If I had a nickel for every time I heard a hockey fan, usually intoxicated, yell Sidney Crosby is a crybaby, I would be a millionaire.
But is the Pittsburgh Penguins star really a crybaby or are these fans just uttering ignorance? It seems the latter is more accurate than the former.
Yes, Crosby looks to the refs after some plays and embellishes here and there. You, however, have to look at Crosby's situation in its proper context. The Cole Harbour, NS., native is the best player in the National Hockey League. Therefore, every team guns for him - hitting him every chance they get, slashing him during play and after the whistle, and chirping him for 60 minutes straight. Every hockey player on the planet would lose his/her cool and look to land a power play for his/her efforts.
That's not to suggest Crosby is the only player consistently gunned for. There are several other stars including the Toronto Maple Leafs' Phil Kessel, the Washington Capitals' Alexander Ovechkin, the Philadelphia Flyers' Claude Giroux, and the Tampa Bay Lightning's Steven Stamkos. If you aren't an NHL superstar or a star in a different league though, you don't know what's it's like to be constantly agitated and expected to ignore it. Instead of trying to see what it would be like to walk a mile in Crosby's shoes, most hockey fans choose to take an ignorant outlook at his day-to-day life on the ice, judging him unfairly.
Although it is possible his name was on the NHL's proposed diving list, the players' names that were leaked in September didn't include Sid the Kid. Among the players were the Vancouver Canucks' Ryan Kesler, the Chicago Blackhawks' Daniel Carcillo, and the Penguins' Evgeni Malkin. So why isn't there a bunch of banter on how Kesler, Malkin and Carcillo are crybabies. Well, that's because they aren't on top of the hockey world. If one of them were, then he would be constantly slandered. But since Crosby is, our society looks for reasons to knock him off his pedestal.
The Crosby crybaby talk started to take off last week. According to CBS Sports and various Twitter accounts, there was a crying baby on a Pittsburgh-to-Boston flight on Tuesday, June 4 that just happened to include much of the media covering the NHL Eastern Conference final.
Upon hearing the baby, the pilot asked over the loudspeaker: "Is that Sidney Crosby in back of our plane?"
Some reporters gave their take on the pilot's opinion, including Comcast SportsNet's Joe Haggerty.
"Big props to @JetBlue for having proper perspective about Sid Crosby/baby crying moment on plane I tweeted about. Was a truly funny moment," tweeted Haggerty, who tends to look at things through Boston Bruins' glasses.
If you still think Crosby is a crybaby, go look at tapes of Mario Lemieux during his heyday in Pittsburgh; he wasn't exactly a tough-as-nails warrior either. In addition, how would Wayne Gretzky have been perceived if he didn't have Marty Mcsorley and Dave Semenko riding shotgun with him in Edmonton? I'm sure his reputation would have been different if he didn't play in an era where you could have your own bodyguard.
