Hockey Confidential (34 page)

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 profitable 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 ejected 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.”

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.