Forty-four years ago, in Kladno, Czechoslovakia, a hockey legend was born. Jaromir Jagr grew up in Czechoslovakia during a time of communist rule. He was born to hardworking parents and his family, like much of the country, could not afford any luxuries, or even some things that we would call necessities today.
“There was no chance at all I would have an easy life unless I played sports,” Jagr says. So that’s exactly what he did. He attended a school for skilled young hockey players and was regularly skating with kids two to three years older than he was. Jaromir’s father, also named Jaromir, had a farm six miles from the Jagrs’ house. Each day, the elder Jaromir would ride a bike and make his son run to the farm. This was the beginning of Jaromir’s intense training regimen that he still sticks to today.
Recommended for you
“When I was seven years old, I started doing squats. I did 1,000 a day, every day,” says Jagr. This is when he believes his game took off. Jagr started playing with, and beating, guys five to six years older than he was. By the 1987-88 season, he had earned a promotion to the Czechoslovakian national team, and he was the team’s best player.
In 1990, when Jagr was 18 years old, the Pittsburgh Penguins selected him as the fifth overall pick in the NHL Entry Draft. The Penguins requested that he attend school to learn English, a language of which he didn't know a single word.
“That was the toughest thing I’d ever done. I think I was supposed to go there for six weeks; I think I quit after four,” Jagr remembers. A few months into his rookie season, the Penguins traded for fellow Czechoslovakian Jiri Hrdina. This helped to break the language barrier, as Hrdina spoke English and could translate to and from Jagr. But Hrdina wasn't the teammate Jagr looked up to most; that teammate was Super Mario, Mario Lemieux.
“I always wanna be the best. When Mario was there, I knew it don’t matter how good I’m gonna be, I’m still never gonna be better than him. That guy was the most talented player. People don’t even know. It’s great you got Ovechkin, you got Crosby, but [Lemieux] was on a different level,” Jagr says.
The Penguins won the Stanley Cup both of Jagr’s first two NHL seasons, and during those years his popularity skyrocketed. He was known around Pittsburgh for his famous mullet. He was asked to read the weather on a local radio show. And, although his English still wasn’t very good, he was loved by the media because he frequently tried to tell them jokes in his broken English.
“I was pretty popular in Pittsburgh,” Jagr recalls.
Jagr collected a lot of hardware during his tenure with the Penguins. He won the Art Ross Trophy as the NHL’s scoring champion in the 1994-95 season and each year from 1997-2001. The next year, Jagr set a record for most points (149) by a European-born player. His 62 goals and 87 assists from that season still stand as his career highs. He won four straight scoring titles from 1997-98 to 2000-01. Before the 1998-99 season, Jagr was named captain of the Penguins. And he was awarded the Hart Memorial Trophy as the NHL’s Most Valuable Player in 1999.
Pittsburgh traded Jagr to the Washington Capitals during the offseason following the 2000-01 season. He signed a seven-year, $77 million contract with the Capitals. At the time, it was the largest NHL contract ever. His years in Washington D.C. were largely a disappointment because of his decline in production, and he was traded to the New York Rangers during the 2003-04 season. During the 2005-06 season, he set Rangers team records for most single-season goals (54), most single-season points (123) and most single-season power play goals (24).
“Our team was built around him,” Rangers goaltender Henrik Lundqvist has stated.
After the 2007-08 season, Jagr left the NHL and signed a two-year contract with Avangard Omsk of Russia’s Kontinental Hockey League. He stayed in the KHL until July 2011, when he decided to return to the NHL.
“I started missing the NHL––the full arenas, the excitement, the playoffs. So I said, ‘I’m gonna try to come back’,” Jagr explains.
He had offers to return to the NHL with many teams including the Detroit Red Wings, Philadelphia Flyers and his former team, the Penguins. Ultimately, he chose to sign a one-year deal with the Penguins' in-state rivals, the Flyers. Upon his return, he didn't have much of an impact. He was a shell of his former self and was basically irrelevant in hockey. Jagr wasn't scoring many goals, or even playing in many games. After his season with the Flyers, he managed to keep playing for a while by signing one-year contracts with the Dallas Stars and the New Jersey Devils.
The Devils traded him to the Florida Panthers during the 2014-15 season. Many hockey fans thought the trade was absurd on the Panthers' end because they gave up two draft picks to get Jagr. In April 2015, he re-signed with the Panthers on a one-year deal.
It’s amazing that a 44-year-old can skate with guys half his age and still be competitive. He currently leads the Panthers in scoring (24 G, 31 A) this season, and was named to the NHL All-Star Game earlier this year. Jagr says he’s still able to compete in the NHL because of his strict training routine. He trains by skating sprints and tight turns while wearing a 44-pound weighted vest and four pound weights taped to his ankles. Instead of pucks, Jagr shoots weighted discs. He claims to shoot hundreds of wrist shots a day with an eight pound medicine ball against a wall in the training room. He also prepares for games by stick-handling with a 10-pound donut weight on the blade of his stick.
"You’ve got to trick the brain,” says Jagr regarding his work with weighted vests, pucks, and donuts. He believes his workouts make him feel lighter and faster.
“When I work out now, I need more time to recover than when I was 20 years old, so I have to be a lot smarter. I gotta be right-on with everything I do," he adds.
Jagr doesn't have a wife. He has no children, and he has no one waiting for him to come home from the rink each day. He believes that is an advantage because it allows him to focus completely on hockey.
"If I had a kid, I wouldn't be playing hockey right now. I have to put 100 percent toward whatever I love. If I had a kid, my kid would be number one and hockey would just be on the side. I can't just play hockey as a job. I have to be able to fully love it," Jagr confesses.
“As long as I can play, that’s what I’m doing. If I can play until I die, that’s what I’ll do,” Jagr tells reporters. During his 25-year NHL career, Jagr has been named to 13 NHL All-Star Games and won two Stanley Cups. Within the past month, Jagr has moved into third place in goals (746), and points (1,857) in the NHL all-time record books. He's also sixth in assists all-time (1,111). No one knows how many goals, assists, and points Jagr might have scored in the NHL if he hadn’t spent three seasons playing in the KHL.
It won’t be long after Jagr decides to hang ‘em up that he will receive a well-deserved call from the Hockey Hall of Fame.
