Culture
How Jaromir Jagr defined 1990s culture in Pittsburgh
The Pittsburgh Penguins of the early 1990s were larger than life, a great team that should have won more than two championships. Eight of the 20 players who dressed on the night the Penguins won the Stanley Cup for the first time, May 25, 1991, in Minnesota, are already in the Hockey Hall of Fame. The coach and general manager of those teams are in the Hockey Hall of Fame, too.
It’s fitting, then, that Jaromir Jagr will someday be the ninth player from that team to have his bust on display in Toronto.
You can’t say 1990s without the number nine, and you can’t discuss 1990s culture in Pittsburgh without Jagr.
GO DEEPER
The Pittsburgh stories that built Jaromir Jagr’s legend
“The players parked in this outside lot at the Civic Arena back then,” former Penguins teammate Rick Tocchet said. “And when Jags would walk out to his car, I mean, the teenagers standing there would go absolutely crazy. He had the mullet going. All the ’90s clothes. It was like the Beatles had showed up.”
Oh, the mullet. Lots of players showcased mullets long ago, but few could proudly showcase hair of Jagr’s caliber.
For almost his entire career in Pittsburgh — it spanned from 1990 to 2001 — Jagr sported a mullet. While the mullet was more of an ’80s phenomenon in the United States, Pittsburgh fashion is historically a decade behind. So he was a Pittsburgher from the very beginning, a teenager raised in a Communist country who somehow fit in from the very beginning.
“Part of his appeal was his overall look,” said Paul Steigerwald, the longtime Penguins broadcaster who immediately introduced Jagr to Pittsburgh in 1990, just as he had for Mario Lemieux in 1984.
“Jagr looked like a character from ‘Thor’ when he showed up in Pittsburgh. He was really good-looking, but he was also exotic. He was kind of a mythical, ancient creature. We had never seen anyone who looked like him, especially at 18. People just fell in love with him right away, in no time at all.”
Jagr arrived in Pittsburgh in the summer of 1990 and spoke almost no English. Like many in his position, he turned to 1990s television to learn the language.
In particular, Jagr binge-watched “Married… With Children” and “Saved by the Bell”.
A few years into his career, a celebrity hockey game took place at Civic Arena following a Penguins game. Mark-Paul Gosselaar, who played Zack Morris on “Saved by the Bell”, was one of the participants.
After the Penguins game, Jagr was made aware of it.
“I can still hear him screaming in the locker room about it,” said Mark Madden, the Pittsburgh radio host who covered the Penguins for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette at the time. “He kept yelling at Petr Nedved to hurry up and get dressed so they could go watch Zack Morris play hockey. He was legitimately excited about it. I don’t think I ever saw him so happy.”
Jagr’s excitement for seeing a ’90s teen idol paled in comparison to the excitement Pittsburgh displayed toward its own teen idol.
Teenage boys in Pittsburgh tried to grow their hair as magnificently as Jagr’s. Few succeeded, but many tried. Teenage girls in Pittsburgh tried to date Jagr. Many succeeded.
“He was the ultimate rockstar,” Tocchet said. “I’ve never seen young people fall in love with a player like him.”
When it became public knowledge that Jagr had a sweet tooth for Kit Kat bars, the Penguins suddenly had a problem. Thousands upon thousands of Kit Kats arrived in the mail at Civic Arena.
“Oh my God, the Kit Kat bars,” former Penguins teammate Kevin Stevens said with a laugh.
Jagr’s preference for them — and his fans’ response to it — forced the voice of the Penguins, Mike Lange, to make an announcement.
“I had to broadcast during a game that people had to stop sending Kit Kat bars to the arena,” Lange said. “It had gotten out of control.”
So had Jagr’s driving. While the number remains unclear, Jagr was assessed an enormous amount of speeding tickets during his first two years in Pittsburgh. Minor details like speed limits weren’t of great interest to him.
The speeding tickets became so frequent that Jagr briefly was stripped of his driver’s license during the 1992 postseason, forcing Lemieux to provide transportation to and from games.
GO DEEPER
Yohe: Jaromir Jagr, Mike Lange and bus rides that forged a bond
It’s a good thing that Jagr had a ride to those playoffs. That’s when he became a star on the ice. Off the ice, he already had been one for a couple of years.
Those Penguins were blessed with all-time greats, and perhaps the only thing more noteworthy than their talent was the size of their personalities. For all of Lemieux’s shyness, his teammates were brash and beloved in Pittsburgh. Stevens made his famous prediction when the Penguins trailed the Bruins in the 1991 Wales Conference final. Phil Bourque spoke of “partying on the river all summer” with the Stanley Cup, and then did just that. Ulf Samuelsson may have been the loudest of the bunch.
But then there was Jagr, who had maybe the biggest personality of them all.
He would simply take over interviews after the Penguins had won playoff series in 1991 and 1992, taking microphones from reporters and cutting a monologue on live television.
His comments in Chicago after the Penguins swept the Blackhawks to win the Stanley Cup in 1992 became the stuff of Pittsburgh legend. Lange’s “Elvis has just left the building” call after Penguins wins wasn’t lost on Jagr in that moment.
He was asked about the parade that would take place in Pittsburgh to commemorate the victory.
“I want to see some pretty girls,” he responded. “I don’t care about Elvis. Just pretty girls. Hello.”
As Jagr’s greatness grew into the mid-’90s, so did the marketing of Jagr.
Kids in Pittsburgh weren’t just eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch. Rather, it had to be Jaromir Jagr peanut butter.
Jagr wasn’t particularly mature during that time. He didn’t have to be. The Penguins had plenty of adults, and Jagr’s childlike persona only made him more popular in Pittsburgh, especially among the Penguins’ growing, young fan base.
Lemieux could be the king, and he was. Jagr was the prince. He frequently appeared on local TV stations to give weather reports. He did the same thing on the WDVE morning radio show. He was the class clown, but he was also smarter than anybody in the class. Flash a laugh and a smile, and everyone swooned.
“It was like when Pierre Larouche showed up in Pittsburgh,” Lange said. “It was like when Paul Coffey showed up. But I think it was even bigger with Jaromir. You’ve never seen people fall in love with anyone like that.”
Jagr sported jean jackets, obsessed over popular TV shows and liked grunge music. What made him unique, perhaps, was that he came from a faraway land that featured a much different culture, and yet, he was very American from the beginning.
Even before Jagr arrived in Pittsburgh, he carried a picture of Ronald Reagan in his wallet. To him, America was the promised land.
Pittsburgh quickly became his playground, and he became a cultural influence with few peers in the world of sports.
“I saw it the first time I took him to the mall,” Steigerwald said. “He was like every other kid in that mall. He was just bigger, stronger, had better hair and was better at hockey. He was just so cool. Everyone wanted to be like him.”
There was only one of him, of course.
“He had the whole city wrapped around his finger,” Stevens said. “A heartthrob at 18. It was something to see. People wanted to be around him and wanted to be just like him.”
(Photo: Al Messerschmidt / Associated Press)
She was blond and he was dark-haired; they were almost photonegatives. She looked as if she’d been in Bergman films. He was, visually, America’s Camus — wary, heavy-lidded, wreathed in cigarillo smoke, an intellectual turned out in black Levi’s and sheepskin-lined leather jackets.
Hustvedt and Auster’s double-barreled impact could prompt strange reactions. Before their wedding dinner, Hustvedt writes, a poet friend of Paul’s lifted a glass and said, “To the bride and groom, two people so good-looking I’d like to slice their faces with a razor.” Hustvedt wasn’t surprised when he slowly faded from their lives.
Auster was diagnosed with cancer in January 2023, when he was 75. Hustvedt tells the story of his illness — the chaotic E.R. visits, the hair loss, the shrinking and then metastasizing of his tumor, the wracking immunotherapy, the wheelchairs, the inability to write and the gradual loss of language — largely by reprinting the matter-of-fact group emails she sent to close friends to keep them apprised of his progress.
These sorts of missives, as anyone who has written or received them knows, are an art form of their own. When delivering good news, Hustvedt urged caution. “There is an important difference between optimism and hope,” she wrote in one such email. “The optimist’s tendency to cheer every piece of good news and predict a good outcome is understandable but creates emotional swings that, at least for those who love the patient, are unsustainable. Hope, on the other hand, is necessary for living on.”
Auster was stoic about his illness, but restless and held captive in the borderless region he termed “Cancerland.” No longer able to write fiction, near his death he began to compose a series of letters to his grandson. These letters, which are largely about family history, are printed here and are models of that form: warm, direct, undogmatic.
Welcome to Lit Trivia, the Book Review’s regular quiz about books, authors and literary culture. This week’s challenge is focused on unfinished novels that their authors didn’t live to see published. In the five multiple-choice questions below, tap or click on the answer you think is correct. After the last question, you’ll find links to the books if you’d like to do further reading.
CHERNOBYL, LIFE, AND OTHER DISASTERS, by Yevgenia Nayberg
“You have to share many things with others … but what you remember belongs to you and you alone,” Yevgenia (Genya) Nayberg writes in the author’s note to her graphic memoir, “Chernobyl, Life, and Other Disasters.”
The elegantly composed pages of this moving story, told largely through Nayberg’s effervescent illustrations, make clear the special place she holds in her heart for memories of her childhood in Kiev (now spelled Kyiv), Ukraine.
It is 1986, Ukraine is still part of the Soviet empire, and the entire world is anticipating Halley’s comet. Yet there are more important things in Genya’s life than the approaching comet. She is 11 years old and preparing for the entrance exam to Kiev’s National Secondary School of Art.
Inspired by her mother, who is an artist, Genya loves to draw and paint. But there is an obstacle: The family is Jewish and the art school — like many schools in the former Soviet Union — accepts only 1 percent of Jewish applicants.
When Genya was 5, her grandpa, who lived through Stalin’s Terror, told her she should “not stick out in school.” He taught her to read using Pravda, which was filled with articles about imperialism and inflation — evil spirits that haunted her dreams. (Pravda and Izvestiya — The Truth and The News — were the two major newspapers in the Soviet Union, and everyone knew the joke that accurately reflected Soviet reality: There is no news in The Truth and no truth in The News.)
In first grade, Genya’s “Honorary Teacher of the Soviet Union” — as manipulative and sinister as the government she served — demanded unconditional love from the pupils in her class, going so far as to ask them to raise their hands if they were willing to give blood to her in the event she needed a transfusion.
The same year, in military training class, the children learned the pretending game: When Genya complained that the gas mask she was supposed to practice putting on, in case of an American nuclear attack, was too big for her face, the instructor replied, “Pretend that it fits.” Both teachers and students were to pretend that everything in the country was ideal, while they waited for the promised dawn of a bright Soviet future. Nobody knew then that the nuclear fallout would come not from across the ocean but from within.
Now it is spring and Genya is bored, painting Young Pioneers with red neckties (a Soviet national scout group) over and over again at the behest of the tutor who is helping her get ready for the July exam. She consoles herself with the thought that if she is accepted she can paint whatever she likes.
On April 26 there is an accident at the Chernobyl nuclear plant, 90 kilometers from Kiev, but there is no official information about the damage or even about the accident itself. On May 1, International Workers’ Day, everyone goes outside for a parade, as usual.
On the left-hand page of a double-page spread, Kiev, in Nayberg’s exquisitely wrought, soft-hued rendering, is “blooming like a giant cream cake with white, pink and purple chestnut flowers.” On the right-hand page, as if it were part of the same scene, Nayberg has drawn a stark picture of the Chernobyl nuclear plant, stamped with the word “RADIATION” in Russian, that makes it look like a colossal tombstone. “Like every year,” young Genya wryly comments, “it is a perfect day.”
In the absence of information, Genya’s family must rely on rumors. Her mother, the driving force in the book, adds iodine to the children’s milk and takes Genya and her 3-year-old brother 1,300 kilometers away to Volgograd (formerly Stalingrad), in Russia, to stay with their cousins.
As Genya bikes by the city’s many World War II monuments that depict victorious soldiers, she encounters “war survivors that never quite survived,” begging for bread. In Soviet Russia, it turns out, they play the pretending game, too.
In July, to their hosts’ horror, Genya and her mother return to Kiev for the exam that cannot be missed. The three-part test — two days for composition, two days for painting and two days for drawing — is grueling.
Happily for Genya and her repeated painting of Young Pioneers cheerfully performing selfless deeds, the theme of the composition portion is “In the Morning of Our Country.” Weirdly, this could be her ticket to freedom of expression.
Nayberg’s narrator is resilient, funny and ironic, observing her surroundings with an artist’s probing eye.
Her story gracefully brings to life the Soviet world — torn down in 1991 and recently resurrected by the latest Russian dictator — provoking thorny questions about different approaches to art, the cost of trying to conform and the complexity of family ties.
“Stories let us hold on to people a little longer,” Nayberg writes at the end of this tender memoir dedicated to her artist mother. Genya’s mom, and the rest of the characters in “Chernobyl, Life, and Other Disasters,” will stay with me for years to come.
CHERNOBYL, LIFE, AND OTHER DISASTERS | By Yevgenia Nayberg | (Ages 10 and up) | Neal Porter Books | 200 pp. | Paperback, $15.99
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