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Jaromír Jágr: Miracle on Ice

He came to the NHL more than 20 years ago. His teammates, half his age, grew up with his poster on their bedroom walls.
By Peter Simek |
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photography by Elizabeth Lavin
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photography by Elizabeth Lavin

When the Anaheim Ducks scored two goals in the second period of Monday night’s game against the Dallas Stars, I knew we here at D Magazine had a problem. We were in the final stages of editing a story for the May edition of the print product. The subject was Jaromir Jagr, a 41-year-old winger for the Dallas Stars and one of the greatest — and strangest — players in the history of the NHL.

Our press deadline mirrored the trade deadline for the NHL, and just a week ago, the Stars looked like they might make a last ditch run at the playoffs with Jagr playing a key role. But when Monday’s game slipped away, it was clear that the Stars’ season was over. Jagr, a hired gun signed to a one-year contract, was suddenly worth more for the prospects he could bring to the team for future seasons than the goals he could produce in an increasingly meaningless one. And on Tuesday, the Stars traded Jagr to the Boston Bruins.

It’s a fitting coda for our story about Jaromir Jagr, a rootless hockey player who has spent the second half of his storied career wandering around the league (and in Russia). For a few short months in 2013, he was in Dallas. This is what happened.

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Walking through the wet, dreary streets of Prague during a brutally cold November night in 1999, the last thing I expected to stumble into was a conversation about hockey. I was in the Czech city for all of 36 hours, staying in a hostel in a repurposed training facility for gymnasts left over from the communist Czechoslovakia. As my traveling partner and I made our way back from a bar on the far side of the Charles Bridge, a short man with a round, hatless head and an oversize overcoat—hands shoved deep in the pockets—walked up alongside us. He said he heard us speaking English and wanted to practice his. I was skeptical. In foreign countries, particularly Eastern European ones at well past 1 in the morning, wandering men don’t approach Americans on the street unless they want something. We chatted about the States, about his city. He had studied English in school but had never traveled outside his country. Finally, he asked an odd question.

“Tell me,” the little man said. “Is Jaromír Jágr really that good?”

By 1999, Jágr, a Czech-born hockey player, was widely regarded as one of the best goal scorers in the world, well on his way to being recognized as one of the best who ever played the game. He had won Stanley Cups in his first and second years in the league with the Pittsburgh Penguins. He had just led the Czech national hockey team to an Olympic gold medal at the 1998 Nagano games. And in 1999, he had won his third Art Ross Trophy, awarded to the player who scored the most points (goals and assists) in a season, as well as both MVP honors—the Hart Memorial Trophy (selected by hockey writers) and the Lester B. Pearson Award (voted on by players). “Good,” I said. “He’s probably the best.”

The man looked down at the wet street. Okay, he says. He wasn’t sure what to think. So much was written about Jágr in the Czech Republic. He was ubiquitous on TV. But could the man trust the broadcasts? Could it really be true? Could a young man from a little Eastern European country go across the sea and become one of the greatest players in the history of the National Hockey League? For the stranger, who had lived most of his life behind the Iron Curtain distrusting and skeptical of all news from the outside, it all seemed a little too much to swallow.

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More than 12 years later, the Czech national enthusiasm that surrounds Jágr hasn’t yet subsided. Jágr’s presence in a hockey arena nearly always coincides with a contingent of Czech fans. This past February in Calgary, six Jágr fans dressed in the jerseys from the six teams Jágr has played on throughout his career, capping the costumes with straggly and curly brown-haired wigs, a quirky mix of bowl cut and mullet, saluting Jágr’s distinctive and unmistakable 1990s-era hairdo. On a Thursday night in Dallas in March, 68 members of the local Czech-Slovak association purchased 68 tickets in honor of their national hero. Jágr wears that number as a nod to the Prague Spring of 1968, a student-led revolution that won a six-month spell of freedom in Czechoslovakia, before Soviet tanks rolled into the city and crushed the rebellion. When I asked a few of the Czech fans at that game where Jágr fits on a list of Czech national heroes, they rank him third—after Václav Havel, the poet, politician, and dissident who was instrumental in the overthrow of communism, and Švejk, the subversive fictional hero of Jaroslav Hašek’s beloved anti-war novel The Good Soldier Švejk.

Jágr’s towering presence in the Czech national imagination is as much a product of a serendipitous bit of historical circumstance as it is a reflection of his undoubted skill on the ice. By the age of 16, Jágr was playing at the highest professional level in what was then Czechoslovakia. At 17, he impressed NHL scouts and players alike with his performance at the 1990 World Junior Championships. He was picked fifth overall in the 1990 NHL draft, which should have meant facing the difficult decision to defect from his native country in order to pursue his hockey career. Instead, that summer, the Iron Curtain fell, and Jágr was free to travel to the United States and play professional hockey at precisely the same moment when his fellow countrymen back in Czechoslovakia were free to watch the NHL on television. In those early years after the end of communism, when you flipped on a hockey game in Czechoslovakia, there was Jágr, the teenage wunderkind, dominating.

The transition for Jágr, however, was a difficult one. When he wasn’t on the ice during his first season in the NHL, the homesick 18-year-old star was said to hole up in his room crying, and his mother had to come in from Czechoslovakia to comfort him. His English was nonexistent; the world he entered into was strange and foreign. The Penguins eventually traded for veteran Czech player Jiri Hrdina, now a scout for the Dallas Stars, to help integrate the future star into the locker room.

The strategy seemed to work. In his second year with the team, the Penguins won the Stanley Cup, and Jágr became a household name. You always knew where Jágr was on the ice because of his floppy locks, the curly mullet that spewed out from the back of his helmet. In 1992, during the first game of the Stanley Cup finals, Czech fans who had skipped work or school to watch the live broadcast of the game saw exactly what made the young Jágr special as he helped lead one of the great comebacks in NHL history.

The Penguins began chipping away at a 4-1 deficit against the Chicago Blackhawks. By the third period, it was 4-3. That’s when Jágr took charge. After intercepting a pass, he whipped the puck around a defender, moving it from his forehand side to his backhand to find a little space on the ice near his favorite spot: along the boards, near the top of the face-off circle. Jágr had launched many offensive strikes from this position, but on this night, there was a crowd of players between him and the net. A Chicago defender tried to pin him against the boards, but Jágr made a daring move, scooping the puck between the defender’s legs and evading his check before stretching out with his entire body to find the puck again with the bottom edge of his stick’s blade. Upon reeling it in, Jágr faked a third defender, then cut around yet another defender, who was tangled up with one of his teammates in front of the goal. And then, finally, he sneaked a hard backhand shot between the diving skate of Chicago goalie Ed Belfour and the goalpost, tying a game the Penguins would go on to win. It is the most memorable of Jágr’s many goals (679 at the time of this writing; 10th on the NHL’s all-time scoring list).

Jágr cultivated a reputation as an arrogant, disengaged talent trying to squeeze every penny he could out of his career.


The 1990s were Jágr’s time, but by the end of the decade, despite being one of the most recognizable forces in the sport—known as much for his distinctive hair as his highlight-reel goal scoring—his career was increasingly defined by an enigmatic, isolated personality and glimpses of misfortune. “I’m dying alive,” he said during his last season in Pittsburgh, a quote that began to turn the Penguins fans, who adored Jágr, against him. He left Pittsburgh in 2001, signing a contract with the Washington Capitals that was, at the time, the largest in NHL history, and cultivated a reputation as an arrogant, disengaged talent trying to squeeze every penny he could out of his career.

Off-ice troubles with gambling debts and unpaid taxes weren’t helped by mediocre performances on the ice. Washington finally dumped the middling star on the New York Rangers. Jágr helped lift the Rangers into playoff contention, but the Rangers let him go in 2008. He landed in Siberia—literally—playing in the Kontinental Hockey League for Avangard Omsk, a two-and-a-half-hour drive from the Russian border of Kazakhstan. He made headlines again in 2010 after his team was swept up in a large, ugly brawl. That game had to be suspended just three minutes and 39 seconds into the first period because all but four players had been thrown out of the game by the officials for fighting.

At nearly any other time in the last 22 years, the Dallas Stars’ signing of Jaromír Jágr would have been a huge deal. But when the Stars picked up the 40-year-old in the summer of 2012 on a one-year, $4.55 million contract, his arrival was met with ambivalence and skepticism. Deadspin called Jágr a “mediocre hired gun, a traveling circus.” Local Stars blog Defending Big D called the signing strange but potentially exciting. Stars general manager Joe Nieuwendyk defended the move, saying he believed the aging star still had “gas in the tank,” that he offered the Stars a chance at making the playoffs. The team’s fresh-faced coach, Glen Gulutzan, himself only six months older than his new star player, said he hoped the veteran could mentor the Stars’ young roster. And, considering the team’s youth, Jágr’s late-career tour stop in Dallas offered new owner Tom Gaglardi a name that could sell jerseys in the fan shop.

In hockey, it is not uncommon for players to burn out and retire by their late 20s. Very few players make it past 37. But when the 39-year-old Jágr returned to the NHL on a one year, $3.3 million contract with the Philadelphia Flyers in 2011, most of the chatter focused not on Jágr’s regained form, but rather on the fact that the player had spurned his former team, the Penguins, who had offered him $2 million for a victory lap. “Jágr does what Jágr wants,” wrote ESPN’s Scott Burnside, and what Jágr wanted, it appeared, was a paycheck. He surprised skeptics when he turned in a decent season in Philadelphia, racking up 54 points in 73 games, modest by Jágr standards but third highest on the team. And the Flyers got what they wanted out of him. During the year Jágr was on the team, their young prospect Claude Giroux emerged as a star player, and management spoke about the influence Jágr had on Giroux’s development and worth ethic.

 

The stone-faced Eastern European is the only player on the team with a small bronze icon of the Madonna and child atop his locker.


For his part, Jágr kept his head down when he signed with the Stars. During the lockout that postponed the start of the 2012-2013 season, he stayed in his hometown of Kladno, playing for the team he rooted for as a child and now owns. A few days before the first game, he landed in Dallas and shirked the team’s offers to find him an upscale apartment near downtown Dallas. Instead, Jágr rented a room at an extended-stay hotel for $169-a-night. He asked management for a key to the rink, and on the team’s nights off, sometimes well after 10 pm, Jágr would go by himself to the ice to skate.

In Dallas, team officials latched onto the Jágr-as-mentor storyline. He runs drills after games and the young guys join in, hopping from leg to leg outside the locker room, skating extra reps of sprints in between the blue and red lines, or swinging around a small circle weight on the end of their hockey sticks. Team officials told me Jágr is going to do with Jamie Benn, the Stars’ 23-year-old top-line center, what he did with the Flyers’ Giroux. Players seemed equally star struck.

“Obviously, this guy’s a living legend,” says Eric Nystrom, a 30-year-old, hardworking forward and son of New York Islanders legend Bobby Nystrom. Among all the guys on the team, Nystrom seemed to hover around Jágr the most during practice, chatting, joking, and running drills together. “I had his poster on the wall when I was a kid, his jersey. It’s amazing.”

By midseason, mentoring aside, the Stars were hovering at the middle of the standings, fighting desperately for the final playoff spot. And nothing revealed the team’s youth and mediocrity more than the fact that Jágr, the grizzled, wandering vet, the oldest guy on the team—the second-oldest active player in NHL, who turned 41 on February 15—led the Stars in scoring.

On the day I am supposed to interview him, Jágr doesn’t feel like talking to me. The highest-scoring European player of all time has always had a reputation for dodging the press. In the late 1990s, Jágr, then at the height of his career, told New Yorker staff writer Alec Wilkinson to get out of Pittsburgh, after his sudden arrival in the city coincided with the breaking of a Pittsburgh Penguins 14-game win streak. In Dallas, the Stars’ public relations people warned me. I’d have to spend a lot of time around the locker room before he’d talk, they said. It’s been a few weeks, and I’ve finally been promised some time to sit down with Jágr. First, it was Wednesday. Now, it’s Friday. There’s no guarantee it’s going to happen then either, and when it comes down to it, Jaromír Jágr can do whatever he wants.

“Jágr does what Jágr wants,” wrote ESPN’s Scott Burnside when Jágr spurned an offer to return to the Pittsburgh Penguins.





The hockey star struts up and down the hallway between the locker room and the team kitchen at the Stars’ Frisco practice facility. He is 6-foot-3 and shirtless, in tight black biker shorts, with a sculpted chest and thighs as thick as calves’ necks. His once-iconic face, with its smooth, baby-face cheeks, is stubbled and wearied. But the protruding brow bridge remains, and those recognizable almond eyes still flash when Jágr shouts a wisecrack at a player or slaps a suited staff member on the rear.

During my time watching him like this, I’ve noticed two sides of Jágr. There’s the all-business Jágr, the stone-faced Eastern European who’s the only player on the team with a small bronze icon of the Madonna and child atop his locker. He’s the one who mumbles to reporters, who splits off from the pack during practice to skate his own drills or ask a young player to feed him dozens of passes to one-time into an empty net. Then there’s this Jágr, the knavish Peter Pan prankster. Around the locker room, he isn’t the superstar; he’s just another aging hockey player trying to feed off the youth around him.

On this day, the hardworking, loner hockey player shtick doesn’t fit. Jágr is in a particularly ebullient mood. Earlier, during practice, each time he beat goalie Kari Lehtonen on a drill, he raised his stick in the air and skated to the boards, giving the young fans watching the practice high fives by punching the glass. He was one of the last players off the ice, and he has been bouncing around the locker room for so long most of the other reporters are gone. I wonder if he sees me waiting for our supposedly scheduled interview, and then he looks at me as he walks by.

“Give me a minute,” he says. “I need to calm down before I talk to you.”

Calming down means heading into the kitchen, where Jágr loads up a plate of barbecue brisket and beans and teases Chefy, the Stars’ cook, about his food. “Chefy thinks French toast is bread with a hole in the middle and an egg,” he jaws at two other players at the dining table in the players’ lounge. Nystrom is busy rounding up drinking cohorts for the afternoon off. Cody Eakin, a 21-year-old prospect from Winnipeg, is in. Nystrom turns to Jágr.

“Coming, Jimmy? It’s right off Preston.”

The superstar doesn’t look up. He stoops over his lunch, elbows bracketing the plate, his head just a few inches from the morsels he backhands into his mouth with his fork. Chefy, a rotund man with the jolly disposition of a ship’s cook, comes in from the kitchen.

“I think I’m going to put together a book of Jágrisms,” Chefy says to Stretch (real name: Jason Rademan), a towering native Pennsylvanian who runs PR and player services for the Stars. Stretch smiles.

Jágr is finally finished with his lunch. He points to a row of leather lounge chairs toward the back of the room. “Over there,” he says in his still thick Czech accent, jabbing his finger at a chair facing a wall with a television. “This won’t take long, right?” It is more a warning than a question. I remember Alec Wilkinson writing that when the Penguins PR personnel told him that Jágr would give him only 20 minutes of interview time, he thought they were joking. For the kind of feature someone like Wilkinson was used to writing, he would likely spend hours, if not days or weeks, with a subject. Of course not, I say. I’ll be quick.

As we start chatting, Jágr is short with his answers. He doesn’t remember a time when he didn’t play hockey, he says. During the communist years in Czech, sports were the only avenue toward a better life. I ask about his grandfather, whose release from jail during the Prague Spring of 1968 prompted Jágr’s choice of 68 as his jersey number. It turns out both Jágr’s grandparents were imprisoned under the communist regime, and his parents met because his mother’s family moved to his father’s hometown of Kladno to be close to the jail where both their parents were locked up.

“They give up so much in life for me,” he says of his parents. “They truly give up. It’s not like parents who drive their kids to practice. They did everything, and they didn’t know if I was ever going to be able to play in the NHL.”

One of the few upsides of living under the communist regime was that youth sports were free. At age 7, Jágr says, he started doing 1,000 squats and 150 pushups a day. He got stronger and better. He started playing with kids two and three years older than him. While other children his age had one practice and game a week, he would have four practices and games in different age groups. By 16, he was playing for Kladno’s pro team in the highest-level Czech league, but he couldn’t prepare for exactly what his move to Pittsburgh and the NHL would mean.

“I became a soap opera,” Jágr says. “I wasn’t the only one to defect, but I was 18. I was the youngest one. I was the only one to win scoring titles, the MVP. So I become their guy.”

It is impossible to know what being this kind of national figure feels like, and when I ask Jágr about it, he shrugs it off. It’s just what happened, he says. The timing was right. But later, he begins to talk about the pressure he felt as a young player in the NHL.

“When I was younger, of course, I wanted to win the scoring titles,” Jágr says. “That was my goal. When I win it, the season was good. And if I didn’t win it, I didn’t play good. I didn’t have a good season. That was in my head. Everything in your head. Whatever you put in your head, it is going to happen.”

I ask him if that is why he is in the NHL, to reach 700 goals, to bump past his former teammate, mentor, and fellow Penguin playmaker Mario Lemieux on the all-time points chart.

“It is funny how this works,” he says before a long pause. “How to explain it. Everything changes with your age. You are different thinking. I think you are less selfish. When you are younger you try to prove to the world that you’re the best, or whatever. And when you are paid the most on the team, if you are not the best on the team, the media go after you more than anybody. And it is not good if you have a bad season. It is not a good feeling, trust me. But when you are older you just think differently. I never look at the long stats.”

In 1994, after the Penguins won their second Stanley Cup, a 22-year-old Jágr appeared on a talk show on Czech television and told an interviewer he hoped to retire at 30, after making his money, to enjoy life. But turning 30 coincided with his big contract. Jágr converted to Orthodox Christianity in 2001, right at the time when life got difficult for him—the bad years in Washington, the tax and gambling issues. By the time he decamped to Siberia in 2008, he was 36, unmarried, and still playing hockey.

“I was just happy to be on the ice,” Jágr says of his early years in the league. “I had a car. I could buy some stuff.”

In another old video from Czech TV in the 1990s, a young Jágr shows reporters around his parents’ farm. His mother fries pastries on a small electric hot plate as she talks about her son. Jágr takes a hockey stick and maneuvers a small ball around a barking farm dog. Toward the end of the segment, Jágr rolls out his black Mitsubishi 3000 GT from a clapboard garage. He runs his hand along the sleek sports car and grins at the camera.

These days Jágr drives a white Mercedes with an expired temporary resident tag. Stretch tells me he has been trying to get Jágr to take care of his car’s registration for more than a month, but he can’t get his attention long enough to fill out the paperwork. I wonder if there are unpaid tickets, and if there are, are they really Stretch’s problem?

I also wonder why Jágr is still doing this. He has money. He owns a hockey team in his hometown. He could return to Kladno and finish out his career a hometown legend. Instead, he is in Dallas, playing alongside kids half his age, getting whipped by the league’s best, beating his body late into the night after the game to stay fit enough to continue to perform at the highest level in his sport.

“Everything changes with your age. You are different thinking. I think you are less selfish. When you are younger you try to prove to the world that you’re the best,” Jágr says.


“It’s in my genes,” Jágr says. “My dad is 70, and he still has a farm and he’s working every day. My mother, it’s the same thing. I cannot stop. I don’t think our family enjoyed life much. We feel like we have to work all the time.”

Well, at least you love what you do, I say.

“But you know what? My dad fucking loves the farm,” he says. “I ask him, ‘Why do you do that?’ Because he doesn’t have to work—he’s so rich. And he answers, ‘I have to be loyal to the things that fucking got me to be rich. When I had nothing, that gave me food.’ ”

Jágr stops suddenly and jumps up from his seat. “Good enough?” he asks, walking away. I get up after him and look at my recorder. We’ve been talking for 40 minutes. I thank him for his time.

“I give you a lot more than I fucking thought I would,” he says, not really to me, but just looking out across the empty room. “You owe me big bucks for that.”

Write to [email protected].

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