I keep seeing john stewart saying the former gl quit but why would DC not put one of their biggests stars in the biggest crossover of that time? Just seems weird.
No, Crisis was '85. Parallax didn't come around until '94. I wish I could answer your question, wheeljack01, but I honestly don't know either. All I know is that at that point John Stewart was the active GL for Sector 2814. Edit: Nevermind, I just looked up Hal on Wikipedia and found this:
I just did a quick skim through of the old 85-86 issues of GL. Guardian's took the ring from Hal, gave it to Guy. So Guy and John were the GL's at the time.
Hal WAS in the Crisis, in some of the Green lantern crossover issues, he and Guy had a mission in space. For Earth though they only had John Stewart.