Jaromir Jagr had quite the weekend in Pittsburgh for his jersey retirement ceremony.
The Czechia forward skated with his old team, and played witness to the monstrous sight that was Sidney Crosby in a mullet. He saw his number 68 rise to the rafters of PPG Paints Arena, and participated in warmups ahead of the Penguins’ game against the Los Angeles Kings.
The 52-year-old legend’s final act was to be a guest on SportsNet Pittsburgh’s broadcast of the game where he managed to make headlines there as well. Jagr joined the booth in the second period and began discussing retired Pens play-by-play announcer Mike Lange.
“He understood my language barrier, so we were…,” Jagr said before trailing off.
It was at that very moment that Kings forward Phillip Danault put a shot on goal while LA was on a power play. Tristan Jarry made the initial save, but left a big rebound in front of the net.
“Oh f***,” Jagr said. A few seconds passed.
Laughter erupted from the box as the announcers were quick to cover up Jagr’s blip.
“Sorry,” Jagr said sheepishly.
“The player came out of you right there!” they replied.
When the play subsided, Jagr returned to his conversation about his long-time friend in Lange. The two struck up friendship when Jagr was banished to the front of the Penguins bus his rookie year.
“He was a young player; rookies are all forced to the front,” Lange told NHL.com. “I was like, four back, on the right, sitting on the aisle or whatever. He came in, and he said, ‘Can I sit over there?’ I said, ‘Sure you can.’ So, he jumped in there and he was there.”
Jagr, the first European to play for the Pens, was desperately looking for ways to make the Penguins feel like home (weird thought, we know), found a certain solace in Lange.
“We started talking, just short stuff. You don’t say too much, just a couple of things.” Lange added. “The next time, he came back, he says, ‘Let me get in there!’ Then we just kind of got used to it. He would ask me things, and I could help him a little bit with his English. Then I’d ask him the dumbest questions to get him to kind of open up and talk. It just kind of built as a friendship.”
The pair got so close that Jagr would give Lange ideas for strange phrases to sneak in to his broadcasts, something that the eccentric announcer was known for. Lange coined the odd term “scratch my back with a hacksaw,” and Jagr challanged him to use “smoked him like a bad cigar.”
Instead of taking that call as it was, Lange asked the young Jagr to do him one more favor, to write it down in Czech and teach Lange how to say it in Jagr’s native tongue.
“Twenty-six years later, lots of Mike Lange catchphrases have come and gone. But that one, beyond a shadow of a doubt, will always be my favorite of the bunch,” Lange wrote for the Players’ Tribune. “It’s still in my shoebox.”
Jagr has 24 NHL seasons under his belt. You can take the man out of hockey, but you cannot take hockey out of the man. And the hockey in the man still screams “f***!” when the opposing team almost scores.
