Crosby handles post-game scrum in Penguin's dressing-room

In the summer of 2005, Sidney Crosby took the hockey world by storm - and the sports media immediately took notice of the charming and talented Canadian teen and jumped on the bandwagon. TV appearances, including The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, and countless print and broadcast interviews followed quickly over the course of his rookie season.

In addition to being featured in sports publications, like Sports Illustrated, The Hockey News, and ESPN Magazine, Crosby has also graced the pages of American magazines GQ and Vanity Fair. In those instances, however, Crosby was featured without his trademark No. 87 Penguins jersey -- or any shirt for that matter. With photo spreads like that, it's clear that Crosby has become a star for more than just his skating ability. "I mean, you're in Vanity Fair, shirtless," says Shawna Richer, who followed Crosby's season for The Globe and Mail. "That's a magazine that's pretty far from people who have an interest in sports."

The media's love affair with the 19-year-old native of Cole Harbour, Nova Scotia is easy to explain. The young man is well-spoken, a fan favourite, good looking and, of course, amazingly talented for someone his age. "He's kind of the whole package," Richer says.

Crosby's name has appeared in the local Halifax papers, like the Chronicle Herald and The Daily News since he was a young teenager. Nationally, he started to gain attention when he began starring in the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League, when he was just 16, and as a member of Canada's national junior team in 2004 and 2005.

Now that he is playing on the hockey world's biggest stage in the NHL, the media attention is huge.

"Almost everywhere you went he was sought out and sought after for any insights," says Bob Dvorchak of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, who followed Crosby on a regular basis during his rookie season as a member of the NHL's Pittsburgh Penguins. "It was relentless, it never stopped. There might have been two whole days in the year when he wasn't interviewed by somebody.

"He was probably the most scrutinized hockey player, or professional athlete, that I've ever been around."

As the Director of Media Relations for the Penguins, Keith Wehner fields an overwhelming amount of requests for Crosby's time and attention. He says that after a home game Crosby will leave the ice to find that his stall is filled with 10 to 20 reporters and cameras waiting for him. The attention can be even crazier when the team is out of town. "On the road the scrums are usually much larger. Media in other cities don't have the same access to him as the home reporters do, so there is much larger group waiting for him."

Wehner also says that due to his popularity Crosby gets more non-sports related requests than most. Richer agrees, saying that last season the media interest came from many different angles, including the city magazine in Pittsburgh. The amount of attention from outside the sports world still surprised Richer. She says that the coverage during his rookie season was more than she had ever seen for "a first year player; it was quite extraordinary, actually."

After virtually every game last season, sports news programs like TSN's SportsCentre or Rogers Sportsnet's Sportsnetnews would highlight Crosby and fellow star rookie Alexander Ovechkin's performances in a daily tracker. TSN's website devoted an entire page, titled 'The Crosby Show,' to his stats, and the Post-Gazette's website has a similar 'CrosbyWatch' section in their sports coverage. Not to mention on top of that the many blogs, fansites, even a Yahoo! Group, dedicated to the young superstar. Crosby's name was also a hot topic amongst sports talk shows and many sports radio hosts during the course of the hockey season. "Sidney grew up in the media age," says Dvorchak. "He understood at a very early age that he was going to get a lot of media attention. When you give your first newspaper interview at the age of seven, I guess you sort of adjust to that."

Crosby faces-off against former rookie star, Jason Spezza

Second in points, first in the media's heart

By now, everyone knows the facts -- Crosby, just over a week shy of his 18th birthday, was taken first overall in the 2005 NHL entry draft by the Pittsburgh Penguins. He went on to play in all but one of the Penguins regular season games in the 2005-2006 season, and he scored a whopping 102 points (39 goals and 63 assists) on a team perennially stuck in the NHL's basement. He ended the year without a trip to the playoffs and finished second in voting for the Calder trophy, handed out to the league's most outstanding rookie, behind the Washington Capitals' own sensational freshman, 21-year-old Ovechkin.

In addition to being almost two years older than Crosby, Ovechkin wasn't saddled with the task of being the face of the entire league. Coming off the lockout year the NHL was counting on the massive talents of a double class of rookies to lure fans back, but none faced the media attention of the young Crosby. While Ovechkin played on a Washington team that had virtually no other big-name stars and no real expectations, Crosby was faced with the task of being the saviour of the Pittsburgh franchise. After drafting Crosby and bringing in several high-priced veterans the Penguins were expected to make a playoff run, some even projecting them to contend for the Stanley Cup.

When the team struggled, the sports media usually looked to Crosby for answers. "I'm sure it's probably difficult, day in and day out, for a rookie player to be asked what's wrong with this team, why isn't this team winning, what do you have to do to get better, how do you deal with this," says Pittsburgh Post-Gazette sports writer Shelly Anderson. "In that sense, the media was tough on him."

On paper, the battle was close -- Ovechkin edged Crosby in points (106 to 102) and goals (52 to 39) last season - but off the ice and under the intense glare of the media spotlight, Crosby was miles ahead. Ovechkin never looks quite comfortable with the press because, as he admitted in September on TSN's Off The Record, "my English no good." Crosby, on the other hand, has become quite media savvy during his young career. Richer says that Crosby has had media training that "probably made him a lot more comfortable" when surrounded by the press.

He is eloquent when giving post-game interviews, and because of that he has become the team's go-to guy, according to Anderson. "I think it's pretty obvious that he is someone who can be a leader or a spokesperson-type leader for the team," Anderson says. "All teams seem to have a go-to guy off the ice for the media, where it's someone you can go to and just get an honest answer about things, someone who's not going to blow you off because they're tired or had a bad game. You know you can count on him, and because he's their best player that obviously makes him someone whose thoughts are worthy of putting in the paper."

There's no doubt that Crosby is worthy of the attention and accolades that were heaped upon him this past season, but Dvorchak wonders if the hype around the rookie didn't sometimes become excessive. "Some of it's over the top," he admits. "I think because there is so much more in the way of media outlets, you know 24 hr news cables, blogs, internet sites, and newspaper and traditional media, the demand is growing and the supply is staying relatively constant." He concedes that somebody like Crosby "comes along once a generation," and that his talent makes him worth following. However, Dvorchak says that "if an 18-year-old kid wearing his sweaty underwear gets more attention than the President of the United States or Prime Minister of Canada, then that's over the top."

Anderson believes that much of Crosby's popularity with the media comes from the fact that he's so composed for his age. "He's very thoughtful. He answers questions directly and succinctly and he speaks well," Anderson says. "When you're standing there talking to him your idea is, 'My gosh, this guy is a teenager and look at how well spoken he is and how thoughtful he is, and if all athletes couldn't be like this'."

While he answers the questions well, Anderson says that there's often not a lot of substance to what he's saying. She notes that while you won't usually get a humorous or inflammatory quote from Crosby, "you couldn't ask for anything better in terms of cooperation."

Fans at Halifax Metro Centre cheer Crosby on in preseason game

Crosby-mania

Crosby will even take questions from the press in French, and his proficiency with Canada's other official language has made him even more of a favourite with French-speaking fans, and media outlets, in Quebec. "Because he played in Rimouski and because he's made a really conscious effort to speak French, he is really adored in Montreal and the reaction from there was quite amazing," according to Richer. Trying to get to the airport after playing against the Canadiens, Richer says that the team "had to sneak him out of the arena around the side so no one could see him, because there were several hundred fans, a lot of them young girls, at the Penguins bus where it was parked." This incident, according to Bob Dvorchak, led to Penguin's PR man Tom McMillan practically being crushed up against the side of the bus by the swell of admirers.

In Toronto, seen by many as the centre of the professional hockey world, the attention was even more frenzied. Richer says that she has never seen anything like it surrounding an athlete as young as Crosby. "I remember one day on the first trip to Toronto, he was leaving the hotel to go to practice and a bunch of autograph seekers in cabs followed the car that he was in to the arena. They were basically chasing him... it was like a scene out of [The Beatles movie] A Hard Day's Night or something!"

It seems to be the teen idol factor, something which few other hockey players are able to achieve. It is expected that a young hockey phenom would be looked up to by aspiring players, gushed about by their parents, and hounded by the media, but the number of smitten young women surprised some people. "I always liked the banners that people had up during games," says Dvorchak, "ones like 'Marry Me' or 'Gimme a goal and I'll give you a kiss'," from Crosby's many young and single female admirers in the crowd. Keith Wehner says that this sort of attention should be expected, given the fact that "Sidney is the face of the team."

While this much widespread media attention for someone not even out of their teens may seem like overkill to people outside the hockey world, Shelly Anderson says that for Crosby, it's deserved. "I don't think the media built him up any more than what he is. I don't think that they made him out to be anything he isn't," she says. "I think the fact that what he did on the ice pretty much speaks for itself."

Bob Dvorchak believes that while the media attention may be helping Crosby out, his star status has been determined long ago by his talent. "I'm a firm believer that media doesn't really set trends, it just documents trends," he says.

"He's always going to be somebody special, but the media doesn't really make stars. If the media makes stars, they don't stay stars for long because you have to earn that on the ice."