Lindros is a handsome, 6-foot-5, 235-pound center who has been touted since he was 15 as the player destined to join Lemieux and Wayne Gretzky in hockey’s modern holy trinity. Before playing a single NHL game, he became the highest-paid player in league history-$22 million over six years. To earn the chance to pay his salary, the Flyers gave the Quebec Nordiques, which owned his rights, $15 million, five players, a top draft choice-and future considerations, which, given the going rate, may mean moving the Liberty Bell to Quebec City. “I’ve never seen a man with all the skills and skating ability who was that big and strong,” says Flyers coach Bill Dineen, who played with the legendary Gordie Howe. “There’s never been a player so outstanding in every area.”
The Flyers, a team that has missed the playoffs (and in the NHL, nearly everybody makes the playoffs) for three straight years, have bet their future on Lindros. So, in a way, has the entire league, an enterprise whose management has long been the laughingstock of professional sports. Lindross arrival coincides with the NHL’s first true national TV contract since 1988, a five-year deal with cable network ESPN. So it’s little surprise that ESPN begins its NHL season with Lindros’s first two games. “With the possible exception of Joe Namath, I don’t think there’s been a more ballyhooed rookie in the history of professional sports,” says John Walsh, ESPN’s executive editor. “All he’s expected to be is the savior of professional hockey.”
At the very least, we know Lindros can walk on frozen water. Hockey is trying to emulate pro basketball, which became a national, then global, craze by selling the personalities of Magic, Michael and Larry. Lindros has his own crossover potential: for instance, outside the Flyers’ dressing room crowds of young women sigh when this Luke Perry with muscles emerges. More prosaically, the NHL is contemplating its own “Dream Team” for the ‘94 Winter Olympics in Norway. The package would neatly tuck No. 88 Lindros between Lemieux (66) and Gretzky (99), assuming the Great One’s chronically injured back heals.
Lindros, who has already published an autobiography and played for the silver-medal-winning Canadian team at the ‘92 Olympics, is not entirely comfortable with celebrity. He is patient and polite, but he dismisses virtually all personal questions as “my business” and wonders why anyone would possibly care what foods or movies he likes. “I’m not Siskel or Ebert,” he says. “People will know my personality by the way I play on the ice.”
On the ice, Lindros plays the game with what the hockey world calls “a little bit of mean.” During his last full juniors season, when he scored an astounding 149 points in just 57 games, Lindros also totaled 189 penalty minutes. That should endear him to Philly fans, whose last great team, in the mid-’70s, was known as the “Broad Street Bullies.” But it could also make him, unlike hockey ambassador Gretzky, a prime villain in other NHL rinks, as well as a target for the league’s designated goons and cheap-shot artists. “Some players are going to try him, but I don’t think it will be too many or too often,” says former Flyer star Bobby Clarke, now the team’s senior vice president. “With his size, meanness and aggressiveness, who the hell is going to challenge him?”
But Lindros can also skate with some delicacy, as he has certainly done around his teammates’ feelings. He portrays himself as just another nervous rookie (“I’ll probably be puking on the way to the rink that first night”) and won’t discuss any individual goals. “Everybody here will be a lot happier if I score 80 points and we make the playoffs,” he says, “than if I score 100 and we miss out.” (Eighty points would be three more than anyone scored for the Flyers’ last season.)
Regardless of how much Lindros scores, Philadelphia’s zealots, never noted for their patience, will require some. Though Gretzky scored 137 points his first NHL season, it was five years before he led Edmonton to a championship. Lemieux, too, reached the 100-point mark as a rookie; but Pittsburgh didn’t even make the playoffs until his fifth season, and it was two more before they won a championship. “The whole world’s expecting Eric to dominate from the moment they drop the first puck,” says Clarke. “I hope we can let the kid grow into this just a little.” Say by 1994. That’s when the Flyers expect to move into a brand-new arena–Spectrum II-with its 3,000 additional seats in luxury suites and superboxes priced just right for the Lindros Era.
