Kučera & Pak: Hockey Legend’s Final Act

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You are referred to as one of the least appreciated gold -generation players. Do you feel like that?

At all. Some boys may be talked about more, after the end of their career you can see too. They go to TV studios, commenting on matches. I’m not doing this. I remember my achievements, perhaps the professional public and fans. (smiles)

Sometimes it makes a problem to leave the environment. You just left the big hockey in the season and end. Didn’t it hurt a bit?

If you say that you will give a season, will you announce it in the media, the year will be decent and will end with a team success? There’s a bigger halo around it. But there are cases where you fail hockey during the season. At that moment you say it’s over. Not much of it. You give an interview, it has been written about it for two days, the season continues to fly. Slightly forgets the players. And that was my case. I stopped doing well and we agreed with Vláďa Růžička that I end up.

That seems unique to me. Few can just leave and clear the cabin. It never dragged you on a bench, on TV?

But we stayed at hockey, and my brother and I built a hockey arena in Letňany on a green meadow.

Sure, it’s just a completely different era than to work in a professional team where everyone will take care of you and solve the problem. Suddenly you have to arrange.

But again you have a filling after your career. The stadium has been standing since 2001, I ended up in the autumn of 2004. I just moved to Letňany, began to see there to help my brother, who took care of the stadium for three years. I didn’t have in my head that I would wake up and I got empty because I don’t know what to do without hockey. I devoted myself to the pupil categories, there were some operational worries with the winter.

Just don’t tell me it is just going to turn off and downright leave the big hockey world. After all, who won Nagano, he had the position that if he went to buy rolls, he would get the whole box for free and cakes like a bonus.

Occasionally there were requests for an interview, first I gave something, went somewhere. Then I started to refuse it, because I didn’t watch hockey in detail. Maybe they asked me if I could comment on the NHL match to the studio in Nova, but I would have to go through everything in advance to know something about those players. Again I wouldn’t want to look like a jerk, that I should have an overview of something and I don’t.

We are guys again and we are pleased to talk about us, someone praises us here and there. Do you not miss this?

Rather, it is a relief. I understand that the public may not understand it, because you see that as hockey players we have a hobby that will eventually become our work, which is very beautiful. But even at work you want to go after five or ten years away. As you stop doing, they will join the injury, so it is very difficult to come back. In the end, there is a relief when you can say enough. I didn’t need to go to lower competitions to feed my family. I earned some finances with hockey, then we had a business with a hall in Letňany, so it was given.

Is it true that you poured most of your career savings into the arena and was it such a risk of all-in?

It was a bit of a risk. But we had a survey of how many places in Prague that provide hobby hockey players and commercially rented the ice. According to him, it was supposed to work.

Only practice can always be different in the end…

He can, but we didn’t think about it, which may be good.

So did you have to go from savings?

We had to put some of our own. (smiles) Most of the time was covered with a long -term loan, which of course had to repay. If it failed, there is a problem.

It is offered that a hockey player who earned money in his career is more likely to buy apartments or whole houses. You decided to build a hall. Doesn’t that sound like a completely different adventure?

A little bit. (smiles) My brother is very straightforward, he was very bitten into it, so I thought I’d go too. Then it was not possible to get off. Sometimes a catastrophic scenario jumped in his head, but it did as a result.

When you sold the arena to Karel Pražák, you finally enjoy without stress, what did you earn?

Finally, we think we did well. So sometimes I say that if the hall was reconstructed, there were conveniences using solar energy, various modern pumps that it would be nice to run the arena again. But no… no nostalgia. (smiles)

From today’s perspective, it looks incredible as you went to the NHL. In 1990 you ended up in Jihlava and immediately went to Chicago, where Mike Keenan ruled, one of the harshest coaches of that time. Was it a big shock?

If only sports. (smiles) In November there was a revolution in our country, I was in the army in Jihlava and we let us home two months earlier. At the end of May I flew to America to sign a contract and then moved to my brother, who emigrated to Canada. We haven’t seen each other for four years, so I spent summer with him and trained there. Hockey and I went to the west twice a season, but this was different. Suddenly you were supposed to live there.

Do you remember what you had to get used to?

That no one is with you. There is a signed contract, the money goes to the account and you have to take care of everything. Nobody told us you have a car here, here’s housing. That was our thing. Dominik Hašek also went there, we were available to one emigrant, so he helped us. As a result, I thought that Keenan would not be such a shock, because under the Communists the coaches did not bother with us at home either, figuratively speaking had a whip like him.

He and assistant Darryl Sutter, who then became the head coach, had such an interesting tactic. The more they held the team under pressure and under stress, the better it brought the results.

Which probably takes the player that he is not personal, but it is a perverted plan…

That’s right. (smiles) It certainly wasn’t personal, it just can’t stand it for a long time. For two or three seasons, the team needs to be replaced because it is poisoned.

Have you ever doubted the whip and whip method?

One thing still made no sense to me. When there was a gap that it was not played for three days, the first day we got such a training that we climbed four. We were totally destroyed by how the stupids we went from the goal line to the goal. The next day too. The third day was looser, but I thought we could never handle the match. But we felt good in it. (smiles) You just know what was the worst? When we lost the home game and then came the three days off. We knew we would get terribly behind our ears. Now I recalled one madness.

When the skating began to skate, the drinking bottles were balanced on the cushion, everyone had their own. The coach then told Kustod to pick them up that we wouldn’t drink. So we went twenty -five minutes back and forth, a moment of break, but we didn’t get a drink.

Slowly course of survival…

How somewhere in Siberia. Such things were doing there, digging a dryer or baskets during breaks was the standard. (smiles)