those TV moments - a two minute segment on TSN - where one of us has to take a side and I lost the coin toss - (although I do love his speed)

also - we're talking about your book - which is the best publicity I know - the more people follow this guy, the more people will buy the book - better for you, right?

and i look forward to the launch

Okay, I’ll admit: I did find Simmons’s condescension and self-congratulation a bit much to bear. I had to respond. Put it down to genetics and heritage.

The two basketball books I reference here are: 1. Tim O’Connor’s The Jump: Sebastian Telfair and the High-Stakes Business of High School Ball; and 2. Darcy Frey’s The Last Shot: City Streets, Basketball Dreams. (I mention “Telfair’s Cuz”—that was in fact Stephon Marbury, who was a two-time NBA All-Star at about that time.) Frey’s I especially recommend. Searching for Bobby Fischer by Fred Waitzkin is probably the most accessible book about chess for those not immersed in the game—if you only play checkers and Parcheesi you can still get the human story of a father and a son who’s a chess prodigy.

Oh, and that mention of “Strack”—I was referring to Al Strachan, then of the Toronto Sun, a rival and adversary of Simmons.

The note to Simmon continued:

For the record, twenty years after the fact, I’m still not disgusted by my first Crosby book, just a little regretful. I couldn’t find any big-name publisher who was interested in a book about a phenom that they had never heard of, so I wound up with a $3,000 advance, a pittance. I had to use earnings from magazine stories about the future No. 1 draft pick, dig into my Aeroplan and Marriott points and tap my savings to bankroll the project. If I had landed a decent advance my plan was to spend the 2004-05 season in Rimouski, making for a book that would be rich not just in detail about Sid but also evocative of junior hockey in a small town at a time when the NHL was dormant because of the impasse in collective bargaining. Could it have been a better book? Sigh. Yeah, I guess. Still, it has some historical value, I guess, some unique insights. Not that I’m pumping it to get some sales—the book is out of print and the publisher ceases to exist in any meaningful way.

But I digress.

The teachable lesson, one that I’ll pass along to Conor Bedard, entirely gratis: People love to bury the famous names and especially the next-gen stars.

A goon destined for the East Coast Hockey League will bury Crosby at 18 on a sports-talk show—such cluelessness is one of the reasons the guy didn’t make it. I suspect at some level the clown even knew better, but couldn’t get past his envy of Crosby’s talent and money.

Scribes like Steve Simmons will bury Crosby at 18 in print for paycheques and on air for self-promotion and profitable side hustles—to that same envy of talent and money, factor in the envy of the star’s youth. A critical point: Even when they’re egregiously wrong, Simmons and friends are never called on it—they count on a collective amnesia kicking in a day after the column runs or the program airs. When he’s on radio or television, he’s introduced as Steve Simmons of the Toronto Sun, not Steve Simmons, the guy who thought Phil Kessel would be a better player than Sidney Crosby. Funny, that’s how I always refer to him, not that it comes up much.

Thank you for reading and for Toronto fans, savour Steven Simmons’s lofty praise of Phil Kessel, the player he’d later mock for his substance abuse, the substance being hot dogs. Yeah, the story was possibly apocryphal, but as Simmons laid out on a Reddit ask-me-anything session, he stood by it. Ah, the utter dispensability of that two-confirmed-sources thing in hard-hitting journalism. Here’s a throwback for you.