How communists clipped the hockey players' wings

Augustin Bubník was one of the rising stars of the Czechoslovak ice hockey at the turn of the 1940s and 1950s. He was the league’s best shooter in the 1949/1950 season and, together with others, was about to go to London to defend their champions’ title. But the national team did not fly to London on a false pretext. One of the hockey players, Jiří Macelis, suggested to his disappointed friends to have a drink to wash away the sadness and celebrate the birth of his son at their favourite “Gold” pub, U Herclíků. As the afternoon progressed, a majority of players from Prague and České Budějovice started to gather at the place. Augustin Bubník remembers: “At about quarter to seven, we heard reporter Edmund Koukal on the radio, explaining to the nation how politically conscious the hockey players are not to have flown to London for the championship… Then we got angry; Vašek Roziňák and I asked for Koukal on the phone and told him: ‘Now, Mr. Koukal, if you want to know the truth, come over here to Pštrossova Street!’” But nobody from the radio came, so the hockey players went on partying. “We drank and we started to swear. We swore at the regime, at Kopecký and the government, and we said that we wouldn’t let them clip our wings and that we wanted to be free. Now and then we would run outside the pub to the little square and shout out, and when we were having the best of fun, two gentlemen got up from the next table, grabbed me and Vašek Roziňák and said: ‘You’re coming with us.’ Goalie Zlatko Červený noticed. ‘Why are you holding him?’, he started at the plain-clothed policeman and knocked him down right by the stove. The other one got out a gun, whistled – and in an instant, the pub was just full of cops…” Some players managed to run away in the ensuing brawl but it didn’t help. Bubník and several others were taken to Bartolomějská Street and the interrogation continued in the “Little House” in Hradčany. Augustin Bubník walked away with the second severest penalty in the Modrý et al. Subversive Group trial – 14 years in prison.