Will he ever be the same?

By Gare Joyce in Pittsburgh

SPORTSNET MAGAZINE

Like Mario, Crosby could become a 'game-time decision for the rest of his career'.

In a swirl of fast-moving bodies draped and capped in black, a lone white hard plastic shell goes up and down the ice, in play but at the same time slightly outside it. It's the Reebok helmet that contains the league's most valuable body part and its greatest mystery: the brain of Sidney Crosby.

It can be hard to pick out players of interest at a practice, especially when the team opts for a single sweater rather than colour-coding lines. The Penguins are in all blacks on the first day of training camp but it's easy to pick out Crosby, even when he's standing at the other end of the rink. He's the only one wearing a white helmet. It signifies that he is to practise without contact, that he isn't game-ready. Even if Crosby somehow forgets about it, the white helmet looms in the minds of his teammates, management, and fans.

This isn't his choice, or at least, it's not just his choice. This is the recommendation of neurologists overseeing his recovery from a concussion, now in its ninth month and counting.

Everyone in the arena tracks Crosby's every move. There's a sense of hope for a team that, with Crosby, looks loaded on paper. There's also, though many would deny it, a sense of dread that something might befall 'the Franchise.' Not a blow to the head, not a stiff check. It could be incidental contact. It could be something as innocuous as a bit of dizziness, nausea, a headache. And if that were to come to pass, he'd be on the sidelines again and there'd be speculation anew. That he wouldn't be able to wear the black helmet anytime soon, if ever. That, even if he were to make it back to the lineup eventually, he would come out of his medical hiatus as a lesser player. That he would become, as Hall of Famer Larry Murphy describes Mario Lemieux after his back surgeries and bout with lymphoma, "a game-time decision the rest of his career."

Lemieux, the Pens owner and Crosby's mentor, isn't the NHL's only hard-luck story. Bobby Orr didn't even make it to 30 before he was hobbled by knee injuries. Lemieux's and Orr's travails, however, played out across seasons, while Crosby's spanned but two games.

Most hockey fans have seen video of the two plays that grounded Crosby. Many saw the first in real time: the Winter Classic on New Year's Day, the Penguins hosting Washington outdoors at Heinz Field. More than 68,000 watched it in the ballpark, 6.6 million more from home. The names atop of the marquee were Crosby and his nemesis Alexander Ovechkin. It was a Classic in name only: a forgettable 3–1 victory for the Capitals.

It did, however, include what might turn out to be a play that defines the era. That it would feature Crosby should not have been surprising. That David Steckel, an ungainly checking-line center, would skate through the frame was unlikely.

---

Special magazine trial offer: Sign up for four FREE issues of Sportsnet magazine and get a discounted price on a subscription. Satisfaction guaranteed. Order now!

---

On the last shift of the second period, Crosby was skating in the Washington zone, circling on the right wing, trying to find the puck along the boards. Steckel was between Crosby and the Washington net. He spotted the puck clearing the zone before Crosby did. Steckel started toward the puck in a straight line, intersecting with Crosby. The six-foot-five Steckel didn't drop his shoulder as he might have if he intended to drive Crosby backwards. But he didn't skate around him either.

Steckel caught Crosby high. No penalty was called even though the puck was 100 feet away. "The shoulder hit did not look premeditated," said the Associated Press. Later, when the implications of the hit became clearer, an honest debate would ensue, with many inside the game claiming that Steckel knew what he was doing.

It doesn't look like a devastating head shot, but rather a glancing blow. Crosby's head turned sharply rather than snapping back. Some might have thought he gave it a theatrical flourish to draw a penalty. He landed on his left side, rolled onto his back, then onto his right shoulder, and finally came to rest face down on the ice, arms crossing his chest under him.

The Steckel hit didn't alarm the Penguins. They just thought it should have been a penalty­­. Dr. Charles Tator had a different reaction when he viewed it. "On the replay it was clear to me that he was concussed," says Tator, a neurosurgeon at Toronto Western Hospital. "The blow had a rotational rather than a translational element. That's the type of hit that is more conducive to a concussion, a more severe concussion."

Dr. J. Scott Delaney concurs. "Given that it was a blind-side hit, something like a sucker shot, [Crosby] didn't have a chance to contract his neck muscles and absorb the shock of the blow, [which would] lessen the likelihood or the severity of a concussion," says Delaney, team physician for the Montreal Alouettes and an emergency and sports physician at McGill University.

In the nine months since the Steckel hit, many have wondered why Pittsburgh didn't bring Crosby in for baseline testing immediately. The Penguins haven't publicly second-guessed themselves. "If Sid had felt something out of the ordinary, he would have said something to our training staff," says Penguins GM Ray Shero. "Our trainer spoke to him and didn't notice anything wrong. And if Sid's teammates noticed anything wrong with him, they're supposed to go right to the trainer."

Crosby took the opening faceoff of the third period. In fact, he would be out on the ice for more than eight minutes after the Steckel hit. Yet, to the eye of those who specialize in hockey rather than neurology, Crosby was symptomatic that night. "I said to my wife right away on the play, 'He's concussed,' " says Pat LaFontaine, a Hall of Famer whose career was ended by a series of concussions. "I couldn't believe they left him in the game."

On the Hockey Night In Canada broadcast, commentator Craig Simpson pointed out that Crosby seemed not to notice goaltender Marc-Andre Fleury coming over to the bench in favour of a sixth attacker with about a minute left in regulation. That sluggishness was again, Tator says, reason enough for a baseline test. "It isn't clear why they managed the situation the way that they did," says Tator. "It's not simply the risk that the player and the team are taking if he had been hit. Simple exertion could exacerbate [the concussion]. So could a whiplash effect without any contact to the head."

Crosby complained of a sore neck in the days following, but he continued to practise. Four days later, just before the Tampa Bay game, he thought he was coming down with the flu. Again, in light of the Steckel hit, these could have been construed as signs that testing was needed. "Along with headaches, sore necks are a very common physical complaint for an athlete who has suffered a concussion," Delaney says. "It's reason for follow-up and baseline testing."

The other sequence that has been replayed hundreds of times occurred Jan. 5, at the end of the second period against the Lightning. Victor Hedman, a large but hardly physical defenceman, took Crosby into the boards and was whistled for boarding. Crosby didn't fall to the ice like he had four days earlier during the outdoor game, but his anguish was even more clear when he skated away. Again, the doctors didn't put him through baseline testing at the end of the period. Again, he played a regular shift in the third, even though the Penguins routed Tampa Bay 8–1. And again, he wasn't tested following the game. The Penguins say they had no cause. "He actually had a really good game that night," Shero says.

"I was watching that game with a friend," LaFontaine says. "[On the Hedman hit] I told him, 'He's going to be out three months, no question.' And it wasn't a big hit at all."

Two days after the Tampa Bay game, the Penguins announced that Crosby had suffered a mild concussion and was expected to miss a week. "The [announcement of a] week was just the league protocol," Shero says. "You're supposed to wait a week to assess the symptoms."

Turned out to be a long week. Crosby and the Penguins held out hope that he'd be back for the playoffs, but in the early spring he was shut down. And even in late summer, when he was working out in Halifax, symptoms recurred when he pushed himself to 90 percent.

The specialists overseeing Crosby's treatment did not respond to interview requests from Sportsnet magazine. The Penguins staged a press conference in early September with Crosby and the physicians, and all that came out of it were banalities. When asked when Crosby might return, Dr. Michael Collins, the director of the University of Pittsburgh's sports medicine concussion program, didn't take the bait. "I have no earthly idea," he said. "The first time I saw Sidney [the day after the Tampa Bay game], I knew we were in for the long run."

If it seems like the worst-case scenario is playing out, that's hardly the case. It's not clear whether Crosby suffered one concussion or two in succession. Even if it was just one, he would have been at mortal risk if he tried to tough it out. "Second impact syndrome: If you suffer a second concussion before you've recovered fully from a first concussion you can die; it's just that simple," says Tator. "Some who've survived are wrecked neurologically. It goes beyond persistent post-concussion syndrome as we know it."

Crosby's teammate Matt Cooke says that players have played with concussions before and will likely do it again. Cooke was suspended for 10 regular-season games and the first round of the playoffs last season for a head shot on the Rangers' Ryan McDonagh and another the previous season may have ended the career of Boston's Marc Savard. He's also been on the wrong side of big hits, sitting out games four times with concussions and playing with them on a few occasions. "I wouldn't do that now but I did before and a lot of guys have," he says. "[Third- and fourth-line] guys feel they're risking their jobs if they don't get back in there."

Not that Crosby was having to get in the lineup to keep his job. That's just always been his approach to the game. Back in August 2003, a week after his 16th birthday, Crosby made his debut appearance for Canada in international play at the summer under-18 tournament in Breclav, Czech Republic. In the second period of his second game there, a Swiss defenceman knocked Crosby woozy with a cross-check to Crosby's helmeted right temple. Crosby went down for an eight count, staggered to the bench and took a seat. A minute later, he was back on the ice and carved the first Swiss player who came within a stick's length of him. Tim Burke, a scout with the San Jose Sharks, watched the sequence unfold. "He won't need anyone else out there to fight his battles," Burke said. "He can take it and give it back."

It was even more true when Crosby played major junior in Rimouski. He skated into areas where most stars fear to tread, paid the price, and later looked for payback. "He was just so strong and so driven, you'd be putting yourself at risk if you got between him and the goal," says Mark Kelley, who scouted Crosby for Pittsburgh leading up to the 2005 draft. "He had no fear. He had about 80 penalty minutes in his last year of junior, 110 his first year in Pittsburgh. He never avoided contact. It was just his game."

Shero says that it wasn't Crosby's game or determination to play through injury that sidelined him last season. It was, Shero says, just an unfortunate and unforeseeable set of circumstances. "Sidney is a tough player but I don't think this was a case of Sid being too tough for his own good," he says. "It's simply a matter of slow-developing symptoms and maybe some that could have been mistaken for something else. I'm sure that Sidney's played at 80 percent before."

The hardest I've gone since January," says Crosby, after his first day of training camp. "Harder than the practices at the end of last season. Pretty happy with the way things have gone the last week or so. Feel and timing are going to come." He won't say when he hoped to hang up the white helmet. "Some things there aren't answers for," he says.

Crosby made it through the hour-long session. No dizziness. No headaches. No nausea. He went through drills looking not quite razor sharp, but as sharp as anyone else at the end of the summer. What matters most isn't his first practice or his first week. The symptoms could return at any time. Perhaps, when he wears the black helmet the first time and takes a clean check delivered with kid gloves by a teammate who'll understand his role in the test run. "Coming back from a concussion is a test of confidence," says LaFontaine. "Your hand-eye coordination, your skills, your strength, you can get all of that back. But you don't know what it's going to be like to get hit. You can simulate it in practice, but it isn't until you get in a game that you really know."

During his hiatus, Crosby listened to diagnosis and prognosis and became versed in daunting and tragic statistics. "Athletes who've suffered a concussion are four to six times more likely to suffer another concussion than an athlete who hasn't had one," says Delaney. "After three concussions, we start to see symptoms of cognitive impairment, often and most dramatically with balance."

Crosby had to have been concerned about the concussion that his little sister Taylor suffered playing goal in the Shattuck-St. Mary's hockey program in Minnesota last winter. Concerned for Taylor, of course, but also about the implications for his career. Tator and Delaney and other neurologists are investigating familial predispositions to concussion. For some families like the Lindroses, concussions are a shared curse.

When Sidney Crosby plays his next NHL game, the Penguins will be complete, but there's no knowing if he'll ever be whole, if he'll ever be all the way back, if something has been irretrievably lost. Based on training camp, a full comeback looks possible, but if a "mild" concussion sidelined him for more than nine months, another one is an awful prospect for the player, the team and the league.