František Kaberle

“It was similar in the national team. There were people there as support that didn’t know a thing about hockey, we had hardly even seen them before. They just kept rooting us on. I remember that at the World Championship in Vienna when we were leaving from the stadium to the bus, the place was full of fans. They traveled there through Sportturist like an organized trip, part of which was visiting a hockey game. They would come up to us. And we signed various things in a various ways. And the “eye,” as we liked to call them, would call us out: ‘Do you know what you’re signing? What if the Charter 77 were on the other side?’ We told them: ‘We don’t care about politics, we’re hockey players.’ But that wasn’t good enough of an excuse for them.”

“The Canada cup. Back then Canadians thought that they were the ones who could play and that everyone else in the world were chumps who played hockey with branches torn off of trees for hockey sticks. Before I started the Canada cup, we played one scrimmage game with them. Our trainer Mr. Gut came to our locker room, fresh from the press conference, when we were getting our gear on for training, and he was quite furious, though usually he was a decent guy. He tells us: ‘Guys, I just got back from the press conference and that Scotty Bowman...’ That was the Canadian trainer who was answering questions. When the reporters asked: Well, Scotty, what do you say to Czechoslovak national team, the fresh world champions at Katowice in May 1976. Mr. Gut says: ‘So, Bowman thinks for a second and says: Well, they have nice white jerseys.’ They made a total joke out of us. Then in the basic we group we played with them and we beat them 1:0. Milan Nový scored the winning goal and Vlado Dzurilla, our goalie, who was catching, it was really unbelievable. I remember when the game ended and the Canadian players kept waiting for something to happen, the audience too. It was a quiet as a church. They simply couldn’t believe that some guys from over there in Czechoslovakia, which is however many times smaller than Canada, had beat them."