by Bob Mckenzie
Jari Byrski’s first contact with Canada came after the 1972 Summit Series with the Soviet Union. He hadn’t seen any of it when it was actually played, but he was aware of the outcome from listening to Radio Free Europe on his grandfather’s little battery-powered transistor radio. When he finally did see some replays of those eight historic games, he immediately fell in love with the Canadians for beating the hated Russians and playing the game of hockey like he’d never seen it played before—so roughly, so physically. And yet, even though he would never forget Poland beating the Russians in the 1976 World Championships on Polish ice in Katowice, he still couldn’t help but be awed by the Russians’ speed, skill and precision passing and team play, especially that of little Valery Kharlamov, the diminutive Russian superstar.
“He was small,” Byrski said. “Like me.”
As fate would have it, Byrski was perhaps going to get a chance to go to Canada. Missing his wife and child back home in Poland, Byrski went to American authorities to see if they would permit him to bring his family to be with him in Atlanta. But he was told his student visa wouldn’t permit that. It was suggested to him, though, that if he went to the Canadian consulate, there was a chance Canada would allow the whole family to immigrate there. Byrski was told by Canadian authorities that they could approve his immigration status in three months, his wife and child’s in one year.
While studying in Atlanta, Byrski had become a huge fan of the NHL. He worked odd jobs to make money, and two of his best American friends were a pair of rabid Philadelphia Flyer fans.
“Crazy men,” Byrski said. “Absolutely crazy. They would fight each other if they had disagreements over the game while watching it. We would go to bars to watch the games. I’ve never seen this kind of hockey. Fighting, hitting, yelling at the referees. I loved it. I told my friends about me going to Canada, and they told me all about it—one of their fathers went to Canada during the Vietnam War.”
Canadian immigration authorities gave Byrski the option of settling in Montreal, Toronto or Vancouver. He chose Toronto because he was blown away watching Wendel Clark hit, fight and score for the Maple Leafs.
“It had to be Toronto because of Wendel,” Byrski said. “He was my hero. He embodied something that was missing for me. He was smaller than most, but not afraid. He was confident and tough and passionate.”
So in 1987, Byrski touched down in Toronto. Within a year, Dorota and Matthew joined him. They had another mouth to feed with the arrival of son Bart. Jari worked odd jobs to support the family—painting houses, working at a funeral home, driving a truck—but mostly he was drawn to hockey, not only for himself as a fan but as the father of five-year-old Matthew.
“I’m taking Matthew everywhere to skate,” Jari said. “Pleasure skating at the community rinks, ponds . . . we would find outdoor ice and every day after work, for two or three hours, I would have Matthew out there, teaching him. I’m starting to do a lot of the drills and exercises I did as a young kid, I’m using my figure-skating training. Matthew and I would be exhausted, but we loved it. Dorota thought I was cuckoo.”
It must have been quite the sight at Oriole Arena or Fenside Arena in Don Mills: Jari, with his little boy, doing everything but the conventional counterclockwise pleasure skating. They would zig and zag all over the ice, kicking their legs high in the air, doing the same edge work drills he would one day show to NHL superstars.
“The guys in the orange vests, the rink attendants, they would say to me, ‘Sir, you can’t do that. Sir, please stop that.’ It got to the point they would see me walking in and tell me I couldn’t go on the ice. The arena manager said to me, ‘Sir, why don’t you take your son to hockey school?’”
Hockey schools were too expensive. He had no money for that. But then he thought he might be able to trade his services as an instructor for Matthew’s lessons. He started checking out all the hockey schools in Toronto and settled on one that he could identify with. It was run by Dr. Yasha Smushkin, an old-school Russian who reminded Jari of his own teachers back in Poland. Smushkin was something of a minor hockey legend in Toronto. He would wear a big Russian fur hat and fur skate covers over his black figure skates. He would have a microphone and amplifier on the ice and would bark out orders to his students in a thick Russian accent.
Jari and Smushkin came to an agreement: Matthew would get free skating lessons and Jari would be one of Smushkin’s instructors/demonstrators. Matthew continued to excel at skating, and Jari was getting noticed for his ability to relate to the kids and teach. Matthew started playing AAA minor hockey with the Don Mills Flyers, but Jari noticed that as well as Matthew could skate—he was on the ice hours each day—his hockey skills and understanding of the game were lagging. That was when Jari realized it wasn’t enough just to teach skating—that shooting, stickhandling, deking and game situations needed to be incorporated into the instruction. As time wore on, Smushkin started paying Jari for his work. Jari had an expanding role and was becoming popular with many of the minor hockey players and their families. Maybe too popular.
It was clear to Byrski he had found his calling. He loved working with kids, he was good at it and he was passionate about it. But his utter devotion to it was also fracturing the relationships in his life. Jari’s marriage was disintegrating; by 1993 it was over. His relationship with Smushkin had become strained, and in 1992, Smushkin dismissed him.
He was no longer married, a father of two, out of work but still looking for a hockey school for Matthew. Jari went to former NHLer Martin Maglay, the Czech goalie who started HockeyTech, a well-known Toronto hockey school at the time. Maglay told Byrski it was time for Jari to strike out on his own. So in 1993–94, SK8ON became reality. By day, Byrski would drive a truck for a carpet company. By night, he would try to establish himself in the competitive Toronto hockey school/skating instruction landscape.
“It just felt right,” Byrski said. “I had Matthew out there with me, which was important to me. The first three to six months was tough. I would go on the ice at Chesswood, after the HockeyTech sessions before me, and there were people there watching, they would stand at the boards and laugh at me doing my teaching. They would call me [a] clown. People would say to me, ‘Who are you? What did you do in hockey? How many goals did you score?’ What could I say? I played no pro hockey, I played very little hockey at all. I finished my career when I was 14, and it was not much of a career.”
It was almost as though he was back to being the smaller, outcast kid in Poland once again. But Jari figured if Wendel Clark could prevail in a big man’s world in the NHL, he could make his way on the ice in Toronto, too. And he did just that.
It didn’t take long for word to spread about the crazy Ukrainian—most assumed Jari was Ukrainian, not Polish, because his SK8ON colours were blue and yellow. There were a variety of reasons why he was becoming so popular with young hockey players and their parents.
First, his skating drills were like no others. Intricate and highly complex, focusing on edge work, they were challenging to the point of being, for many, impossible to complete.
“I think that’s what first made me like going to Jari,” Spezza said. “It was so challenging. It was so hard.”
Elite players in Toronto minor hockey seemed to gravitate towards Jari, but his background—that of a bullied child and a teacher with a major in psychology and a love of art—made going to SK8ON something far greater than a place for elite-level players to thrive. Many parents took their kids their because Jari was known for doing wonders with kids lacking confidence and self-esteem.
If some kids were overwhelmed by the complexity of the movements, Jari made sure to entertain them. He would sing and dance in front of the kids, make crazy faces and blurt out random catchphrases—“confeeeedence!” or stealing Leonardo DiCaprio’s line from Titanic: “i aaaaaam the king of the worlllllld!”—laugh like a madman, often poking fun at himself but sometimes mixing it up
with the kids.
As a kid who was bullied, an outcast, he knew what it was like to lack confidence, and as technical as many of his skating drills and movements were, they were mostly about instilling confidence, making kids reach outside of their comfort zones and feel good about themselves for trying something difficult and getting a hug from Jari and stick taps from their peers. Jari would get shy kids to sing in front of the group, disarm everyone by good-naturedly poking some fun at the elite, confident kids. The parents who turned out in droves to have Jari teach their kids could not have known how Jari’s difficult childhood in Poland and his natural passion for teaching and psychology played into everything he was doing on the ice.
“I was the outsider kid when I grew up,” Byrski said, “so I am always thinking of the small kid or the quiet kid or the kid with no confidence. There’s a little kid inside of me, and I know some kids wonder, ‘Does anyone like me? Does anyone love me?’ So when I see a kid, I want to teach them what I know about skating, but I want to give them a safe place, a hug, sing with them, laugh with them. . . . I’m taking my own experiences and what was missing in my life, and that’s my passion. I love kids, I love teaching them.”
Maybe it was serendipity, but at the same time that Byrski’s hockey school career was taking off, he hired a secretary who turned out to be the love of his life. Her name was Ann Lebeuf, a Québécoise from just outside of Montreal, and she had an incredible impact in every aspect of Jari’s life and business. In short order, Ann became Ania—“she loved the European pronunciation of her name,” Jari said—and she ran the business for him.
“She’s the one who really built the business,” he said. “She would spend hours talking to clients. She would take care of everything. She was the missing ingredient.”
While Ania would drive the business and keep it all organized and running smoothly, Jari was constantly seeking new teaching and training methods. He saw a team doing skating drills while jumping over stick shafts and he could only think of the many ways that the drills could be adapted for stickhandling and agility training. The next thing you knew, he was walking into Chesswood Arena with bundles of stick shafts. He would go to Matthew’s games and technically break down the movements required to take a puck from the corner and drive to the front of the net, constantly seeking to make his instruction practical and current with what was happening in the game. Between the pylons, stick shafts, mini-boards and pucks all over the ice, his sessions looked like a hockey yard sale. With a large staff of assistants, large groups of kids would flow from one drill station to another seamlessly. It was equal parts precision timing and art form of sorts, all set against a backdrop of fun and laughter and unbridled enthusiasm.
In its heyday in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Jari would mark the end of the hockey year with a celebration for his students and their parents, a gigantic skills competition: hardest shot, most accurate shooter, faster skater, puckhandling agility. There would be two one-hour sessions, with 125 kids on the ice in each session. It was poetry in motion, a flawlessly choreographed exercise that would put an NHL All-Star Game skills competition to shame. Afterwards, all the kids from both sessions and their parents would have an awards banquet. Boxes of skates and dozens of sticks and pairs of gloves and equipment would be on display as the kids waited with eager anticipation to find out who would go home with the prizes.
“That was all Ania,” Byrski said. “She got sponsorships, organized everything, she did it all. It was amazing.”
But so, too, was the way Jari doled out the prizes. The skates and sticks and equipment were awarded by random draw. The elite players who won the various skill events went home not with expensive gifts, but links of smelly sausage, a bag of onions, a jar of pickles, a gigantic package of toilet paper. The presentation of these prizes would draw guffaws from the other kids and parents, which was Jari’s idea. As he said back then when asked about the bizarre prizes, “No one can brag about winning a bag of onions.” Winning the skills event was its own reward.
SK8ON’s business was thriving, but it was hard work, too. Time-consuming. Jari would be on the ice all day all summer long, running camps from morning to night. During the hockey season, he’d give private instruction in the mornings or afternoons as well as regularly scheduled classes each night of the week. There was never any doubt he was a workaholic, but it was a business that needed to be tended to, and for as much as Ania and others did to help it run smoothly, Jari was the show, the centrepiece. Without him and his Crazy Jari routine and unique skill and skating drills, there was no business.
So life was good, but life was busy. And then, when Ania was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2000, life got complicated and life got hard.
Ania underwent chemotherapy treatments. By 2002, she was declared by doctors to be in remission. But the treatments and illness took their toll on her. She had never been a big fan of living in the city, and she wanted to move to a more peaceful setting. So in 2003, she moved to Lac Joly near Mont Tremblant, Quebec. Jari and Ania lived apart, but every Thursday he would make the eight-hour trek—it often took 12 hours if it was snowing—to spend weekends with her. But in 2004, she began to complain she wasn’t feeling well. In 2005, doctors told her the cancer had returned, and it was not only in her breasts but in her lungs and bones, too. She was terminal. She returned to live out her days in Jari’s condo, her bed set up in the 33rd-floor living room, with its beautiful view across Lake Ontario. Doctors gave her three months to live; she lasted 13 months, dying in her bed in the condo on June 15, 2007.
In the immediate aftermath of her death, Jari went back to work. He was at the Ottawa Senators’ prospect development camp in early July, he went back to his summer camps with the young kids in July and August, but he knew he was cracking. He couldn’t stand to be around the kids. The grief and guilt associated with Ania’s death were eating him up. He gathered some of his big-name clients—Stamkos, Michael Del Zotto and Alex Pietrangelo, amongst others—and told them he couldn’t be there for them, that he needed some time away from the rink, time to sort out his life.
And that’s when he went off the grid and into a deep pit of despair and depression.
Jari and Ania were to have been married on August 8, 2008—the eighth day of the eighth month in a year ending in eight, which only underlined Jari’s utter fixation with the number eight. (In Chinese culture, eight is associated with prosperity and confidence, which is why the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics took place at 8 p.m. on that date. Jari’s obsession with it started because 1988 was the year in which he and his family were reunited in Canada.)
Jari and Ania had planned to be married in a mountain hut in eastern Poland, near his birthplace. Instead, after Ania died, he took her ashes there and spread them on the mountain in Poland, and did the same in Lake Louise, Alberta, which was one of Ania’s favourite places they had visited together.
But even after Ania’s death, he wasn’t about to let his planned wedding date of 08/08/08 go by without marking it in some special way. So on that date, a Friday, he invited eight of his NHL clients to join him on the ice for a skating and skills session. The eight who were able to be there that day included Spezza, Stamkos, Wolski, Cammalleri, Andrew Cogliano, Steve Staios, Manny Malhotra and Alexei Ponikarovsky.
“We knew that day was special to him, and we were flattered he wanted to spend it with us, on the ice,” Stamkos said of the 08/08/08 session. “We all knew [after Ania’s death] that Jari was hurting, that he was going through a difficult time, but I don’t think anyone knew how bad it was. It was great to see him back doing what he loves.”
It wasn’t lost on Byrski that he did, on what would have been his wedding day, something Ania likely would have objected to.
“I’m a workaholic, nonstop, that’s who I am,” he said. “I’ve had some regrets about that, but I have to be content and live with my decisions. I wasn’t able to balance my passi
on for work and my personal time. I should have been spending more time with Ania and my own kids, but at the end of the day, my passion was to love hundreds of kids but maybe not spend enough time with my wife and own family. . . . My professional life and my passion for it kind of burned everything around it.”
It’s funny, though, how things work out.
In the early months of 2008, after Byrski came out of his deep, dark depression and was in the midst of rebuilding a business that, outside of his pro clientele, had largely fallen apart, he was having lunch with his sons, Matthew and Bart, talking about hiring a new secretary to get things up and running again.
“Matthew said to me that day, ‘Why don’t I try to help you?’ So Matthew comes in, and next to Ania, he’s the best person I’ve ever had in that job. And I said to him, ‘You’re a great skater, you know how I teach skating. You should be on the ice with me.’”
So SK8ON once again became a thriving enterprise, with much of the load being shouldered by Matthew Byrski, on the ice pretty much all day long and overseeing much of the company’s administration.
“It’s an incredible circle of life,” Byrski said of working and spending so much time with his eldest son. “Matthew is doing a great job of running the business, and I’ll always want to be involved in some way. You know, a lot of the parents ask, ‘Is Jari going to be on the ice with my child?’ so I’ll still come on the ice for a few hours each day and be the crazy old man. I’ll sing, be my Crazy Jari self, and they’re happy, but I can’t tell you what it means to be father and son working together and for Matthew to one day take over the business.”
Byrski knows times have changed. The kids all still come to learn, but it’s not the same as it was for that decade, framed by Spezza and the 1983 birth year at one end and Jeff Skinner and the 1992 birth year at the other, when Jari developed special bonds with kids like Spezza, Burns, Wolski, Bickell, Stamkos, Del Zotto and Skinner, amongst others.