Eric Lindros was still a fine player, if not the Next One

Eric Lindros: the size of the man and his talent promised great things before controversy and injury took their toll. John Biever/SI

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This was on an early August morning, just after 9, Maple Leaf Gardens, 1991. The training camp for Team Canada, in preparation for the start of the Canada Cup tournament later that month, was to begin with a scrimmage. The opening draw went back to defenseman Al MacInnis.

Yawn.

Then ... four seconds into his career playing against men, an 18-year-old Eric Lindros hit MacInnis with a check that gave the onlookers a bigger jolt than any take-out double-double of Tim Horton's coffee. You know those collapsible paper skeletons that hang on the classroom doors of elementary school around Halloween? Well, that's how MacInnis crumpled to the ice. In sections.

At that precise moment, there were people in the stands -- me, included -- who believed that Lindros would have as much impact on hockey as he had had on MacInnis. This was easy. This impossibly handsome kid with the square jaw and twinkling eyes would not be the Next One, as he had been anointed in junior hockey, but the First One, a wholly original player who was different, although not necessarily better, than anyone who had come before him. He was a 6-foot-4, 235-pound package of size and strength and dangle, a combination that would change the hockey paradigm, would push the borders as easily as he pushed around an unsuspecting all-star defenseman.

The revolution was over that sultry morning. Lindros won.

Lindros was set to formally announce his retirement at a press conference in London, Ontario, on Thursday, 16 years after leaving that indelible impression on anyone who was there. The revolution fizzled. The irony is that after the NHL actually took some halting steps to revolutionize itself after the lockout, there really was no place in the game for him, a first-rate center who had been reduced to skating the right wing for the Dallas Stars.

Ultimately Lindros's career was a victim not of his laundry list of injuries (especially concussions) or the ravages of creeping age (he quits at an old 34) but of expectations. Any player who scores 372 goals, who plays in three Olympics, who wins the Hart and Lester B. Trophies, who averages more than a point a game despite a surfeit of injuries, should be judged to have been a wild success. Instead, Lindros has widely been viewed as falling short of his promise. He was finished by the pernicious hat trick of woulda, coulda, shoulda -- an affliction that strikes only those among us who have been graced with uncommon talent. Lindros was measured, often unfairly, on a scale that was even more out-sized than his skills.

Even before the moment at the draft in 1992 when Quebec Nordiques owner Marcel Aubut demonstrated that he was not the kind of man to take yes for an answer and traded the young phenom to both the Flyers and the Rangers, Lindros always seemed to be digging out of some controversy. No player in recent memory has ended up being buried under a greater avalanche of gossip and gawking by a hockey world that seemingly took a proprietary interest in Carl and Bonnie Lindros' son. There was so much clutter surrounding Lindros that sometimes you needed a machete to hack your way through. Some of it was his doing -- his decision not to play in Quebec after being the first player selected in the 1991 draft, for example -- but most of it was not, such as Team Canada (and Philadelphia) general manager Bob Clarke's decision to make Lindros captain of the 1998 Olympic team even though Wayne Gretzky, Ray Bourque and Steve Yzerman were among his teammates.

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