For Penguins, Lemieux, 20, Is ‘The Franchise’

At 6-foot-4 and 200 pounds, he is bigger, stronger and faster than most everyone in the National Hockey League. He also is probably a smarter, better player than any contemporary except Wayne Gretzky.

And, since Mario Lemieux is only 20, many experts think it is just a matter of time until the NHL’s second-leading scorer and second-highest paid player ranks second to no one.

The Pittsburgh Penguins call Lemieux The Franchise. It is an appropriate nickname, because the owners and management have pinned all of their hopes for the long struggling club -- as well as a large chunk of their money -- on the young sophomore center’s broad shoulders.

It was a big gamble--signing Lemieux, as the No. 1 pick of the 1984 entry draft, to a rookie-record two-year package worth an estimated $700,000. But the early returns are making the risk look increasingly like a solid Wall Street investment.

The Penguins are gradually obtaining the players needed to complement Lemieux’s play-making and scoring talents, and the team, which finished last, last and next-to-the last in the NHL overall standings the past three years, is improving daily. The Penguins are in good position to win the fourth and final playoff spot over the New York Rangers in the tough Patrick Division.

Equally important to the Penguins’ future is the fact that attendance is increasing. Through 29 home games they have averaged 11,697--242 more than they averaged during their best attendance year, 1975-76.

Penguin management is so pleased with Lemieux’s impact on the team that it recently re-signed him to a five-year contract that, with bonuses, is reported to pay him $700,000 a year.

Lemieux is pleased, too, but he is not satisfied. He will not be satisfied until the City of Pittsburgh has reason to give the Penguins the kind of parade it once accorded the Steelers and Pirates as Super Bowl and World Series champions.

“My goal is to build a good team in Pittsburgh and, maybe in a few years, to win a Stanley Cup,” Lemieux says in the French-accented English he learned in a crash Berlitz course a couple years ago. “I think every team in the NHL is trying to build a good team, but I would like to win someday a Stanley Cup . . .

“It’s getting better,” Lemieux adds. “Last year, we had a bad team. This year, it’s a lot more fun to play, and we have a lot more good players and we’re not very far from being a very good team.”

Lemieux bases that assessment on past experience.

“I’ve always been a player that a team was working around,” he explains. “As a junior, I came up my first year and finished last, like we did last year with the Penguins, and two years after that we finished first.

“It take more time in the NHL,” he adds quickly. “There are a lot of good teams. I know it’s going to take some time to finish first.”

But there is no doubt in Lemieux’s mind that it will be done. And when it is, Lemieux will have become more than The Franchise to Pittsburgh’s long-suffering hockey fans. He will be Superman.

That too would be an appropriate moniker for the handsome, dark-haired, dark-eyed athlete. Because off the ice, without his pads and his contact lenses, Lemieux bears an uncanny resemblance to Clark Kent. His lifestyle too resembles that of The Daily Planet’s mild-mannered reporter.

“A boring life,” Lemieux says.

It is by choice. Obviously. As an attractive, high-salaried, well known bachelor living in a city desperate for heroes, he could be tearing up Pittsburgh’s night spots the way Joe Namath once ripped through Broadway.

But Lemieux is not interested. Never has been and probably never will be.

“I think I’m the same way now as I was last year, or two years ago,” he says in a voice so soft that a tape recorder 18 inches from his mouth fails to pick up many of his words. “I haven’t changed a bit. I just like my privacy. I like to be alone off the ice, away from the rink. Our family is pretty close, but I never played with my brothers. I just went on my own, did whatever I wanted to.”

In his free time, Lemieux watches TV--”but not hockey. I don’t care too much if there’s a hockey game. I’ve seen enough.” He answers his fan mail. He plays with his two blue-point Siamese kittens, brothers Casey and Oscar. He sometimes visits the family with whom he lived last year or sees a few non-hockey-playing friends, all older than himself.

His vices are few. He smokes--a low-tar brand--and he shares his apartment with his girlfriend of three years, Nathalie Asselin, who moved here earlier this season from Montreal. Lemieux confides that the arrangement does not sit too well with his mother, but he is much less homesick now than last year.

He does enjoy sharing a drink with the boys--but not during the season.

“During the summer I go out, but not in the season,” he says. “I just stay at home.”

In the summer, he also allows himself the luxury of playing golf. He has a five handicap.

Many of his free daylight hours are, of necessity, spent sleeping.

“I don’t sleep at night. I have a problem with sleep,” Lemieux says. “I sleep during the day. At night I wake up every hour. I sleep in the morning, two or three hours. I’m always awake at night. I go to practice half awake and wake up on the ice. I go back home and go back to bed for a couple hours.”

The insomnia, he says, “started when I was 10.” He adjusted to it long ago by grabbing rest whenever possible. He sleeps quite well on airplanes and in cars.

Despite his love of privacy and his upside-down sleeping patterns, Lemieux is readily accessible to both fans and the media. He seems to find it easier to hug and chat with a youngster--”He’s unbelievable. He treats little kids like they’re his own,” says Director of Marketing Paul Steigerwald--than to answer the media’s probing questions. But he applies himself to both tasks with good humor and enthusiasm.

“I think it’s my job to give interviews, to talk to the press people,” he says. “I think more players in the NHL should give time to the press people because it’s important for yourself and for the team and the NHL. I enjoy it. Sometimes it gets to be a bit too much, and I need to get away from it. Then I just tell Paul Steigerwald or (publicist) Cindy Himes that I am busy, that I don’t want to do anything that particular day.”

But, whether the request is for an interview or to appear at a shopping mall or in a schoolroom, his use of that excuse is rare.

“He grumbles a little bit sometimes,” Steigerwald says, “but he never really says ‘No.’ He always says, ‘Yes.”’

And that in itself is a bit of a problem.

“We’re going to pull in the reins a little bit because we’re in the thick of the season now,” Steigerwald says.