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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

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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.