Rostislav Osička

“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.”

“There was the revolution in 1989 and I had the first private boxing school in the country. I stared my own business immediately and I was approached by these two cowboys, who claimed they wanted to have big matches at the Lucerna. They asked me for help, for my know-how, my name, and they said they had the money. They had none though. It was all pretence. They were boxers but they were after money. They invited a dozen of Russian boxers, including the Olympic winner Yanovsky. They were cheaters. Boxers, but they were after money. Sparring was arranged. I asked whether they had money for it and they answered in the positive. A friend of mine, a butcher and a former weightlifter, lent me CZK 200,000. It was much money then. I gave it to them without any receipts, they took the money, bought fancy suits, drove in limousines, even had their own chauffeur. Well, I was cheated like an idiot.”

“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.”