VANCOUVER, British Columbia — The way Conor Sheary sees it, as long as somebody at PPG Paints Arena is saying his name, that’s probably a good thing.
Call him anything you want. Just don’t call him late for dinner.
Cheesy jokes aside, Sheary really doesn’t care if you pronounce his name SHARE-ee or SHEER-ee — although for the record, it is the former, not the latter.
“Honestly since I was even like 10 years old, in little-kid tournaments, every announcer was always ‘SHEER-ee,’ ” Sheary said Saturday following the Penguins’ morning skate at Rogers Arena. “It wasn’t something that bothered me too much. It’s something that I’ve always been called. I just kind of stuck with it.”
So, yes, Sheary soldiered on, hearing his name mis-pronounced every time he scored a goal, not saying anything to anyone, fearful of coming off as overly pretentious or something like that.
“I didn’t want something like this to happen,” Sheary said. “It wasn’t that big of a deal to me.”
In case you missed it, an old video surfaced a couple days ago of Sheary offering the correct pronunciation of his name. The Penguins have made the necessary adjustments, although there wasn’t much they could do since Sheary never made a big deal out of it.
What actually matters, it seems, is Sheary’s nickname. It’s currently “Sheers,” like a pair of scissors.
The adjusted pronunciation of his name presents and interesting question: Is he now ‘Shares,’ like someone sharing a pen?
“I hope not,” Sheary said. “That sounds a little weird. I’d like to keep ‘Sheers.’ ”
The whole hubbub, basically created on social media, has always made Sheary’s Twitter notifications an interesting place.
“I was actually really surprised,” Sheary said. “Fans were apologizing to me on Twitter for calling me the wrong name. I was like, ‘I’m not offended at all.’
“It’s something that I didn’t think was a big deal and didn’t say anything about. The way it looks, it looks like SHEER, for sure. It’s always been that way.”
Jason Mackey: jmackey@post-gazette.com and Twitter @JMackeyPG.
First Published: November 4, 2017, 8:30 p.m.
