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Friday, July 14
The Big Hurt

By Tom Friend
ESPN The Magazine

Sorry that he drinks herbal tea. Sorry that the best hockey player in Philadelphia has all his teeth and takes pre-game baths and charters a jet home every Christmas. Sorry that he "lost it" when his coach said, "By the way, I have cancer." Sorry that his dad is his agent.

Sorry that he's always injured, and that he could've died in Nashville, and that his general manager thinks he's a "baby," and that he's never hoisted the Stanley Cup. It's been seven years since six of them were traded for one of him, and sorry that the Philadelphia Flyers seem to be regretting it. He got them a new building and a new owner, and he got them a scapegoat, too -- him. He is a 6-foot-4, 240-pound center who can penalty-kill and score and pass and fight and take every important face-off. Yet they considered trading him this year, considered trading the best hockey player in Philadelphia, and sorry that it's depressed him.

He won't want a trade, won't want to leave home. Never has. Home is what he's all about. Home is the backyard rink in Toronto. Home is the Messier poster still hanging over his boyhood bed. Home is his father's red turtleneck. Home is his mother putting the pedal to the metal. Home is his current place in South Jersey, with its welcome mat that says, "Reindeer Greetings." He won't want to go, because he cannot deal with change. Never has. When he had to go play for a junior team in Detroit, he kept a knife under his pillow.

He forced trades as a junior and pro, to be closer to Toronto, but now Philadelphia is home, and he wants a truce with Flyers management. He lives a 9-iron away from LeClair and, from his front yard, can put an 8-iron through Jonesy's bedroom window; he loves the fellas. He just wishes management would accept him for who he is. This is not some old-time hockey player who wants a concussion for Christmas. His own brother is out of the NHL due to head injuries, and when he had one of his own, he didn't rush back. But management stewed over it; they stew every time he misses a start. Don't they get it? He is not the reincarnate of Bobby Clarke. Repeat: he is not Bobby Clarke. And the first person that needs to realize this is Bobby Clarke, Bobby Clarke his own self.

	“	Can't this story wait until after the trade deadline? ”
		— the best hockey player in Philadelphia, Eric Lindros

Bobby Clarke had bad breath when he played. He was a pitbull on the ice, and he'd soak his aching body in a painkilling balm that gave him halitosis. And who knew where his front teeth were; because they weren't in his mouth. But he became a Hall of Famer, and later Flyers General Manager, and now he's the one in the middle of this, now he's the one shopping Eric Lindros.

He won't admit it publicly, but he's shopped Lindros because Lindros isn't him. Because Lindros can't stay on the ice. Because Lindros is oversensitive, melodramatic. But the main reason he's shopped Lindros is Lindros's family, a family that Flyer executives cannot cope with. A family that, in the Flyer board rooms, is referred to simply as "Toronto."

Clarke denies it publicly, but management's perception is that Carl and Bonnie Lindros of Toronto, are a nuisance. That Carl and Bonnie do not trust a soul and have raised an unhappy son. The Flyers privately wish Carl would resign as Lindros's agent, while the Lindros's privately wish they could bypass Clarke and negotiate with Flyer minority owner Pat Croce (the 76er majority owner). But no one's stepping down, and it should come to a head this summer, when Lindros becomes a restricted free agent. The Flyers will likely offer a long-term deal, and Lindros will balk. And he will balk for one reason: He wants to stay put. He figures if he signs for five years, it'll be easier for the Flyers to trade him, and that would rock his world.

Yet, the question is whether Carl and Bonnie Lindros have, by now, made it too difficult for their son to stay a Flyer. "I don't know," says the Flyers' founder and chairman, Ed Snider. "They make it difficult for their son to play anywhere. I don't really know who can satisfy them."

Snider later tried to rescind that comment, but what is said is said. And it is a peculiar rift, because the people who know Carl and Bonnie, the people who have been to their cottage and have been licked on the face by their dogs, say they are wonderful parents. They talk about the Lindros Christmas's, and the Lindros sing-a-longs, and the children the Lindros's raised, and they don't see how there could be trouble.

This is a couple that met in the 10th grade. Carl would ride his bicycle to see Bonnie, guitar over his shoulder, and he would serenade her until she climbed aboard. He serenaded her all through college, until someone hopped on his bed and inadvertently crushed the guitar underneath.

He became an accountant, and she a nurse, but they were 6-foot-5 and 5-11 respectively, and loved their sports. He had played hockey and football, and she had done track and field ("I was a great standing broad," she has said, winking), and when they had their first son, Eric, they bought him his first pair of skates for $2.

A second son, Brett, was 3 years younger, and Carl built them a backyard rink, the size of a blue-line in. "It was better than NHL ice," Brett says. Carl's trick was to steal Zamboni snow at the local arena. He'd load the snow in his trunk, and use it as the boards of his homemade rink. He'd flood his lawn at night, and again the following morning while he drank his coffee, and this created two layers of smooth ice. By the time Eric was home from school, it was practically the Montreal Forum.

Eric would recruit goalies to play against him, and he'd watch Hockey Night in Canada before bed, and in the summer, he'd try slap shots in Carl's office parking garage. He'd go to hockey school, and when his special-fitting skates were late to arrive one year, Carl rushed to the post office to sort through packages.

Both parents were free spirits. "At 16, my mom took me driving with my learner's permit," Eric says. "I drove her to the mall, and she was relaxed. She's wasn't, 'You gotta stop still at stop signs,' like my dad. She'd be, 'Let's get to the mall already.' Then, she drove home, and halfway through a curve, she steps on the gas and says, 'See how you can gain speed coming out of a turn?' "

Carl was his most eccentric over Christmas. He'd wear the same red turtleneck every Dec. 24th, and when family and friends came over, he'd organize singing contests. "That's when I'd head for the hills," Eric says.


	Lindros and the Flyers have come to an understanding this season.

So this is how Eric grew up, with hockey and crooning, but he wasn't comfortable away from the house. At 15, he played on a Junior B team with 18-year-olds, and because his bike had been stolen, he had to take Bonnie's bike -- with its straw wicker basket -- to practice. His teammates took one look, tied up the bike with athletic tape and shot pucks into the basket. "It'd take me 45 minutes just the get the thing ready to ride home," Eric says. "There'd be Vaseline all over it, and they'd hang it from the rafters, and put pucks in the spokes."

He was never part of the "in" crowd, and as Eric began advancing in hockey, he leaned on the family unit. When he was drafted by Sault Ste. Marie's junior team, the family decided it was too far West and and that the travel would hurt his schooling. So, he received poison-pen letters. "From adults," Carl says. And when the NHL Quebec Nordiques were similarly not a good fit, the family forced the mega-trade to Philadelphia.

He arrived there as a sad 19-year-old, alone in a condo, trying to cook for himself, uncomfortable with limelight. Bonnie and Carl would fly in, together and separately. He later had a dog, a Great Dane named Zeus. But one night while he was at dinner, the dog hopped a wall and was killed on the road. He returned to find it there, and wept. "I don't handle those situations well," he says.

He later moved in with teammate Kevin Dineen and his wife Annie, which helped, but now there was the matter of his untimely injuries. He'd played only 61 games as a rookie, due to a knee problem, and in ensuing years, he had a series of freak accidents that kept him from playing no more than 73 in a season. He had a gouged eye, a groin pull; you name it. Flyer executives had already started to grouse, but they seemed to grumble louder as soon as the new First Union Center was erected for the 1995-96 season. Lindros had given them a marquee name, which helped fund the building, but now they expected a Stanley Cup. The team reached the finals in 1997, but Lindros scored only one goal in a Detroit sweep. Worse, one of the six players he was traded for, Peter Forsberg, had brought Colorado a Cup. And then, late in the '98 season, a concussion limited Lindros in a first-round playoff loss to Buffalo.

And there is a story people tell about that concussion. They say that as Lindros was lying in his ambulance, who else but Bonnie called on his cell phone. Eric doesn't remember it, but, as the story goes, Bobby Clarke rolled his eyes and said: "Isn't that nice -- Mommy called."

At least he had Roger.

Prior to the 1997-98 season, the Flyers hired Roger Neilson as their head coach, and, finally, Lindros had a soul mate in the organization. Before then, he had been closest to Croce, who helped him rehabilitate his rookie knee injury and who later brokered Comcast's deal to buy the Flyers. But Croce was into basketball, and Neilson came along just when Lindros needed a confidant. Neilson was Dudley Moore in blond curls, and he'd ride a rickety bicycle to every practice, even on icy days. He'd call Lindros in to watch film, but his critiques didn't feel like critiques. "Roger's so honest," Lindros says, laughing. "We met to talk one time at a bus station, and I said, 'Roger, am I gonna be traded?' He said, 'I don't know.' Because he didn't! I said, 'Then, why are we meeting?' And he said, 'Because we drove all the way here, and we might as well. And I'm gonna get a cup of coffee out of it.' "

It eased Lindros' mind to have a coach who felt like family, and, on Christmas Eve of 1998, he asked Neilson to join him on his private jet. Lindros, every Christmas, would charter a flight home to see Carl in his red turtleneck, and Roger agreed that night to fly along, so the coach could see his own family in Ontario.

Lindros was comfortable in Philadelphia now. He'd do children's charity work. He bought a house in Vorhees, N.J., and surrounded himself with a new dog and roommate. The Great Dane was named "Bacchus," after the Greek God of Fine Wine and Wild Behavior, and the roommate was Frank, a 51-year-old family friend. Frank was a Brit, who had once worked security for the Rolling Stones, and was now in town working as a chauffeur. He and Lindros would drink herbal tea together and never talked about hockey -- because Frank didn't know hockey. Over the holidays, they would buy a Christmas tree and hang stockings; Philly felt perfect. "I just like being home," Eric says. "I like knowing my dog is 7 feet away from me at all times."

But life changed on April Fools Day, 1999. The Flyers were playing in Nashville, where Lindros took a painful hit in the ribs. Clarke, from Philadelphia, suggested Lindros fly home the next day for X-rays. But that night at the team hotel, a listless Lindros couldn't sleep, climbed into a bathtub and was discovered there in the morning by his hotel suite mate, Keith Jones.

"He takes baths before every game, so at first I didn't think anything of it," Jones says. "But he looked real white, and it seemed to be more than a rib injury."

Lindros was to fly to Philly that morning, but an angry Jones shouted, "He's not getting on that [bleeping] plane." Instead, he entered a Nashville hospital, where he underwent surgery for a collapsed lung. "They operated on him in the ER, with his suit pants on," Carl Lindros says. "As soon as those X-rays came out, they were cutting tubes in him. The lung had been punctured and collapsed. He'd already lost half of his blood supply, internally. Thank God for Jonesy."

To the Flyers, it was another in a long line of injuries, and with the playoffs only three weeks away, they wanted him to hurry back. "Well, how are you supposed to guard against a punctured lung?" Lindros says. "No one's ever heard of that injury in hockey before. Figures I'd be the one to open up the chapter on it."

But he wasn't ready for the playoff opener vs. the Maple Leafs, and it all boiled over. In the locker room, a Flyers assistant mentioned Jeremy Roenick was returning early from a broken jaw, and said to Lindros, "You gonna let him come back before you?" Clarke heard it and chuckled, but Lindros felt he'd been embarrassed in front of his team. He confronted Clarke in his office, slamming the door, at which time Clarke, according to a Flyer official, said, "Stop being a baby."

Lindros will not comment on it, but Clarke says, "I was in the locker room when the comment was made, and it was said jokingly. Nobody meant for it to be taken the wrong way. It was just guys standing around, joking and stuff, and I guess it ended up bothering Eric. It's no big deal.

"But it's good he came up to see me. At least we know what bothers him, anyway. Other guys, you can say anything, and it doesn't bother them. Now we just won't say anything around him."

It was a tense time. A rumor circulated that Lindros had actually injured his lung in a car accident along with teammate John LeClair, which Lindros and LeClair deny. Meanwhile, according to witnesses, an irritable Clarke tried baiting Lindros into an early return, saying to the player, "Would you rather come to Toronto and skate with the team or skate with the [farm team] Phantoms?" The remark burned at Lindros. He never played, and the team was eliminated. "What did they want," Brett Lindros says. "He nearly died giving his life to hockey."

Not long after that, the Lindros family sent a letter to Snider, insinuating that Clarke was egregious for attempting to fly their son to Philly the day after the lung injury. They wrote that he could've died on the flight due to the cabin pressure. But Snider wrote them a terse letter, backing Clarke. "It's totally untrue what they wrote to me," Snider says. "That's their own imagination. Bob Clarke would never do anything to harm Eric Lindros, nor would he ever make medical decisions. I don't know what their problem is. I investigated it, and there's no issue."

It made for an anxious summer, and although Snider says he met with Carl and Eric at training camp, nothing was ironed out. "I don't know if things ever get ironed out with his parents," Snider says.

By this season's start, Lindros was still despondent. Rumors circulated he would be traded to Carolina for Keith Primeau -- a deal his teammates were against -- and Lindros became a zombie. "The off-ice crap was getting to me," Lindros says. "I was just sick of it. I was letting the team down. I wasn't myself, off the ice or on the ice. I was drained and maybe mopey. Is that a word?"

The team started 0-5-2, and Lindros, the team captain, called a players-only meeting to apologize and to say he would drop his feud with Clarke. "He was man enough not to put himself ahead of the team," LeClair says.

They surged into first place, and, Clarke, to his credit, agreed to the truce. Clarke does have a human side, considering the name of his 9-month old grandson, Stoney, is tattooed to the back of his wrist. And he, like Lindros, apologized to the team.

So, all seemed well-until Neilson tapped Lindros on the shoulder in early December. The coach told Lindros he had bone marrow cancer, and Lindros openly wept. Neilson, as is his way, tried to soothe him, saying, "Well, if I've gotta go, I'm sure heaven's a better place than Philly."

It hit Lindros then that the feud with management was irrelevant. A teammate, Dimitri Tertyshny, had died in a boating accident that summer, and now Neilson was to undergo chemotherapy, and Lindros simply set his jaw, once and for all. He promised Roger a Fedora, for when all his curly hair falls out, and he also promised to just play hockey. "I just want smooth sailing," he says. "If the Flyers don't want to deal with my dad, they can deal with our family attorney, Gord Kirk. I just don't want any hiccups anymore."

He began skating brilliantly, like the best hockey player in Philadelphia. And as the Flyers coasted into first place, everyone agreed Lindros was again the team's heartbeat, and that, for a fifth time, he would win the team's MVP award.

An MVP award named, The Bobby Clarke Trophy.


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