Nevermind the gold, the Fridays were worth it!
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Jiří Holík was born on 9 July, 1944 in Havlíčkův Brod. He came from butchers’ family, his father, uncle and even grandfather devoted themselves to handicraft. But family tradition ended, when his father´s butchery got nationalised in 1950. The new domain of the Holíks became sport, and mainly hockey. Jiří was a top hockey player and his older brother Jaroslav (1942-2015) and later also a nephew, Robert Holík. His niece, Andrea Holíková, devoted herself to top level of tennis. The witness studied eleven-years of secondary school and later also pedagogic faculty, approbation PE and geography. The fist hockey success was celebrated already in 1961, when he won the republic championship as a youngster with a hockey club Jiskra Havlíčkův Brod. As a grown-up he shortly acted in the Prague Sparta and then for a long time in a club Dukla Jihlava, where he played side by side with his brother. At the age of nineteen years he was accepted to the national team, where he played a record of 319 matches and shot 132 goals. He won four medals of winter Olympic games and eleven of the world championship, and three times gold medal (in 1972, 1976 and 1977). He participated in the world championship in ice hockey in 1969, which followed after the Soviet occupation of the Czechoslovakia and where the Czechoslovak team beat the Soviet hockey players twice, which earned them much appreciation and fame back in the country. After finishing the contract in the Czechoslovak representation Jiří Holík played hockey in Germany and Austria; later he taught at the grammar school Seifertova in Jihlava and trained children hockey. Nowadays he is retired and devotes himself mainly to his family and plays golf on recreation basis.
