#‘area man has audacity to complain about constantly getting beat on and cheap-shotted’

[himbeaux-on-ice]

Yeah I don't like people calling Sid a 'whiner,' like I feel like every player can be called a whiner? Every player, especially the superstars, will complain if a call doesn't go there way or a call is missed/non called. So, I always just ignore people calling Sid a whiner, because I do feel like people are just jealous he isn't on their team. Since they wouldn't complain then. But I do 100 percent agree that for the most part Sid doesn't embellish unless he can get away with it

He literally spent the first 5-6+ years of his career getting pummelled because teams got frustrated with him outplaying them and this league doesn’t do enough to protect its stars from that treatment, and because he was a young babyface hockey princeling and had the audacity to be like “what the fuck??? no seriously what the fuck???” and put up a fuss about it on the ice (rather than necessarily fighting), everybody was like “oh boo-hoo what a wussy baby!” instead of being like “hey wait, the reason our teams were also frothing for the opportunity to draft this guy was not because we wanted to watch him get pummelled all the time, it was to watch him be a highly skilled player, this is kinda asinine and not what the game should be”.

There’s a culture of stoicism and “playing through the pain” in hockey which is really fucked up in and of itself (a toxic masculinity “take it like a man” thing), and you really saw this come out a lot with the wave of people (especially fans of rival teams) in that first half of Sid’s career calling him “Cindy Crosby” or a baby because he didn’t always stiff-upper-lip it through the shit he took as much as people thought he should, and let his frustration show a lot. Sometimes that temper got the best of him and made him do boneheaded things, yeah. But the mocking that people felt was justified just for “very competitive young man who came here to play skilled hockey is a bit ticked off about all the times people cheap-shot him instead of actually trying to compete” was just so ugly.

I think that was one of the cultural things that kept me from really trying to get properly into hockey when I was young even though it sounded interesting and I was surrounded by it. The hockey coverage I heard during that time obviously focused a lot on Sid due to where I was, and I never liked how there didn’t seem to be true widespread concern about the amount of shit he took with being injured by rough play until it got to the point where his ability to continue his career came into question, and then people said “Oh. Maybe this is bad actually huh?”

As time has gone by Sid has learned to play the physical game back (and make himself really hard to hit/knock down bc his lower body strength is so insane lol), to focus his temper more on driving his play instead of having vocal outbursts, and has also gained enough respect in the league (from other players at least) that you don’t hear the “whiner” rhetoric as much as you used to imo, despite the fact that he’s still pretty argumentative lol. But it leaves a bad taste in my mouth all the same.