Their first night as teammates, housemates, doesn’t go well. Crosby remembers (Eric) Neilson walking off the bus.
“There’s this big guy, the best mushroom cut I’ve ever seen, full of energy, right away just hootin’ and hollerin’ at the bus station after a long trip. You can tell right away, just a great guy to be around. Seemed pretty normal - and then he said (laughs), he said: ‘Make sure you open my window tonight’.”
They had bedrooms next to each other in their billet’s basement.
“He said that he was going to wait at the billet to make sure that he was there if there was a curfew call, but that he needed his window open to get back after curfew. So, I’m thinking to myself, ‘Okay… here we go’.
So I go into my room and sure enough, I fall asleep. I totally forget that he’d asked me that, and I wake up around 2 or 3, and I hear this banging and crashing, and I have no idea what it is. I can’t tell where the noise is coming from. It’s my first night there, obviously I don’t know my billet that well at this time, so I just kind of shake it off and go back to sleep. At that time, I totally forgot what he had asked me.
So I go back to sleep, wake up in the morning. Supposed to wake him up for the practice in the morning. So I open his door. It’s freezing cold in his room. I look up and the window is just demolished. And I’m thinking, ‘Oh… I forgot to open the window’.
He just rolls over, and he’s so pissed off at me. I think he just sighed and said, ‘What did I ask you?’ (laughs) I said, ‘Yeah, I know. Sorry, I totally forgot. I fell asleep.’ It wasn’t a great start.”
Luckily, it’s easy to forgive a guy who’s about to turn your franchise around.
Neilson and Crosby quickly become best buds. A local Mazda dealership gives them a sponsored car. Crosby doesn’t have his driver’s licence yet, so the dealership puts his name and number on the passenger side door. 87, Crosby. And on the driver’s side: Neilson, 29.
“It’s Driving Miss Daisy. Like I’m his personal chauffeur, right? Everywhere Darryl needs to go, I take him. But it was kinda fun. We had a good time with it. Taught him how to drive a little bit. We’d go to the parking lot and he was an awful driver. Still is a bad driver, but he just never really got the hang of 10 and 2 and being able to check the mirror. He’s just pretty bad. He’s a lot better a hockey player than he was a driver, that’s for sure.”
Crosby can’t handle a stick. Now that’s irony.
These are golden days for the boys. With Crosby, the Oceanic go from the basement to instant contender. And Neilson has a driver’s side view of the future of hockey.
But one night, he almost blows that last chance the Oceanic have given him.
They’re out late after a game. Neilson is the driver. He’s taking home a couple of drunk teammates and there are girls in the back. He’s showing off. Comes around a corner, tries to do this emergency brake Tokyo Drift thing and loses control.
...An officer shows up, says: “Hey, I know it was a mistake. I’ll make sure you don’t get into trouble. I just need one favour. All I want is two Crosby autographed cards in return.”
“I said, ‘Got it. Right away. Whatever you need’.”
A tow truck takes away the beaten-up Mazda and the officer drives Neilson back to his billet’s house. He runs into Crosby’s room, grabs the cards and a marker from his desk and shakes Crosby awake.
“‘Hey, Darryl, buddy, you gotta sign these cards for me, man.’ He’s a heavy sleeper. You know, Sidney Crosby, he’s hard to wake up and he doesn’t really remember a whole lot when you do wake him up from his beauty sleep. So I got him to sign the two cards, and go back up and give them to the cop.”
The next morning, Crosby comes down for breakfast.
Sid: “When I wake up that morning, I knew something was- I was like, what happened? But I couldn’t really - I was pretty out of it.”
Neilson: “Sitting at the table, I see him come up the stairs. And I look, and he’s got marker on his face, on his chest, everywhere. And I’m like, ‘Holy shit!’”
Sid: “He had gotten me to sign cards but he was in such a hurry or whatever, he just left the marker in my bed. So what happened was I had kind of tossed and turned that night.”
Neilson: “I was like, ‘Darryl, go look in the mirror, man’. And he’s like, ‘What?’. I said, ‘Go look in the mirror!’ So he goes and he comes back and he’s like, ‘What the fuck, Neilson?! What? What?!?! What are you-?’ He thought that we had pranked him, that we wrote in permanent marker on him while he was sleeping.”
Sid: “I thought, ‘Well, they probably just came home and, like, wrote all over me or something, while I was asleep’. But then I came upstairs that morning and he kind of told me the whole story, and it’s not what I was expecting obviously (laughs). Kind of an interesting way to wake up in the morning. ‘Car’s totalled, and I got you to sign a few cards’.”
Neilson: “He was pretty pissed off about that one. He was pretty upset once I told him the real story, and once we got the permanent marker washed off his chest and his face.”
...Neilson never makes it to the NHL. He becomes a journeyman enforcer, mostly in the minors. But he takes great joy and a mentor’s pride in watching Crosby become a superstar. The two remain close friends. Crosby writes “Darryl” on his gloves his entire first season in Pittsburgh. At season’s end, he gives Neilson and three of the Rimouski vets who nicknamed him a set of the gloves.
To this day, Neilson refuses to say the name Sidney or Crosby. Sid is Darryl. Darryl only. Darryl forever.
-Beauties Episode 1, Oct 13 2020: Darryl
If you need some Sidney Crosby serotonin, Sid’s voice and some stories from his Rimouski days in this short podcast by James Duthie
