by Bob Mckenzie
“Jari really took me under his wing,” the Dallas Stars centre said. “I just enjoy him as a person, and he has such a positive outlook and tremendous energy. I owe him a lot.”
It was Byrski’s relationship with Spezza that led to Jari working with Spezza’s representatives, the Orr Hockey Group, at its annual summer development camps. It was the Spezza connection that led to Byrski working the Senators’ summer prospect development camp since 2006. That resume paved the way for the NHLPA All-Canadians program. And so much more.
“My first meeting with Jari was when I was overseeing the summer development of a young Jason Spezza,” said Senators director of player development Randy Lee, who started as the team’s strength and conditioning coach. “Jari’s energy on the ice and passion for encouraging young players to develop their high-end skill left a huge impression on me. The level of energy he brings to every on-ice session is contagious. The players who worked with him over the years believe in him as a coach, but more importantly as a person. He’s been a big part of our development camps and really created a strong bond with the players.”
It’s a popular refrain. When Tampa Bay Lightning head coach Jon Cooper was coaching the Bolts’ farm team in Syracuse of the American Hockey League, he was looking for someone to teach specialized skills. His assistant, former NHL player Steve “Stumpy” Thomas, told Cooper about Jari, with whom Thomas’s son Christian had worked during his minor hockey days in Toronto. Byrski started by working for Cooper in the AHL and then moved up to conduct the skill side of the Lightning’s summer prospect camp once Cooper was promoted to the NHL.
“Jari’s energy level is off the charts,” Cooper said. “Guys just gravitate toward him. The problem is he’s busy; he’s a hard guy to nail down. Everyone wants a piece of him. Even now, we’ll use Jari’s drills at times when he’s not here. But we do not have his lingo down, which is hilarious. He’s unique, just a special person.”
Cooper and Stamkos will often marvel in practice at a player performing a beautiful toe-drag deke and roofing the puck for a goal. The two will look at each other knowingly, nod and simply say to each other, “Jari.”
Stamkos wouldn’t think of ending any off-season without at least a few weeks of daily skill instruction from Jari.
“Once the [regular] season begins, there’s basically no time for skill work,” Stamkos said. “None. It’s all travel, play games, practice when you can, but the practices are not anything to do with skill development. It’s great to get time with Jari, work on your hands and your feet.”
The only difference from the time when a 10-year-old Stamkos showed up to SK8ON is that it’s now Steven, not his dad, Chris, who tells Jari what areas need to be worked on.
“Chris Stamkos came to me the first time we met,” Byrski recollected, “and said, ‘I know more about hockey than you, but you’re going to teach my son because he won’t listen to me.’” He laughed. “Chris would tell me to work on turns, that Steven was slow on the takeoff out of the turn, and I’d say, ‘Okay, Steven, your dad wants us to do turns,’ and Steven would say, ‘That’s so boring,’ and I would say, ‘We’ll do turns for a while and then do something else fun.’”
Now, in August, Stamkos will show up to Jari with a very specific list of things he wants to improve on.
“Typically, it’s a 50-minute session,” Jari says. “Two stickhandling drills with momentum of movement. One drill for acceleration, hard feet and monster hard work and conditioning. One drill with just pure hands in a small space. One drill for dynamic shooting, one drill for stationary shooting.”
Jari will employ pylons and pucks and sticks and shooting boards and PVC pipe to go over the stick shaft on stickhandling drills. Whether it’s Stamkos or Spezza or Skinner or Cammalleri, “the player will tell me he wants more of this or less of that. The players, they keep getting better; they want more speed in their drills, more complicated drills. We keep coming up with new gadgets and equipment, always pushing, always more, more of everything.”
The bond Byrski has formed with some of his players is beyond tight. The Spezzas and Stamkoses consider him a member of the family. With many of his clients, summer isn’t officially over until Jari comes to their homes for dinner or a BBQ just before they leave for NHL camp.
“That’s our tradition,” Chris Stamkos said. “We share laughs and stories. Jari is a special guy—a little eccentric, but special.”
“That’s our ‘airing of the grievances,’” Steven Stamkos said, laughing. “Jari is so much fun.”
For many years, Rino Spezza actually used to get out on the ice and be one of Jari’s helpers. And Byrski’s eyes positively light up at the mere mention of Brent Burns’s name. The hairy San Jose Sharks behemoth came to Byrski as an eight-year-old, and Jari instantly took to the lovable goofball in what’s become an enduring relationship.
“He was so young, only eight,” Jari said. “Like a flamingo bird—passion in his eyes, so much desire, a smile on his face. I fell in love with this kid and his family. Now, he has all these animals he keeps in his house, all these tattoos . . . we’re both a little crazy, maybe that’s why we like each other. I worked in Minnesota with him and Derek Boogaard. I’ve had so many good times with Brent: his crazy military and Navy Seal training, his groomsmen, racing his bike Tour de France style, all those animals and snakes in his house. What’s he got, like, 600 snakes? I don’t like snakes. He tells me when I stay at his house not to worry, I’m in a safe room. Hah! There is no safe room in a house with 600 snakes.”
There’s a special place, too, for Wolski, who shares Polish heritage with Byrski. He’s another one who came to Jari at a young age, made the NHL and remains a lifelong friend. When he made it, Wolski gave Byrski a Rolex watch with the inscription: from 8 to 8. Wolski wore No. 8 in the NHL in honour of Byrski’s SK8ON.
“I tried to convince Spezza and Stamkos [to wear No. 8],” Byrski said, laughing. “Not happening.”
Byrski could tell stories about his “boys” all day long.
Like the summer of 2011, when he got a written message from his new office assistant that read, “Ann wants to invite Jari for dinner.” Jari was perplexed. He didn’t know an Ann, and he certainly wasn’t prepared at that point to begin dating again. He asked the assistant to call the woman back, pass along his “thanks, but no thanks,” only to find out a couple of weeks later that the assistant hadn’t followed up with this Ann. So Jari decided he would call her himself and personally apologize. The call went something like this:
“Hello, Ann, it’s Jari Byrski—”
“Hi, Jari, you missed the party. What happened? I invited you.”
Ann turned out to be Ann Bickell, the mother of Chicago’s Bryan Bickell, and she wasn’t phoning Jari for a date—unless you count inviting him to a Stanley Cup party in Orono, Ontario, as a date.
“The Stanley Cup,” Byrski moaned. “I’ve never been to a Cup party. I missed it. I got some Kleenex and I cried in the corner like a baby.”
Fast forward to the summer of 2013. Byrski’s assistant—a different one this time, a woman not too familiar with hockey—left him a written message: “You’re invited to dinner with Stanley.”
Jari racked his brain, trying to remember which Stanley he knew who would want to have dinner with him, when, suddenly, all he could remember was: “Ann wants to invite Jari to dinner.”
“Hah-hah!” Byrski bellowed. “I wasn’t missing it this time. I was being invited to Bryan Bickell’s day with the Stanley Cup. ‘Dinner with Stanley.’ I love it.”
Byrski won’t ever forget that day with the Cup he shared with Bickell, or what it means to have worked with a teenage kid and seen him grow up to be a Stanley Cup playoff hero.
Byrski has had more than one opportunity to put aside the helter-
skelter lifestyle of working with so many players and teams for a less harried and potentially more profi
table existence, working with just one entity, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it.
U.S. billionaire and entrepreneur Nelson Peltz sent his four sons to Jari’s summer hockey schools for years, and if they couldn’t make it to Toronto, Peltz would fly Jari on the private jet to his mansion in Palm Beach, Florida (cited by Forbes magazine as one of the most expensive homes in the U.S.), or his estate in Bedford, New York, which once belonged to Mariah Carey, where Jari would get on the ice and work with the Peltz kids. Eventually, No. 352 on the Forbes 400 list of the richest people in North America in 2013 offered to hire Byrski full time not only to school his boys in hockey but to run a hockey-related company for Peltz—equal time on and off the ice, but at a far more leisurely pace and much more lucrative rate of pay than what Byrski was used to.
“Mr. Peltz was very good to me,” Byrski said. “He and his family are incredible people. I still talk to them, but I never seriously considered it. He told me, ‘Don’t be crazy, you’re going to make money you will never make here, you will never have to work so hard again.’ But I couldn’t do it. I had two issues. One, how can I turn my back on some of the biggest talents in the game? Two, it’s not about the money. This is my body of work, the realization of my passion. Not just those who play in the NHL—the children. I love working with children. And then I look at the sweaters, the pictures I have on my walls of my guys, that stuff symbolizes the relationships I have with them. I just couldn’t walk away from all of that.”
Imagine how all this might have turned out if Jari Byrski had actually ever played hockey. Because he didn’t—not really.
Jari Byrski’s life story could be the stuff of a Hollywood epic. Think of some twisted hockey version of Warren Beatty in Reds. This one would have to be called Blue and Yellow, though, as homage to Byrski’s Ukrainian roots.
Byrski was actually born in the Polish village of Szczecin. At age five, he moved to Puszczykowko in rural eastern Poland, where his mother’s family resettled after being driven out of their Ukraine homeland by the Stalin regime. Jari’s mother Bozena met a Polish man, Kazimierz Byrski, in the little Polish village. Jari was born December 7, 1961. The marriage only lasted a few years, and while Jari’s father made efforts to see him, he had to move away for work and Jari was primarily raised by his working mother and his grandparents.
He grew up dirt poor in a small village in the middle of the Wielkopolski national park in eastern Poland. There was no electricity, no running water, no indoor plumbing, no television—no real comforts at all. His home was lit by kerosene lanterns and heated by an old stove.
“It was a tough way to grow up,” he said. “I had no friends at school. I was different. I was a minority. We were very poor. I was very small. I felt inadequate. At ages six and seven and eight, I was left on my own a lot as my mother was working in the city.”
During the winter, though, Jari would see the bigger boys playing hockey on outdoor rinks, and he immediately fell in love with the game. He so wanted to be a part of their games, but had no skates. His mother told him they couldn’t afford skates. So, left on his own in his family’s little back garden, he improvised. He took snow and water, created a small hill of frozen snow and ice and made what amounted to a little patch of ice and a ramp of sorts. He took a pair of shoes, fashioned some plastic to the bottom as makeshift blades, and would spend hours alone on the little patch, making turns and manoeuvres that had to be tight because his space was so limited. He had no hockey stick; he used a tree branch. He had no puck; he would use whatever he could find to hit around the ice with the branch.
When he was eight, though, his mother surprised him with a gift of skates, something he had constantly pestered her for. He excitedly opened the box, and what he saw mortified him. They were figure skates. White figure skates. Girls’ skates.
“Imagine my trauma,” Byrski said. “Figure skates. I said to my mother, ‘What am I supposed to do with these? I can’t play with the guys.’ I got into big problems with my mother for not being appreciative. She didn’t know the difference between figure skates and hockey skates, and she went to great trouble to get them and I wasn’t appreciative.”
Jari took the white figure skates, went to his grandfather’s tool shed and used sandpaper to take the white finish off the leather. He put black boot polish over the scarred, sanded leather, and the result was a terrible coagulation of black, brown and white. But they were skates, and Jari would spend hours on the little patch of ice in his garden. Finally, he worked up the courage to go to the outdoor rink with the other boys.
“I was never part of their group, but they let me play,” he said. “I was the butt of a lot of their jokes. I couldn’t play very well in those skates. I kept falling, I couldn’t make proper turns. One of the boys told me to file off the toe picks on the blade, which I did. I still couldn’t turn as well as others because the [figure skating] blade is so much longer, but I was becoming a very good skater. I was tiny, but very agile. I learned lots of little tricks on my blades.”
At the state-run school in communist Poland, though, the administration would decide which sport or activity best suited each student. Jari badly wanted to be a hockey player, but was told his aptitude was as a figure skater, an ice dancer.
“Can you imagine the scope of the jokes I faced from the other boys?” he said. “Having to dance on ice with a girl, at age eight or nine? I resisted it. I showed no figure-skating prowess.”
The school figured he was a lost cause. It basically gave up on him. He was allowed to be on the hockey team, but not really. He was the youngest and smallest, so he mostly just sat on the bench and continued to be an outsider, bullied by the older, bigger boys.
“I wasn’t growing, I was shy and embarrassed, and they were always laughing at me, making jokes about me. I was very late to puberty. Even in Grade 9, I was still under five feet tall. It turned me off. I didn’t want to be part of any sport or part of anything, really.”
His focus changed from athletics to academics. While he continued to skate on his own when he could, he became a voracious reader. At age 14, he was reading Joyce, Faulkner, Dostoyevsky and Proust, anything he could get his hands on. He would read in his unheated bedroom on the second floor; the inside wall would be covered in frost and he’d cut the fingertips off his gloves so he could turn the pages of his precious books, only to rue his creativity the next day when he would wear his gloves outside and his exposed fingertips would freeze.
Reading allowed him to realize there was a large world beyond his little corner of communist Poland. He was raised with a hatred of communism and totalitarianism, fear and distrust of all things Russian.
“My family on the Ukrainian side were all rebels, sent to camps and died,” he said. “As a young boy, my family would sit around the fire and drink their vodka and the stories would come out—horrible stories about what the communists did to our family. My eyes were opened wide. I was anti-communist. Everything from the east I hated, everything from the west I loved and glorified.”
Jari was doing well in school. His mother wanted him to be a lawyer, but there was far too much bouncing around inside his head to focus on law or school. Raised as a devout Roman Catholic, Jari turned to Buddhism. He grew his hair and became part of the burgeoning hippie movement. He set off on a journey of self-discovery, backpacking through the mountains from east to west. He took a vow of silence on that literal and figurative journey, never speaking, living in mountain huts and, by writing notes, begging for food from locals. He wanted to be an artist or a sculptor, like his father, who used to do cartoon illustrations. But he ultimately returned home and went to university.
This was around the same time as the rise of Lech Walesa’s Solidarity movement in Poland, amidst general strikes against the government, civil unrest and martial law. The students at the university, including Byrski, locked down the university for several days of protest until they were forcibly ejec
ted by military police.
Jari had seen the violence in the streets, the tanks, the police and the army shooting at unarmed protestors. He’d seen enough to know he wanted no part of it. He was able to secure a travel pass to go to a region of Poland on the Baltic Sea—a quieter, more serene place—which gave him time to think about what he wanted to do with his life. That choice, though, was effectively made for him not long after he returned to school.
At university, Jari met a woman, Dorota, and he got her pregnant. Soon after, in the spring of 1983, they were married, and in October of that same year, their son, Matthew, was born. Jari was now trying to raise a family while attending university, majoring in psychology. He would attend classes by day, perform diaper duty after class and tend to Dorota and Matthew at night. Then he would meet a friend from school; they would study in a janitor’s closet at the university into the wee hours and smoke strong Polish cigarettes with no filters to stay awake. He’d only get a couple of hours’ sleep, be up at 4 a.m. to line up for rationed food, toilet paper and other necessities of life that were in short supply because of the general strikes and civil unrest in Poland.
He excelled at school in the psychology department, having particular success working with children and art. While at school, Jari befriended two American exchange students from the University of Florida who were studying in Poland. They regaled Jari with stories of America and freedom. He met more American students who encouraged him to go the United States, telling him they could help arrange a scholarship for him there. It all sounded too good to be true.
So, on his own, leaving his wife, Dorota, and baby son, Matthew, behind, promising to return after completing his studies abroad, Jari touched down in Atlanta in the spring of 1985, took English as a second language and studied psychology at a local college.
“As soon as I got to America, I was like, ‘Whoa!’” he said. “I knew I would not be going back to Poland.”