Florida Panthers right wing Jaromir Jagr watches a high puck during a game against the Winnipeg Jets on Dec. 15, 2016.Bruce Fedyck
Any day now, Jaromir Jagr of the Florida Panthers will move into second place on the NHL career scoring list, behind only Wayne Gretzky.
Think about that for a moment.
In other sports, milestones of this historic magnitude would be blared from the rooftops, complete with Twitter campaigns, sepia-toned retrospectives and any manner of promotional excesses.
But hockey still maintains a greater decorum. There is a modesty among its players that means these events sometimes come and go with minimal fanfare.
Toward the end of last season, Jagr slipped past Gordie Howe, who scored 1,850 points in a career that lasted until the age of 51. With three games to go until the Christmas break, Jagr is three points shy of Mark Messier, No. 2 with 1,887 points.
Most of what's been said about Jagr these past few years has focused on his age – and how last season, at 43, he had 27 goals and 66 points to lead the improving Panthers in scoring. Florida won the Atlantic Division, and Jagr's mentorship helped emerging talents such as Aleksander Barkov and Jonathan Huberdeau to breakout years.
There was always a sense of playfulness in Jagr, even early in his career, which sometimes hid his deep love for and commitment to the game. Now, of course, it is manifested in the oddball late-night workout schedule he maintains. In each of his final five NHL stops – Philadelphia, Dallas, Boston, New Jersey and now Florida – he's acquired access cards to the arenas, so he can exercise whenever the mood strikes, sometimes in the wee small hours of the morning.
"Whenever people talk about Jagr, they talk about his size, the size of his butt, the length of his stick and his hands, but the thing that always got me early on was his work ethic," said Paul Coffey, who played with Jagr in Pittsburgh at the start of his career, but was also Messier's teammate for close to a decade in Edmonton.
"I remember Jaromir, in broken English, asking me once, 'Why do you ride the bike so much?' And I told him the same thing Larry Robinson once told me. When Larry was 30 and I was 20, I thought, 'Man, how could he still be playing at 30?' But at the first Canada Cup I went to, which was 1981, Larry said to me, 'If you take care of your body, your body will take care of you. And don't start when you're 30 or 35, because it will be too late.'"
Jagr shares one common trait with Howe, beyond their longevity and strength. In the same way that Howe gave six years to the World Hockey Association before returning for one final NHL season, Jagr spent three seasons in Russia's Kontinental Hockey League, playing for Omsk. Had Jagr kept at it in the NHL, he would have reached this statistical moment far earlier.
But where some players come back from a tour of duty in Russia with strange tales of the life, the travel, practice routines, Jagr always spoke highly of his time there, treating it as he does so many things, a life experience, one more chapter on an unexpectedly long journey.
The Penguins drafted him fifth overall in 1990, a player who bore a startling physical resemble to Mario Lemieux, the Penguin star. Soon, Jagr's given name – Jaromir – was turned into an anagram, Mario Jr.
The political changes in Eastern Europe were still ongoing in Jagr's draft year, so there was still some uncertainty over when the younger generation of Czech and Russian players might land in the NHL. But Jagr made it known privately to the Penguins that he would come over as soon as possible, if they chose him, information that the four teams drafting ahead of them didn't have.
Accordingly, Jagr surfaced sooner than expected, allowing Pittsburgh to add him to a star-studded roster that also included Lemieux, Coffey, Ron Francis, Joey Mullen, Tom Barrasso and others. When Jagr had some difficulty adjusting to life in North America in the beginning, the Penguins traded for Jiri Hrdina, a veteran Czech player who'd been playing in the NHL with the Calgary Flames, who helped him make the transition. Jagr's mother also made the trip, and he lived with her and she cooked his meals.
"We take it for granted, but here was a kid, who was 18, leaving a country that for most of his life was Communist and coming over to North America," said Francis, the Carolina Hurricanes' general manager, who played extensively as Jagr's centre.
"It's a whole new culture and a whole new way of life. It can be overwhelming at times. So to have a guy from your homeland like Hrdina that you can trust and have those conversations with was a huge factor in his adjustment."
Jagr was a fourth liner in his rookie season and promptly won the Stanley Cup. The Penguins won again the next year, Jagr's second season, which means four months after his 20th birthday, he already had two Stanley Cup rings. And though he's had a remarkable career since, and played a total of 208 NHL playoff games, those are the only two Stanley Cups he's won.
He was part of the Czech team that won the 1998 Olympics in Nagano, when NHLers first started to participate, and has been at every Olympics since.
Jagr eventually became a thoughtful and respected voice in the NHL, but there were times early on when his reputation was not good. But according to Francis, what appeared to be selfishness to those watching from afar was just the outward manifestation of his desire to be the best – and the frustration that bubbled to the surface when things didn't go his way.
"Joey Mullen and I used to talk about how we might handle him and help him along," Francis said. "I remember one time Joey said to him, 'We don't want to see you pouting this year. If anything goes wrong, you can't pout. You've got to work through it.' And then Joey said, 'If we see any of that pouting stuff, then mama has to make us chocolate chip cookies.' He kinda looked at us and all of a sudden, a big smile came across his face. He got it – that we were teasing him.
"It took time, but you could build that relationship and that trust."
One year, when Francis was on the injured list with a back injury, Jagr let his frustration boil over in a game. Afterward, Francis took him aside privately and chewed him out for 15 or 20 minutes, he estimated.
"I tried to educate him about why he couldn't behave that way," Francis said. "At the end, he said, 'This is great, thank you.' He said, 'Nobody tells me this. I need to hear this. This is good stuff.' Which guy would say that? Most guys would get pissed off if you did that to them. But he was willing and receptive."
Jagr won't ever catch Gretzky (at 2,857 points) and wouldn't have even if he hadn't gone to Russia. His scoring pace has slowed this season and Florida is in the midst of a regime change in which the current general manager, Tom Rowe, is now the interim coach, having replaced Gerard Gallant 20 games into the season.
Going into the year, Jagr needed 132 points to become just the second NHLer to reach 2,000 points. That seemed an attainable goal within a two-year span based on last year's production.
Now, it appears as though it would take this year and possibly two more to get to 2,000, at which point he would be 47. But Jagr has said he wants to play until he's 50, and who's to say he won't?
He has won five scoring championships, one Hart Trophy, and made the first all-star team seven times. He is the surest of sure bets for the Hall of Fame once he retires, whenever that might be. But it has been an extraordinary career for the young man from Kladno, with twists and turns you didn't see with any other of the all-time greats.
As for the man he's about to pass, Messier, on a conference call with reporters this week, put himself in the records-are-meant-to-be broken camp, and is fine with the big Czech nudging him down one place on the career list.
"When there have been almost 6,000 people who have come through the league, I can't believe I've been sitting at No. 2 from where I started my professional career," Messier said. "I was never really an elite scorer anywhere I played. I was always playing against kids older than me and I turned professional at age 17. To find myself sitting in second place, I'm as surprised and as humbled as anybody. I look at when Wayne [Gretzky] passed Gordie, it didn't diminish what Gordie had done in his own career – or who he was as a player and a man.
"So No. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, 20, it doesn't really matter for me. I'm honoured to be in the circle."
As is Jagr.