The Arrest

"Well, and Jirka Macelis who had had a son born just two days earlier said: 'Boys, come on, we'll go to the good old pub...' There was a pub close to the National Theatre, owned by the brother of Zdeněk Ujčík the player, that was Mirek Ujčík, he had this little pub which we used to go to. So that we'd meet there and celebrate the occasion. So okay, we trickled in one by one, and we were all there at last, suddenly we hear from the radio, the cable radio, at about quarter to seven, we hear the presenter Edmund Koukal tell the whole nation how the hockey players were so enlightened that they did not fly to London for the championship because of so and so. That really got us angry, me and Vašek Roziňák, and we phoned into the radio right from the pub, we phoned Koukal and told him: 'Look, Mr. Koukal, if you want to know the truth, come meet us in Pstross Street...' To which he said: 'No, boys, I won't come there.' So then the boys came and we drank and there was alcohol all over and everywhere, and there was this accordionist and this piper, and now we started swearing. We swore at the regime, we swore at the establishment and at Kopecký, at the government, that we wouldn't let them clip our wings, that we want to be free, and every now and then Vašek or I would run out onto the small square and shout things. And when things were at their best, when the place was absolutely roaring, suddenly these two men got up from their table and grabbed me and Vašek Roziňák and said: 'You're coming with us.' We didn't know what was going on. Suddenly up rushed Zlatko Červený, the goalie who was supposed to step in for Bóža [Bohumil] Modrý, as Jirka and Červený were close by, so he caught one of them and said: 'What're you holding for!' and gave him a punch that knocked him down under stove. The second one pulled a pistol and whistled and in a moment the pub was full of policemen... There was a van waiting for us out on square, so the noose was all ready for us. They had prepared things, they had known where we would meet, what we would do, that we would probably provoke a reaction like this. We had pretty much all been there, except for Vladimír Zábrodský, he didn't come. They took us to Bartholomew Street [police HQ - transl.], from there they took us soldiers [he was in compulsory military service at the time - ed.] to the headquarters here on Small Side Square next to St. Nicholas, where they had the army Defence Intelligence, and from there they moved us two days later up to the Small House on Castle Square, which was the disciplinary military prison, into the infamous Small House and into the hands of Suchý, Lípa, Pergl, they did all sorts of things to us there... the investigation began there: why had actually done that, why had we been swearing when we had the utmost support..."

• born 21st November 1928 in Prague
• excellent hockey player, member of LTC Praha, member of the national team from 1947
• 1948, silver medal at the Winter Olympics in Saint-Maurice
• end of 1948, the team refused to go into exile en masse
• 1949, became world champions at the world championship in Sweden
• a petty excuse forced them to surrender defence of the title in 1950, most of the team was arrested on 13th March 1950 at the restaurant U Herclíků
• convicted on fabricated charges together with other hockey players, received the second largest punishment (14 years)
• 1955, released on a presidential amnesty
• return to hockey, injuries, coaching school
• 1966-1969, successful coaching in Finland
• 1968, officially rehabilitated
• coached various foreign and domestic teams during the normalisation
• an MP for the Civic Democratic Party (ODS) since 1998
• 2003, entered into the Finnish hall of hockey fame
• 2008, received a similar honour in the Czech Republic