Sidney Crosby: Internet Star or Cyber Punk?

Canadian Press writer Dean Bennett makes the case for Sidney Crosby as "hockey's first superstar of the cyber age":

He's the subject of hundreds of Internet discussion groups that compare him to Jesus Christ, ask for his hand in marriage or seek to know him better in language as subtle as spiked heels and a leather bustier.

There are more than 1,700 memorabilia items - pictures, pucks, posters - bearing his image on EBay alone. Books, blogspots and websites dissect the numerological implications of his fascination with No. 87. You can click to find photos of him as a toddler, or see art of the family dryer he dented with the shots of a thousand pucks.

OK, so referring to sites like this one as a "blogspot" is as clunky as Bush decrying rumors on the Internets; but we all know the MSM is just starting to finally cozy up to the alt hockey media. More important than Web 2.0 savvy is historical accuracy: Is Sidney Crosby truly the first superstar of the "cyber age?"

Perhaps the first issue is when this "cyber age" actually began; it may have been as early as 1984, after the publication of "Neuromancer," the cyberpunk novel by author William Gibson (a Canadian, no less). But I would peg the beginning of the "cyber age" around the time when large portions of the populace took ownership of their respective corners of the Web in the mid-1990s: Through interaction on newsgroups and message boards, and through the creation of their own now-prehistoric Web pages.

Mario Lemieux had his last two massive offensive seasons from 1995-97, during an undeniable boom in access to the Internet from a variety of service providers like AOL (ah, dial-up). When he returned to the NHL in 2000-01, hockey fans had become Web savvy and had started laying the fan-page groundwork for what would eventually explode into the hockey blogosphere.

With that brief history in mind, I think it can be argued that Mario was actually the first hockey superstar of the "cyber age." Take a look at this directory of fan pages from Google. Angelfire, Geocities, Tripod pages ... fans were using whatever tools were available to them to create an idol-worshiping network of fan pages that completely eclipsed the numbers of any other hockey player of the same era. (On a related note: This page has convinced me that spinning letters in headlines may rank up there with .midi files and the movie "Hackers" as the most utterly cheese-tastic innovations of the Internet's late-1990s evolution.)

But if Sidney isn't the first, he's certainly the biggest superstar of "the cyber age," because he understands its impact and how to manage his celebrity in relation to it. As Bennett writes in the CP:

"He's different than some of the players that they (the NHL) have had in the past in that he's grown up in the cyber age, so he's much more savvy in terms of understanding the value of it and marketing himself and the league," said Dan Mason, a sports business professor at the University of Alberta. "He seems to be the complete package from the get-go."

An absolutely critical omission in Bennett's piece: No mention of YouTube, which has amplified Crosby's celebrity by preposterous proportions. I don't know about you, but the first time I realized this kid was going to rewrite the record book was when I first saw him do this: