Written by Katie Baker at The Ringer.com
When the city of Philadelphia hosted the NHL Winter Classic in early 2012, the most memorable event of the weekend wasn’t the Rangers-Flyers game. Somehow, in a city that oozes delicious controversy like Cheese Whiz, it wasn’t even Ilya Bryzgalov’s bizarre benching. It was an alumni game that took place two days prior, in front of more than 45,000 highly emotional fans.
Eric Lindros wasn’t exactly sure how he would be received. His final years in Philadelphia were acrimonious in an almost unbelievably public way, and he’d been mostly estranged from the organization ever since. (Let’s pause for a moment to reflect upon one particular spat that involved a collapsed lung, a bathtub, and GM Bob Clarke saying, “All the controversies, Eric brings them on himself.”) But the no. 88 jerseys in the crowds largely outnumbered any grudges. Even fans who had soured on Lindros by the time he left Philly seemed more wistful than hateful. When his name was announced at the start of the alumni game and the big guy raised his stick, he was greeted with a standing ovation that could make your hair stand on end.
On Monday, he was once again finally given his due. Lindros was named to the Hockey Hall of Fame, after six years of mostly silly rejection, and it’s about damn time. Ever since he was a teenager, the center was an unceasing, and worthy, obsession of the hockey world. He was huge (6-foot-4, 240) and hugely skilled, capable of playing a style of hockey that seemed more of an abstract ideal than an actual bodily possibility. (Instead of usingthe 20/80 scale to evaluate prospects, hockey scouts ought to just rate them from 1 to Eric Lindros.) He was, for a time, hockey’s avatar. In the biopiche’d be played by Channing Tatum, and you’d spoil the viewing experience for your kids because you’d keep pestering them: No, you don’t understand, there was no one like him in his prime.
The problem, in the eyes of the dudes who gatekeep the Hall of Fame (Clarke being one of them), usually had to do with the span of that prime. Lindros played 13 seasons in the NHL, but is remembered mostly for an outlandishly dominant mid-to-late-’90s. He reached the Cup final once and was swept. If Lindros epitomized everything hockey could be, he also was a model victim for all the ways the game could do you wrong, from the self-defeating suffocation of hype to the short- and long-term distress of head injuries.
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