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Jim Kyte was a fearsome NHL tough guy, but his biggest fight was reinventing himself after injuries ended his career, writes Andrew Duffy.
1st Period: Growing up deaf
As a boy, Jim Kyte lived in fear of Belleville.
That city was home to the province’s residential school for the deaf — once known as the Ontario Institution for the Education of the Deaf and Dumb — and Kyte wanted nothing to do with it.
“I always worried I’d be sent off to Belleville if I didn’t do well in school,” he remembers.
Kyte’s mother, Gayle, had always suspected Jim was hearing impaired since, as a toddler, he would rarely respond when she called. The diagnosis was confirmed when Kyte was three years old.
It turned out that all five of the Kyte brothers were deaf: They suffered from auditory nerve degeneration, a problem commonly associated with aging.
In the Kyte family, however, a faulty gene triggered the damage. Curiously, the family’s only girl, Aynslee, was unaffected.
Jim’s father, Dr. John Kyte, was hearing impaired, but he had always assumed his hearing loss was due to a boyhood illness, and he had no idea his children would inherit the condition. John had been a track and field star at St. Francis Xavier University, where he also won acclaim in basketball, rugby and boxing. He later graduated from McGill University’s dentistry program thanks to his ability to lip read and take notes at the same time.
Jim Kyte receives an award at Vanier Arena.
His success would inform the Kytes’ decision to raise and educate their children among the hearing.
In Ottawa, Dr. Kyte owned and operated a dental office on Albert Street. At home in Alta Vista, he constantly preached to his deaf sons that any obstacle could be surmounted by a positive attitude and hard work.
“It may be a handicap, but it’s not a disability,” he would tell them.
That’s not the way everyone viewed it. Gayle Kyte, a former high school teacher, had to do battle with the Catholic school board to keep her children in regular classrooms.
Although profoundly deaf — he has a 100-decibel hearing loss — Jim proved such a good student that he was enrolled in French immersion at St. Patrick’s Junior High School. He could only understand his teachers by collating what he heard with what he read on their lips.
Still, he excelled. “Jimmy was extremely bright,” says Gayle.
Jim Kyte was selected in the first round of the OHL draft by the Cornwall Royals.
Being the mother of five high-spirited deaf boys had its challenges. The boys used to have screaming matches to see who could best penetrate their individual sound barriers. They watched TV with the volume turned up full blast. They liked to sing at the top of their lungs. And they liked to brawl: Dr. Kyte had to cap three of his son’s teeth.
“My dad would come home, take his hearing aids out, and read the paper,” says Jim. “My mom and sister didn’t have that luxury.”
Organized sports lowered the household din; they also offered the boys a way for to fit in. “We wanted to do what every other kid did,” Jim says.
At the time, hearing aids were cumbersome things: A receiver was strapped to the chest, and wires ran up to large earpieces. Jim learned to absorb a bodycheck while protecting his receiver, but the hard-as-rock earpieces often led to ear bleeds.
“That was just part of the game for the Kyte boys,” he says.
All of the Kytes played competitive hockey, along with other high level sports. For Jim, it was hockey all winter and lacrosse in the summer. But he didn’t consider sports a career option — he thought about dentistry or medicine — until one day in Grade 11 when a friend told him that he’d been selected first overall in the Central Junior Hockey League draft.
He didn’t believe it. They went to the school library and found the draft results in that day’s newspaper: Sure enough, Kyte was a Hawkesbury Hawk.
One year later, in 1981, he was a first round draft pick of the Ontario Hockey League’s Cornwall Royals. The scout who picked him, the legendary Gordie Woods, was famously secretive about his evaluation methods and would not sit with other scouts. He didn’t know the scuttlebutt on Kyte.
It meant that when Kyte made his way to the Cornwall draft table to shake hands, Woods and Royals Coach Bob Kilger were both surprised to see that their blue chip prospect had two hearing aids. Kilger turned to Woods, and quipped: “I know this is the year of the handicapped, but don’t you think we’re taking this a little bit too far?”
The awkward joke didn’t faze Kyte: In fact, he was thrilled. “It meant Gordie judged me without any pre-conceived notions,” he says. “He judged me just like any other hockey player as to what I could or could not do on the ice.”
2nd Period: On the ice
Jim Kyte had heard stories about the Philadelphia Flyers’ Dave Brown long before he ever squared off with him.
Brown was about the same size as Kyte — 6’5’’, 225-pounds — and had earned a reputation as a fearsome brawler in the American Hockey League, where he racked up 418 penalty minutes in one season.
Kyte was in his second year as an NHL defenceman and had earned his own reputation as a formidable heavyweight after being drafted in the first round, 12th overall, by the Winnipeg Jets.
But he really didn’t like to fight. He considered himself a policeman, not an enforcer. In fact, he once told Sports Illustrated that being known only as a fighter would be worse than being known as the NHL’s only deaf player. (He remains the only legally deaf player to hold an NHL job.) He wanted to earn his spurs as a stay-at-home defenceman, a smart and dependable blue liner.
Still, he understood that anyone with his size was expected to defend smaller, skilled teammates from the likes of Dave Brown.
Brown stared daggers at him in the warm-up, and Kyte knew it was only a matter of time before they clashed.
Jim Kyte is fighting NY Islanders left-winger Dale Henry on April 25, 1989. Winnipeg Sun files
Their first encounter that night was a classic slugfest; their second made Kyte mad. At the end of that bout, as Kyte lay on the ice with a linesman on top of him, he thought Brown tried to stomp on his outstretched hand.
“I thought, ‘He’s not trying to hurt me. He’s trying to maim me,” says Kyte.
That night, he checked the schedule: He would face Brown again in Winnipeg in six weeks. Kyte dreamed every night about the rematch, and would wake in a sweat with his fists clenched. He studied film of the fighter and rehearsed his approach to their next bout. “He (Brown) was always in my thoughts,” says Kyte. On game day, his stomach was a stew of anxiety and fear.
Eager to end the suspense, Kyte confronted his “demon” on the first shift: He crosschecked Brown hard in front of the Jets’ net, and slashed him on the back of the legs, but when the whistle blew, Brown just skated to the faceoff circle like nothing had happened. At the circle, they locked eyes and Kyte demanded to know the score: “Are we going to go tonight, or what?”
“Not tonight,” Brown said apologetically, “my mom’s in the stands.”
Brown’s parents had driven from their home in Saskatoon to see their son play in the NHL for the first time.
Kyte felt like a piano had been lifted from his back. “My demon has a mother,” he told himself. He could relate: Kyte’s own mother didn’t like to watch him fight, either. Gayle Kyte would always put her head down when a fight started and worry about her son.
She missed some epic brawls with Gord Kluzak, Jeff Beukeboom, Tim Hunter, Marty McSorley and Joey Kocur, who who once cracked open Kyte’s helmet and knocked him out cold. There was no concussion protocol then: Kyte played the next night in St. Louis, despite having a headache that would last six weeks. Kocur missed two weeks with a hand injury.
Often, during a fight, Kyte’s hearing aids would get dislodged and fall to the ice. Before each game, he had to brief the linesmen to make sure they scooped them up and brought them to the penalty box.
Playing in the NHL while deaf had other challenges. Since Kyte could not readily communicate with his teammates on the ice, he found ways to compensate. He became a student of his team’s systems and knew precisely where everyone was supposed to be in any situation. Since he couldn’t hear teammates shout a warning, he constantly counted players in the offensive zone to ensure no one snuck behind him. In the defensive zone, he asked his goalies to signal when it was icing, and to point in the direction he should turn. He used the polished Plexiglass like a rear-view mirror to identify potential outlet passes.
In the dressing room between periods, he had to take out his hearing aids and blow dry them so that they wouldn’t short out from sweat. Later, he learned to sheath them in plastic wrap.
Kyte’s hard-nosed playing style eventually began to take its toll on his body. He broke a vertebra in his back and played six weeks with the injury before finally having it diagnosed at the Mayo Clinic. He returned to Winnipeg in a body brace and missed the playoffs that year.
Calgary Flames #23, Sheldon Kennedy was injured when he collided with San Jose Sharks #2, Jim Kyte and goalie Arturs Irbe near the end of the third period in 1996.
He was traded to Pittsburgh and later to Calgary, where he broke his ankle in a fight with Chicago’s Mike Peluso. The next season, he signed with his hometown Ottawa Senators. He played four games with the club during its inaugural season, but spent most of the year in the minors getting used to his surgically repaired ankle and its two steel pins.
Kyte thought about retirement until offered the chance to captain the Las Vegas Thunder, a new team in the International Hockey League. He performed well enough there to earn two more years in the NHL with the San Jose Sharks. It’s one of his proudest achievements: “I proved to myself that I could still be there and contribute.”
In October 1997, Kyte’s professional hockey career came to screeching halt in a blindside crash. The accident would upend his life and make him confront the sharp end of his father’s old bromide: “Life is 10 per cent what happens to you — and 90 per cent how you react.”
3rd Period: After hockey
Jim Kyte did not see what hit him. He was driving home from Kansas City’s Kemper Arena, where he had just finished practice with the IHL Blades — the 33-year-old was hoping to make it back to the NHL when it expanded the following year — when a black Lexus raced through a stop sign at the bottom of a highway ramp and slammed into the driver’s side of his red Honda Civic.
Witnesses said Kyte’s car slid across the street, hit the curb, and rolled twice. The force of the collision knocked him out. Doctors later theorized that his head struck the passenger seat headrest, which was bent sideways.
Kyte regained consciousness as firefighters cut him out of the vehicle. He called his wife, Nancy, to let her know he was OK. The couple had married in 1993, eight years after meeting at the Ottawa Athletic Club. Jim liked that Nancy knew nothing about hockey: She was a skier and an economist. They had three small children at home.
Kyte is pictured with his sons ( left ) Wyatt 6, his twin brother Hayden 6 (right) and in the middle is Owen 5.
“I’ve got a little bit of a headache,” Kyte told a Kansas City Star reporter later that day. “I’m just glad to be alive.”
He woke the next morning with a gruesome headache that would plague him for the next year. “It was really the first time I’d ever had severe post-concussion symptoms,” he says. “I never experienced anything like it.”
The injury made his life miserable. Every waking moment, his headache oscillated between a dull pain and a roaring migraine. He tired easily and was often dizzy. He fell down at night walking to the bathroom, and slammed into door frames because of his impaired depth perception.
His memory was also affected. One day, he twice went to the corner store in search of batteries and twice came back with bread and milk. “What am I here for?” he asked aloud on his third return trip. “I don’t know,” the cashier told him, “but it’s not bread and milk.”
The Kansas City Blades used a loophole to terminate his contract two months after the accident, and the Kytes moved back to Ottawa. That summer, still suffering, Kyte went to see a concussion specialist, Chicago neurologist Dr. James Kelly.
“I’ll never clear you to play hockey again,” Dr. Kelly told him. “You are permanently post-concussed.”
In pain, his hockey career at an end, Kyte grew more angry, depressed and worried. His wife, Nancy, bore the brunt of his unhappiness. “I wasn’t pleasant to be around because I was in such discomfort,” he says. “But she stuck with me.”
He put hockey firmly behind — he didn’t keep any memorabilia on display — and focused on being a stay-at-home dad to his three boys: twins Hayden and Wyatt, and their younger brother, Owen. (The boys all have normal hearing.)
Kyte kept a journal and found therapeutic value in the writing since he sometimes mixed up words in conversation. Writing gave him more time to get things right. He began to write commentaries for a fledgling website, The Sport Faculty, and his work was so accomplished that the Citizen took notice and awarded him a weekly column. He called it Point Man, and it ran for the next four years.
The job raised his profile and confidence, and he signed on with the National Speakers Bureau.
At one of his speeches, Algonquin College business school dean Kent MacDonald was in the audience, and he invited Kyte to help put together a sports management program for the school. Kyte led a blue-ribbon advisory panel that made recommendations about how to move forward. Six weeks after the panel reported, Kyte called to find out the status of the program, and MacDonald explained that the plan was on hold: The official charged with developing it had abruptly left.
Jim Kyte is now Dean of Algonquin’s School of Hospitality and Tourism.
“But if you’re serious about it,” MacDonald added, “I need a business plan in two weeks.”
Kyte had owned a restaurant in Winnipeg, and had operated successful hockey schools for deaf children. He felt at home in the business world. Determined to capitalize on the opportunity at Algonquin, Kyte worked like a demon to finish the business plan and stickhandle it through school’s approvals process.
Impressed, MacDonald offered him the job of program co-ordinator. It was March 2002. Kyte put together a staff, built the curriculum, recruited students, and began a new career as a college professor six months later.
In 2007, he was named a department chair in the School of Business, and in 2014, he became the dean of Algonquin’s School of Hospitality and Tourism. Along the way, Kyte earned a Master’s in Business Administration from Royal Roads University; he’s now thinking about pursuing a doctorate.
His 640 NHL games, he says, provided robust preparation for a career in academe. “You have to have focus, perseverance and work extremely hard within a team dynamic: Those are the things I’ve transferred here,” he says. “I believe the game, the presentation, the negotiation, the exam, all of it is won or lost well before the contest starts. You need to do your homework, prepare.”
Kent MacDonald, now president of St. Francis Xavier University, says Kyte is a natural leader who demands the best from himself and those around him. “Jim’s transition from the NHL to academe should inspire all athletes,” he says.
Jim Kyte with his mom Gayle.
Laurie Boschman, who played with Kyte in both Ottawa and Winnipeg, marvels at his former teammate’s life after hockey. “I think Jim is one of those true success stories,” says Boschman, the NHL chapel co-ordinator for Hockey Ministries International, a faith-based organization.
Some NHL players have struggled to make the transition to life without their teams, and life without their old on-ice identities. Retired enforcers have suffered the most. At least seven have died young, often after battles with drugs, alcohol and depression — common pitfalls of post-concussion syndrome.
The latest research suggests the effects of concussions are cumulative: that each additional concussion makes an individual more susceptible to the same injury, slower to recover, and more likely to suffer from degenerative brain disease.
Jim Kyte fought 131 times during his 979 games as a professional hockey player, according to the website, dropyourgloves.com. Kyte doesn’t know whether his car accident was made worse by the head trauma he suffered in the NHL, but he is watching the progress of the concussion lawsuit filed against the NHL by 200 former players. He remains torn by the prospect of joining it.
Senators alumni member Jim Kyte walks the red carpet and greets fans during the Ottawa Senators’ 20th anniversary pre-game ceremonies.
“I’m torn because I’d do it all over again,” he says of his hockey career. “What we were able to experience — playing a sport you love for a living — is priceless. But I’m not having the issues that maybe some other guys are having yet…People have different tolerances, and maybe I’m one of the lucky ones.”
Jim Kyte on hockey:
Q. With the heightened awareness of concussions, should kids play hockey today?
A. Absolutely. Hockey is the best sport in the world and you can play it from the time you are able to walk and into your senior years. I feel it is incredibly important for all kids to play a sport — particularly a team sport. Interdependency is the norm in today’s society so to succeed in life one needs to know how to play on a team.
Q. Who was the toughest player you faced in the NHL
A. The toughest player I every played against wasn’t’ a fighter: It was John Tonelli. He never fought but he was big and strong as an ox. He was like a Tasmanian Devil in the corners. I could break five sticks on him and it wouldn’t phase him.
Q. How do regard today’s NHL?
A. No question the game is faster and the players are more skillful, but I think it’s all special teams and too sterile.
Q. What’s not to like about that?
A. Aside from bodychecking fast becoming a lost art, if you stayed in front of the net when I played, you had to pay a heavy price to stand there. Today, the defenceman can hardly touch you, but the guys who stand in front have no problem hitting the goalie. I’m old school. I hate it when I see goalies getting hit on purpose without fear of retribution.
Q. What would you change about the game?
A. I would eliminate the instigator rule so there is more accountability. The NHL is professional entertainment so I‘d try to get rid of the neutral zone trap to open up the game. In my opinion, you don’t need a fourth line today because all the TV timeouts give the top three lines time to rest. I’d only allow 16 skaters to be dressed so it becomes a strategic choice for the coach: Do I want a faceoff guy, a penalty kill specialist or a tough guy in the lineup?
Q. Would you always dress the tough guy?
A. It would depend on the situation. I’m not a fan of gratuitous fighting, and it’s getting moved out of the game. I don’t like having a nuclear weapon on each bench if they can’t play a regular shift. With only 16 skaters they need to be hockey players first, tough guys second.
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1st Period: Growing up deaf
As a boy, Jim Kyte lived in fear of Belleville.
That city was home to the province’s residential school for the deaf — once known as the Ontario Institution for the Education of the Deaf and Dumb — and Kyte wanted nothing to do with it.
“I always worried I’d be sent off to Belleville if I didn’t do well in school,” he remembers.
Kyte’s mother, Gayle, had always suspected Jim was hearing impaired since, as a toddler, he would rarely respond when she called. The diagnosis was confirmed when Kyte was three years old.
It turned out that all five of the Kyte brothers were deaf: They suffered from auditory nerve degeneration, a problem commonly associated with aging.
In the Kyte family, however, a faulty gene triggered the damage. Curiously, the family’s only girl, Aynslee, was unaffected.
Jim’s father, Dr. John Kyte, was hearing impaired, but he had always assumed his hearing loss was due to a boyhood illness, and he had no idea his children would inherit the condition. John had been a track and field star at St. Francis Xavier University, where he also won acclaim in basketball, rugby and boxing. He later graduated from McGill University’s dentistry program thanks to his ability to lip read and take notes at the same time.
Jim Kyte receives an award at Vanier Arena.
His success would inform the Kytes’ decision to raise and educate their children among the hearing.
In Ottawa, Dr. Kyte owned and operated a dental office on Albert Street. At home in Alta Vista, he constantly preached to his deaf sons that any obstacle could be surmounted by a positive attitude and hard work.
“It may be a handicap, but it’s not a disability,” he would tell them.
That’s not the way everyone viewed it. Gayle Kyte, a former high school teacher, had to do battle with the Catholic school board to keep her children in regular classrooms.
Although profoundly deaf — he has a 100-decibel hearing loss — Jim proved such a good student that he was enrolled in French immersion at St. Patrick’s Junior High School. He could only understand his teachers by collating what he heard with what he read on their lips.
Still, he excelled. “Jimmy was extremely bright,” says Gayle.
Jim Kyte was selected in the first round of the OHL draft by the Cornwall Royals.
Being the mother of five high-spirited deaf boys had its challenges. The boys used to have screaming matches to see who could best penetrate their individual sound barriers. They watched TV with the volume turned up full blast. They liked to sing at the top of their lungs. And they liked to brawl: Dr. Kyte had to cap three of his son’s teeth.
“My dad would come home, take his hearing aids out, and read the paper,” says Jim. “My mom and sister didn’t have that luxury.”
Organized sports lowered the household din; they also offered the boys a way for to fit in. “We wanted to do what every other kid did,” Jim says.
At the time, hearing aids were cumbersome things: A receiver was strapped to the chest, and wires ran up to large earpieces. Jim learned to absorb a bodycheck while protecting his receiver, but the hard-as-rock earpieces often led to ear bleeds.
“That was just part of the game for the Kyte boys,” he says.
All of the Kytes played competitive hockey, along with other high level sports. For Jim, it was hockey all winter and lacrosse in the summer. But he didn’t consider sports a career option — he thought about dentistry or medicine — until one day in Grade 11 when a friend told him that he’d been selected first overall in the Central Junior Hockey League draft.
He didn’t believe it. They went to the school library and found the draft results in that day’s newspaper: Sure enough, Kyte was a Hawkesbury Hawk.
One year later, in 1981, he was a first round draft pick of the Ontario Hockey League’s Cornwall Royals. The scout who picked him, the legendary Gordie Woods, was famously secretive about his evaluation methods and would not sit with other scouts. He didn’t know the scuttlebutt on Kyte.
It meant that when Kyte made his way to the Cornwall draft table to shake hands, Woods and Royals Coach Bob Kilger were both surprised to see that their blue chip prospect had two hearing aids. Kilger turned to Woods, and quipped: “I know this is the year of the handicapped, but don’t you think we’re taking this a little bit too far?”
The awkward joke didn’t faze Kyte: In fact, he was thrilled. “It meant Gordie judged me without any pre-conceived notions,” he says. “He judged me just like any other hockey player as to what I could or could not do on the ice.”
2nd Period: On the ice
Jim Kyte had heard stories about the Philadelphia Flyers’ Dave Brown long before he ever squared off with him.
Brown was about the same size as Kyte — 6’5’’, 225-pounds — and had earned a reputation as a fearsome brawler in the American Hockey League, where he racked up 418 penalty minutes in one season.
Kyte was in his second year as an NHL defenceman and had earned his own reputation as a formidable heavyweight after being drafted in the first round, 12th overall, by the Winnipeg Jets.
But he really didn’t like to fight. He considered himself a policeman, not an enforcer. In fact, he once told Sports Illustrated that being known only as a fighter would be worse than being known as the NHL’s only deaf player. (He remains the only legally deaf player to hold an NHL job.) He wanted to earn his spurs as a stay-at-home defenceman, a smart and dependable blue liner.
Still, he understood that anyone with his size was expected to defend smaller, skilled teammates from the likes of Dave Brown.
Brown stared daggers at him in the warm-up, and Kyte knew it was only a matter of time before they clashed.
Jim Kyte is fighting NY Islanders left-winger Dale Henry on April 25, 1989. Winnipeg Sun files
Their first encounter that night was a classic slugfest; their second made Kyte mad. At the end of that bout, as Kyte lay on the ice with a linesman on top of him, he thought Brown tried to stomp on his outstretched hand.
“I thought, ‘He’s not trying to hurt me. He’s trying to maim me,” says Kyte.
That night, he checked the schedule: He would face Brown again in Winnipeg in six weeks. Kyte dreamed every night about the rematch, and would wake in a sweat with his fists clenched. He studied film of the fighter and rehearsed his approach to their next bout. “He (Brown) was always in my thoughts,” says Kyte. On game day, his stomach was a stew of anxiety and fear.
Eager to end the suspense, Kyte confronted his “demon” on the first shift: He crosschecked Brown hard in front of the Jets’ net, and slashed him on the back of the legs, but when the whistle blew, Brown just skated to the faceoff circle like nothing had happened. At the circle, they locked eyes and Kyte demanded to know the score: “Are we going to go tonight, or what?”
“Not tonight,” Brown said apologetically, “my mom’s in the stands.”
Brown’s parents had driven from their home in Saskatoon to see their son play in the NHL for the first time.
Kyte felt like a piano had been lifted from his back. “My demon has a mother,” he told himself. He could relate: Kyte’s own mother didn’t like to watch him fight, either. Gayle Kyte would always put her head down when a fight started and worry about her son.
She missed some epic brawls with Gord Kluzak, Jeff Beukeboom, Tim Hunter, Marty McSorley and Joey Kocur, who who once cracked open Kyte’s helmet and knocked him out cold. There was no concussion protocol then: Kyte played the next night in St. Louis, despite having a headache that would last six weeks. Kocur missed two weeks with a hand injury.
Often, during a fight, Kyte’s hearing aids would get dislodged and fall to the ice. Before each game, he had to brief the linesmen to make sure they scooped them up and brought them to the penalty box.
Playing in the NHL while deaf had other challenges. Since Kyte could not readily communicate with his teammates on the ice, he found ways to compensate. He became a student of his team’s systems and knew precisely where everyone was supposed to be in any situation. Since he couldn’t hear teammates shout a warning, he constantly counted players in the offensive zone to ensure no one snuck behind him. In the defensive zone, he asked his goalies to signal when it was icing, and to point in the direction he should turn. He used the polished Plexiglass like a rear-view mirror to identify potential outlet passes.
In the dressing room between periods, he had to take out his hearing aids and blow dry them so that they wouldn’t short out from sweat. Later, he learned to sheath them in plastic wrap.
Kyte’s hard-nosed playing style eventually began to take its toll on his body. He broke a vertebra in his back and played six weeks with the injury before finally having it diagnosed at the Mayo Clinic. He returned to Winnipeg in a body brace and missed the playoffs that year.
Calgary Flames #23, Sheldon Kennedy was injured when he collided with San Jose Sharks #2, Jim Kyte and goalie Arturs Irbe near the end of the third period in 1996.
He was traded to Pittsburgh and later to Calgary, where he broke his ankle in a fight with Chicago’s Mike Peluso. The next season, he signed with his hometown Ottawa Senators. He played four games with the club during its inaugural season, but spent most of the year in the minors getting used to his surgically repaired ankle and its two steel pins.
Kyte thought about retirement until offered the chance to captain the Las Vegas Thunder, a new team in the International Hockey League. He performed well enough there to earn two more years in the NHL with the San Jose Sharks. It’s one of his proudest achievements: “I proved to myself that I could still be there and contribute.”
In October 1997, Kyte’s professional hockey career came to screeching halt in a blindside crash. The accident would upend his life and make him confront the sharp end of his father’s old bromide: “Life is 10 per cent what happens to you — and 90 per cent how you react.”
3rd Period: After hockey
Jim Kyte did not see what hit him. He was driving home from Kansas City’s Kemper Arena, where he had just finished practice with the IHL Blades — the 33-year-old was hoping to make it back to the NHL when it expanded the following year — when a black Lexus raced through a stop sign at the bottom of a highway ramp and slammed into the driver’s side of his red Honda Civic.
Witnesses said Kyte’s car slid across the street, hit the curb, and rolled twice. The force of the collision knocked him out. Doctors later theorized that his head struck the passenger seat headrest, which was bent sideways.
Kyte regained consciousness as firefighters cut him out of the vehicle. He called his wife, Nancy, to let her know he was OK. The couple had married in 1993, eight years after meeting at the Ottawa Athletic Club. Jim liked that Nancy knew nothing about hockey: She was a skier and an economist. They had three small children at home.
Kyte is pictured with his sons ( left ) Wyatt 6, his twin brother Hayden 6 (right) and in the middle is Owen 5.
“I’ve got a little bit of a headache,” Kyte told a Kansas City Star reporter later that day. “I’m just glad to be alive.”
He woke the next morning with a gruesome headache that would plague him for the next year. “It was really the first time I’d ever had severe post-concussion symptoms,” he says. “I never experienced anything like it.”
The injury made his life miserable. Every waking moment, his headache oscillated between a dull pain and a roaring migraine. He tired easily and was often dizzy. He fell down at night walking to the bathroom, and slammed into door frames because of his impaired depth perception.
His memory was also affected. One day, he twice went to the corner store in search of batteries and twice came back with bread and milk. “What am I here for?” he asked aloud on his third return trip. “I don’t know,” the cashier told him, “but it’s not bread and milk.”
The Kansas City Blades used a loophole to terminate his contract two months after the accident, and the Kytes moved back to Ottawa. That summer, still suffering, Kyte went to see a concussion specialist, Chicago neurologist Dr. James Kelly.
“I’ll never clear you to play hockey again,” Dr. Kelly told him. “You are permanently post-concussed.”
In pain, his hockey career at an end, Kyte grew more angry, depressed and worried. His wife, Nancy, bore the brunt of his unhappiness. “I wasn’t pleasant to be around because I was in such discomfort,” he says. “But she stuck with me.”
He put hockey firmly behind — he didn’t keep any memorabilia on display — and focused on being a stay-at-home dad to his three boys: twins Hayden and Wyatt, and their younger brother, Owen. (The boys all have normal hearing.)
Kyte kept a journal and found therapeutic value in the writing since he sometimes mixed up words in conversation. Writing gave him more time to get things right. He began to write commentaries for a fledgling website, The Sport Faculty, and his work was so accomplished that the Citizen took notice and awarded him a weekly column. He called it Point Man, and it ran for the next four years.
The job raised his profile and confidence, and he signed on with the National Speakers Bureau.
At one of his speeches, Algonquin College business school dean Kent MacDonald was in the audience, and he invited Kyte to help put together a sports management program for the school. Kyte led a blue-ribbon advisory panel that made recommendations about how to move forward. Six weeks after the panel reported, Kyte called to find out the status of the program, and MacDonald explained that the plan was on hold: The official charged with developing it had abruptly left.
Jim Kyte is now Dean of Algonquin’s School of Hospitality and Tourism.
“But if you’re serious about it,” MacDonald added, “I need a business plan in two weeks.”
Kyte had owned a restaurant in Winnipeg, and had operated successful hockey schools for deaf children. He felt at home in the business world. Determined to capitalize on the opportunity at Algonquin, Kyte worked like a demon to finish the business plan and stickhandle it through school’s approvals process.
Impressed, MacDonald offered him the job of program co-ordinator. It was March 2002. Kyte put together a staff, built the curriculum, recruited students, and began a new career as a college professor six months later.
In 2007, he was named a department chair in the School of Business, and in 2014, he became the dean of Algonquin’s School of Hospitality and Tourism. Along the way, Kyte earned a Master’s in Business Administration from Royal Roads University; he’s now thinking about pursuing a doctorate.
His 640 NHL games, he says, provided robust preparation for a career in academe. “You have to have focus, perseverance and work extremely hard within a team dynamic: Those are the things I’ve transferred here,” he says. “I believe the game, the presentation, the negotiation, the exam, all of it is won or lost well before the contest starts. You need to do your homework, prepare.”
Kent MacDonald, now president of St. Francis Xavier University, says Kyte is a natural leader who demands the best from himself and those around him. “Jim’s transition from the NHL to academe should inspire all athletes,” he says.
Jim Kyte with his mom Gayle.
Laurie Boschman, who played with Kyte in both Ottawa and Winnipeg, marvels at his former teammate’s life after hockey. “I think Jim is one of those true success stories,” says Boschman, the NHL chapel co-ordinator for Hockey Ministries International, a faith-based organization.
Some NHL players have struggled to make the transition to life without their teams, and life without their old on-ice identities. Retired enforcers have suffered the most. At least seven have died young, often after battles with drugs, alcohol and depression — common pitfalls of post-concussion syndrome.
The latest research suggests the effects of concussions are cumulative: that each additional concussion makes an individual more susceptible to the same injury, slower to recover, and more likely to suffer from degenerative brain disease.
Jim Kyte fought 131 times during his 979 games as a professional hockey player, according to the website, dropyourgloves.com. Kyte doesn’t know whether his car accident was made worse by the head trauma he suffered in the NHL, but he is watching the progress of the concussion lawsuit filed against the NHL by 200 former players. He remains torn by the prospect of joining it.
Senators alumni member Jim Kyte walks the red carpet and greets fans during the Ottawa Senators’ 20th anniversary pre-game ceremonies.
“I’m torn because I’d do it all over again,” he says of his hockey career. “What we were able to experience — playing a sport you love for a living — is priceless. But I’m not having the issues that maybe some other guys are having yet…People have different tolerances, and maybe I’m one of the lucky ones.”
Jim Kyte on hockey:
Q. With the heightened awareness of concussions, should kids play hockey today?
A. Absolutely. Hockey is the best sport in the world and you can play it from the time you are able to walk and into your senior years. I feel it is incredibly important for all kids to play a sport — particularly a team sport. Interdependency is the norm in today’s society so to succeed in life one needs to know how to play on a team.
Q. Who was the toughest player you faced in the NHL
A. The toughest player I every played against wasn’t’ a fighter: It was John Tonelli. He never fought but he was big and strong as an ox. He was like a Tasmanian Devil in the corners. I could break five sticks on him and it wouldn’t phase him.
Q. How do regard today’s NHL?
A. No question the game is faster and the players are more skillful, but I think it’s all special teams and too sterile.
Q. What’s not to like about that?
A. Aside from bodychecking fast becoming a lost art, if you stayed in front of the net when I played, you had to pay a heavy price to stand there. Today, the defenceman can hardly touch you, but the guys who stand in front have no problem hitting the goalie. I’m old school. I hate it when I see goalies getting hit on purpose without fear of retribution.
Q. What would you change about the game?
A. I would eliminate the instigator rule so there is more accountability. The NHL is professional entertainment so I‘d try to get rid of the neutral zone trap to open up the game. In my opinion, you don’t need a fourth line today because all the TV timeouts give the top three lines time to rest. I’d only allow 16 skaters to be dressed so it becomes a strategic choice for the coach: Do I want a faceoff guy, a penalty kill specialist or a tough guy in the lineup?
Q. Would you always dress the tough guy?
A. It would depend on the situation. I’m not a fan of gratuitous fighting, and it’s getting moved out of the game. I don’t like having a nuclear weapon on each bench if they can’t play a regular shift. With only 16 skaters they need to be hockey players first, tough guys second.
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