How does Sidney do it? The making of a hockey superstar, in this
week's Maclean's

Sidney Crosby is the first hockey superstar built from the skates
up, and
Maclean's tells readers how.

TORONTO, April 13 /CNW/ - The pride of Cole Harbour, N.S.,
finished his
second season with a league-leading 120 points, a pace comparable to early
vintage Gretzky but in a league that - for all its crowing about a
crackdown
on obstruction - remains much more defensively oriented than it was in the
mid-1980s. On March 2, he became the youngest player in history to
reach 200
career points (19 years and 207 days - 147 fewer days than Gretzky),
playing a
game so precise and disciplined that you can hardly tell it's
revolutionary.
For Crosby, hockey is less about controlling the ice surface than
controlling
the nine square feet around his skates.
"Crosby had to forego the very kind of romanticism that tends to
infuse
ideas of how a star is made," writes Maclean's national correspondent
Charlie
Gillis. While the Howes and Orrs who came before him plotted a course
across
frozen ponds and backyard rinks, Crosby is a hothouse specimen, a
player built
from the skates up to conquer a highly systematized game. Yes, nature
supplied
the raw materials of strength, character, vision and unheard of motor
skills.
But the assembly was performed by others - a hockey-playing father;
instructors at high performance hockey camps; coaches at the Minnesota
prep
school he attended for a year.
But the grand experiment that began with a lumbering 13-year-old at a
P.E.I. hockey camp will ultimately be evaluated in sips of champagne
from Lord
Stanley's mug. "And to get to that point," writes Gillis, "it's not just
wanting the puck that counts. It's what you do when you get it."
Read the full breakdown of the anatomy of a hockey wunderkind in this
week's Maclean's.