Stanley Cup Scandal: Crosby Plagiarized Big Motivational Speech Before Game 6

81108716CP120_Pittsburgh_PePITTSBURGH, PA – In the Pittsburgh Penguins’ locker room, just minutes before his team took the ice for Game 6 of the Stanley Cup Finals, Sidney Crosby rose to his feet and delivered what his teammates thought was a heartfelt, impromptu speech urging them to “get me back to Detroit” for Game 7. Crosby’s emotional plea was met with a tumultuous ovation. With tears still streaming down their faces, his Penguins’ teammates charged on to the Mellon Arena ice and delivered their captain a 2-1 victory.

But it turns out that the speech, credited by several Penguins players as “just the spark we needed,” was a fraud.

Crosby lifted it, almost line by line, from former Pittsburgh Steelers great Jerome “The Bus” Bettis, who delivered a similar speech to his teammates before the AFC Championship game in January 2006. Bettis, who had never been to a Super Bowl in his storied career, implored the Steelers to “just get me to Detroit,” his hometown, where Super Bowl XL was to be played.

Crosby implored his teammates to do the same thing for him, but he didn’t bother attributing the words to Bettis. Some Penguins, speaking on condition of anonymity, said they should have realized “something was off” when Crosby described himself as “a poor black kid from Detroit who rose out of the ghetto and became the fifth leading rusher in NFL history.”

Penguins’ center Jordan Staal said he felt Crosby “really played with my emotions. I mean, I felt so bad for him when he started talking about what it was like to grow up poor and black.”

“Now I just feel violated,” Staal added.

The locker-room incident marked the second time a Penguins player was caught in a plagiarism scandal. On January 24, 2006, when Mario Lemieux announced his second retirement, he said, “Today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth,” stealing a line from baseball great Lou Gehrig. Lemieux was suspended from hockey for five years by former baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn, but when it was determined Kuhn had no jurisdiction over the matter, Lemieux was reinstated.

Jun 12