Does the NHL owns shares in fashion magazines like Vanity Fair and Flare? Perhaps the editors of these magazines are big hockey fans. Not long after Wayne Gretzky's daughter graced the cover of Flare magazine, Sidney Crosby was posing half-nude for the delight of squealing teenage girls. in October's issue of Vanity Fair

It's great that the NHL is able to get free publicity in non-hockey magazines before Crosby ever plays a professional game. Sid might just do a better job of marketing than the NHL can do all on its own. What is even funnier is that Crosby doesn't even have to try that hard. The hockey media and some mainstream Canadian media are driving this marketing engine all on their own. As long as Crosby performs well on the ice and keeps flashing that trademark goofy grin, it's basically easy money for him and the NHL.

Oh...here's the eye candy, girls.

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An exerpt from the article:

Kid Crosby
-Brett Forrest

The last year the Stanley Cup sat on the shelf was 1919, when an influenza epidemic wiped out the playoffs. There is under the weather, and then there is laid low, which is pro hockey's posture as the N.H.L. opens play this month. Truth is, hockey has been backsliding for years, even before money came between the owners and the players, forcing last season's cancellation. Scoring has taken a leave of absence, the networks have backed off, and fans in time-honored hockey hubs (Phoenix! Nashville!) aren't quite sure what they're cheering for.

Into the identity breach skates teenager Sidney Crosby, from Cole Harbor, Nova Scotia, who is now charged with hefting hockey back to relevance. The game's best prospect in 20 years, Crosby is the type of player with the ability and appeal (and healthy endorsement deals with Reebok and Gatorade) to draw the casual masses to his sport, like an A-Rod or an M.J., or even Gretzky, "the Great One," himself.

Sidney doesn't yet carry a majestic nickname. (For the time being, let's call him Kid Crosby; his agent, after all, first eyed him at age 13.) But now that the Pittsburgh Penguins have signed him, he's lugging around some pretty unfair expectations. After Crosby's unprecedented back-to-back honors as M.V.P. and top scorer in the Canadian junior leagues, Gretzky said that the upstart could very well break his seemingly unbreakable N.H.L. records. "I've always wanted to be the best, but so do a lot of other people," says the deferential Crosby, who has the requisite aw-shucks Canadian temperament to help him straddle that tricky divide between winning everyone over and kicking everyone's ass.

And now the Big Ice cometh. "I've been waiting for this a long time," Crosby says. How long? The Kid, last time we checked, was just out of high school.


Source: Vanity Fair, October 2005, pages 306-7.

(crossposted)