Rostislav Osička

“Now I’m reading the philosopher Blaise Pascal, my idol. I know about him from my daughter who studies philosophy at the university. There’s something in him similar to me, something close to me since I, too, think by heart not by brain. When I start thinking, it’s sometimes too late. Sometimes I get cheated and the man knows it, I too feel it like that but do it nevertheless, by heart. And Pascal too – he has a heart, feeling, empathy. For instance Milan Machovec, a philosopher I like, I had planned to see him in hospital but it was too late, he wrote, ‘Where would I have to go, if I wanted to go to the end of the world, when it’s round. Where would I have to go to reach the end of my suffering, when death is connected with life in a single ring?’ Everything is just said in that. People chase after something, rush forth, they think they are something, but they are just consciousness and conscience.”

“Then the Russians came, there was this match, a sparring. But then the two guys disappeared. The Russians came up to me that they still hadn’t received the money. They took up a cheque, went to a bank and returned in about an hour, all pale, angry, fists clenched like they were about to break rocks. The cheque was for CZK 999,000, i.e. a million, and was bounced by the bank. They wanted me to give them the money. I said to my then wife – what now? We could sell our car, a Favorit, for not much, we could borrow some money… This was how I was thinking about it. They stayed in the hotel Europa and still waited what would happen, they didn’t want to leave. Eventually, however, they gave up, disappeared and I have never seen them nor heard about them ever since.”

“Once I was approached when I was in Vienna in 1974, this was at a communist manifesto and there was an open-air boxing match in Prater. Karel Gott sang there. We boxed, there was this folk band and boys. I was approached by a Slovak family, a man named Jáno Gala. They had children, I was eighteen and they asked me to stay. They saw that I was talented, they promised to take care of me and I could be a professional boxer. I didn’t think about it for a moment. At home I had my family, friends and didn’t care about money at all. I was given an offer but I simply wasn’t interested.”