Stamkos hopes to cap best season ever with another Stanley Cup
From the beginning of the season, when he wanted to prove he was worthy of the Canadian Olympic team, the Lightning star has put together the best overall campaign of his Hall-of-Fame career
If you want to peer into the soul of Steven Stamkos, a good place to start is Jari Byrski, a Polish immigrant who admits he knows little about the fundamentals of hockey strategy, but has built one of the most successful and prodigious hockey schools in the world. Byrski’s SK8ON school in Toronto has a list of graduates that would make a formidable NHL all-star team. With a background in child psychology, Byrski emerged from poverty and came to Toronto in the 1990s and got the idea for a hockey school when he took his son public skating and a woman offered him $20 if he could teach her boy to skate the way Bryski’s son was being taught to skate.
“I wouldn’t invite my friends to come over to my place because I was embarrassed,” Bryski told me of his life in Poland for a book I wrote in 2013. “When they would ask me where is the washrooms, I’ve got to show them the outhouse. But the outhouse in the summertime, holy shit, it stinks. We had no toilet paper, so when you wiped your ass, you did it with the newspaper and the newsprint was left on your ass. If there was snow, you wiped your ass with the snow.”
It’s interesting that Byrski and Stamkos became hockey kindred spirits. Because like Bryski, Stamkos came from humble circumstances, the son of a first-generation Macedonian-Canadian who didn’t play minor hockey as a kid, largely because it was unaffordable. “My parents were pretty typical immigrants,” Chris Stamkos once told me. “Make 20 dollars a week and save 30.”
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