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The case could be made that he was the first truly modern hockey star, or at least the first hockey star to inspire the queasy feeling that so often plagues the modern sports fan: ambivalence.
Eric Lindros is expected to retire from the game today, having finally come to the conclusion that there is no one in need of his services. He appears destined to move on to work with the National Hockey League Players' Association, certainly not the postplaying career many would have envisioned for him only a few years ago.
Those who came before Lindros and were for at least a brief time anointed as the best player in the game really stirred precious little debate.
They were admired for their prodigious talents. They were assumed by true believers to possess the noble qualities that were invested in athletes. Their love of hockey and team and teammates and country above all else was unquestioned.
Even Mario Lemieux, who was less willing to play the aw-shucks hero than his predecessors, who was obviously uncomfortable in the off-ice spotlight, eventually did enough — by winning Stanley Cup titles, by winning for Canada internationally and by battling back from cancer and injury — to erase any doubts about his place in the pantheon.
But Lindros, almost from Day 1, was different.
He was the opposite of the always beloved, plucky strivers, or a physically ordinary superstar such as Wayne Gretzky. He was big and handsome, and even as a kid, he seemed to be a man playing among boys. Looking at him with his size, his strength, his mean streak and his fine hockey skills, it was as though shinny evolution had skipped a couple of links.
Nobody loves the overdog.
Then he, abetted by his parents, bucked the system, which in a sport whose history featured no real Curt Floods (Ted Lindsay aside), but did feature superstars who accepted hockey jackets in lieu of a raise, certainly went against the grain. What Lindros fought for — the chance to play junior hockey close to home rather than having to move hundreds of kilometres away, the chance to begin his professional career somewhere other than Quebec City — might have been seen in other circumstances as a move toward larger emancipation.
But the fans read it, perhaps correctly, as being all about him, all about what he wanted. Lindros seemed to them like the spoiled progeny of stage parents, who would hold his breath until he got his way. (Though by bucking the system, and then by signing a huge deal with the Philadelphia Flyers, he certainly helped other players, including Gretzky, to understand their true leverage and that there was a lot more money in the system to be tapped.) After that, just how good was he? It's hard to come up with another player of Lindros's calibre who can inspire such a vigorous debate.
You can make a statistical argument that in the games played before the Scott Stevens hit, his scoring pace stacked up admirably against the very best to have played the game. Combine that with his ability to physically dominate, and surely he was the top player in hockey for at least three or four seasons.
But a nearly equal case can be made that there was always someone better, that his lone Hart Memorial Trophy award came at the end of a lockout-shortened year, that Lindros was less than the sum of his parts. There are plenty who today are dismissing his credentials for entry into the most inclusive Hall of Fame in professional sports — in other words, suggesting that Eric Lindros isn't even the equivalent of Cam Neely and Bernie Federko. (It has also been suggested by colleague Tim Wharnsby that Lindros's association with the players union might hurt his Hall of Fame candidacy, as it appears to have for Steve Larmer. If that's true, it's appalling.)
He never won the Stanley Cup, though that certainly wasn't all his fault, and he was demonized on the way out the door in Philadelphia by Bob Clarke, though in most eyes that made him a more sympathetic figure.
During his final seasons, there were times when Lindros was a very good player, though it was nearly impossible to see him for what he was, rather than as a shadow of what he used to be.
So paint him in the contemporary colours of the "hero" athlete: shades of grey.
He's gone now, after 13 years, and we still don't know quite what to make of him.
