One of the greatest European legends of the NHL ends. At the age of 45, Zdeno Chára will start the last symbolic match in the Boston jersey and wave goodbye to his career. Slovak tall man “Big Z” made his way to the top, because in the beginning his height was more of a handicap, or at least the main argument of the doubters.
In the 1990s, he might have been a part of the golden Vsetin era, but the management of the Wallachian club did not like him. They went to see the teenager Zden Chára a few kilometers over the border in Trenčín and decided that he would not be a reinforcement for their project.
“We were there twice and said that this guy can’t play. That he can play basketball, but he’s not fit for hockey. You can see how we underestimated him,” smiled Petr Husička, the general manager of Vsetín years later.
Chára heard similar things at home in Trenčín, for example from coach Ernest Bokroš. “He said that he would never be a hockey player or a defenseman. I told him that he would be the best defenseman in the world, that I would train him myself. I was sorry that they wrote him off just because of his height,” recounted father Zdeněk Chára.
A native of Strakonice and a former top wrestler, he instilled in his son not only a fighting nature, but also gymnastic and movement training. “He had good movement coordination, he was flexible,” added Chára the elder.
By the way, the mentioned coach Bokroš was in 2000 as the assistant head coach at the World Championship in St. Petersburg, when Chára won his first of two silver medals at the championship.
Agent Jaromír Henyš took the teenage Chara under his wing. “It was my capital piece, a masterpiece,” he reveled in the book Hockey Agent Says.
“At the same time, it was enough and he wouldn’t have played hockey. If I didn’t have a friend who did pump-up skates, his career would be over. There were no normal skates for Chara with a size sixteen. And he had pump-up ones. With the normal ones, he had such bruises that he had to have surgery.” Henyš explained.
He got Chara into the Spartan junior team, but the Slovak also faced familiar taunts there. The cleaning lady first sent him from the winter stadium a few hundred meters away to the basketball hall. When he appeared on the ice, he brought smiles to the audience with his hockey style.
“But I was counting on the fact that the Americans would want the greatest hockey player in the world,” agent Henyš stood up for himself. And indeed, in 1996, Chára passed the NHL draft on the second try without ever playing for the Slovak youth national team.
In the third round of the talent auction, the New York Islanders reached for him. Chára eventually grew to a height of 206 centimeters and remains the tallest hockey player in NHL history to this day. Henyš was not wrong in this.
After the draft, he stayed in America and spent his first season in the Prince George Cougars junior team. “He started in Canada with a bag thirty by thirty centimeters. He didn’t have anything else,” Henyš laughed later when reminiscing.
There is a well-known story of how Chara first earned extra money by washing cars overseas in the summer. He didn’t deny his hard work either on the ice or in the gym, he improved his skating skills and passing game and played in the NHL and AHL between 1997 and 1999.
It soon became clear to the coaches in the league that the Slovak quarterback would be useful in other ways than just playing hard and protecting the stars. Chara was becoming a leader.
After years with the Islanders, he went to Ottawa for four seasons, and in Boston, after arriving in 2006, when Char was 29 years old, they immediately made him the captain.
Teamwork, hard shot, excellent work in power-ups and professional demeanor off the ice. All this decorated the Slovak. But after all, when the gloves came down, he had no competition.
Czech brawler David Kočí, whom Chára took out in October 2007, knows about this. He hit him with several punches in the face and Kočí left with a bloodied face. “I’ve never bled so much,” he admitted afterwards.
The peak of Chara’s overseas career came in the spring of 2011, when he led Boston’s drive for the Stanley Cup with a brand on his chest. When he then raised the coveted trophy above his head, you could see how emotional it was for him.
With the Bruins, he reached the NHL finals in 2013 and 2019, when he also played with a broken jaw, but ended up losing both times.
With the national team, he won silver from the 2000 and 2012 WCs, but missed out on the 2002 gold. And although Chára was a great inspiration for his compatriots, he did not spare them at all on the ice in fights.
In the NHL, for example, he fought with Boris Valábik, in the lockout season of 2012/13, in a KHL match, he severely shot down Miroslav Šatan. At that time, Chára wore the jersey of Prague Lion, Šatan played in Slovan Bratislava. The hit that “Big Z” put him out of the game for several months bit hard and for a long time.
The player who played 1,680 games in the NHL, the most among backs, is saying goodbye. He added another two hundred games in the playoffs.
In 2009, he won the Norris trophy for the best defender of the competition, as the second European after Nicklas Lidström. At the same time, he is still one of the four Europeans who led the team to the Stanley Cup as captain.
