What makes a hero?
Wednesday, December 19, 2007 | 12:11 PM ET
What makes a hero?

That question is being debated around the office this week as we prepare our year-ending special for The Inside Track. Instead of the usual highlight reel for the past year, our version is about sports heroes – the people who caught our attention for all the right reasons.

So how do we define heroic? It’s not easy and completely subjective.

Certainly you could look at Sidney Crosby and say that someone of his age winning the NHL’s scoring title is outstanding. Clearly he will get consideration for Athlete of the Year. He’s already won the Lou Marsh Trophy.

I marvel at purely athletic accomplishments, but heroes have to be more than great athletes.

When I was growing up, I was a devout New York Islanders fan. It was the era of Mike Bossy, Bryan Trottier, Billy Smith, and most significantly for me, Denis Potvin.

To the chagrin of the rest of my family, Potvin was my hero. I owned an authentic home-white Islanders sweater with number-5 on the back. I had read and re-read his autobiography, Power on Ice, and my bedroom walls were covered with pictures from the 1976 Canada Cup.

From a purely hockey point of view, he was outstanding. As soon as he stepped into the NHL, he was the best defenceman in the league (sorry Bobby Orr fans, but Orr was past his prime). Potvin could do it all. He was a great skater, playmaker, and goal scorer who could also lay out the opposition with his old-style hip checks. As a young hockey player myself, I admired all these traits.

But that’s not why he was my hero.

What I admired about Denis Potvin was that he was not the stereotypical pro hockey player. He spoke eloquently in both French and English. He grew up in a French-speaking household and became fluently bilingual without a trace of an accent. He voiced strong opinions, never relied on the clichés that have become the hallmark of today’s sports interviews, and he never backed down from controversy. I was glued to the TV set anytime he was featured between periods of Hockey Night in Canada.

Oh, and he was handsome. (I was a teenaged girl, after all.)

Today, my choice of sports heroes sways towards athletes such as Perdita Felicien, for the grace she’s shown in recovering from the disaster of the 2004 Olympics, and Tony Proudfoot, the retired CFLer who is fighting Lou Gehrig’s disease with dignity.

But I still have that Islanders sweater tucked away in a corner of my cupboard, 30-year-old newspaper clippings are saved in my scrapbook, and Power on Ice still sits proudly on my bookshelf.


http://www.cbc.ca/sports/brown/2007/...es_a_hero.html