"Practically this idea for me to emigrate, at that time I was there with my family, my wife, and also during my next career, it didn't bother me. I didn't worry about it. Probably because you got a lot of things as a Sparta player. Not everything. When you had connections, some acquaintances, when you knew who you could trust, on which door you could knock. All the problems that our company had, the issue of foreign exchange promise, passport, going abroad and many other things, it was not a problem to get them. And Sparta had such a network and a lot of such acquaintances. For example, the chairman of the Sparta Club was the son of Antonín Novotný, the president of the republic. A Sparta hockey fan was a state bank governor. It was not a problem for him to give a foreign exchange promise to anyone at any time. So, I avoided this."
"I remember that immediately after the war, the so-called RG Guards were formed, the Revolutionary Guards. It was commonly called the looting guards. They also dressed up, they had their own clothes and took care of the expulsion of the Germans. And three or four of these young boys went to the border area, where they took care of the expulsion of the Germans. And the expulsion of the Germans was, in my opinion, extremely dramatic, it was not easy. That is why the name RG was created, instead of the revolutionary - looting guard. A neighbor in the house was a taxi driver. The only car that stood in our street. And, of course, he was with the Revolutionary Guards, and within a few months he disappeared from life. No one ever found out how. This indicates that the expulsion of the Germans, for those who experienced it on the spot was very dramatic."
"The awareness of the nation, of all this, was that they conquered us. This was such an inner rebellion. The rebellion of those who were silent, showed no resistance, and that resistance showed itself on the ice. But the resistance was often not great enough to defeat them. We defeated them when the motive was maximized, for example after the invasion in 1968, when we defeated them twice at the World Championships in Sweden."
"As a fourth-year student, I was in a gym, in shorts and a T-shirt, when a female worker of the study department came to me telling me to come to the study department. There I came, and there were two young guys standing, saying, 'Comrade Bukac, you are coming with us, we need to talk to you.' And I said, 'I am here in the gym clothes.' 'No! You sit down with us, you go now.´ And I said, I'm not going, it was cold, November, December. So, in the end one of them went to the locker room, they let me change and they took me to Bartolomějská in Prague. At first, I sat there for at least an hour or two alone. And then about three or four took turns on me. Some were good, some were bad, some were screaming. And they wanted cooperation. At that time, I came home at about two o'clock in the morning and I was taken away at eleven. It ended with me saying, look, if you want to work together, you have to choose someone else to do it, I'm an ice hockey player. I realized how they were interfering with man's heart and humiliating him. In the end, when I went home, I thought it was heroic that I literally slammed the door with them. I said I wouldn't, that it is absolutely impossible. That I would stop playing hockey."
A hockey coach and a teacher, PhDr. Luděk Bukač, was born on August 4, 1935 in Ústí nad Labem. He grew up in Prague-Podolí, where he put on skates for the first time. After the war he started playing for the LTC Prague club, later he transferred to the competing I. ČLTK Prague (later Motorlet Prague). He graduated from the Industrial Technical School. He later worked as a player in Sparta Prague and Dukla Jihlava. He graduated from the Faculty of Physical Education and Sport at the Charles University. He received an offer to stay at the Faculty, if he joined the Communist Party. He nodded to the offer and joined the party, he came to the faculty in person to return his authorization after the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops in August 1968. In 1961, he was a player winning the silver medal at the World Cup in Switzerland. In the mid-1960s, he completed a prestigious internship in Canada and was subsequently called to an internship in the Soviet Union. At the age of thirty-two, he took over Sparta Prague as a coach. After the unsuccessful Olympics in 1980 in Lake Placid, he worked together with Stanislav Nevesely as the coach of the Czechoslovak national team. Together they led the team to many medals, this era was crowned by winning the title of the world champion in 1985 in Prague. Since 1991, he worked at his own Bukac Hockey Academy. He wrote many professional articles and published books on the training methodology. In 1994 he returned to coach the national team (this time already Czech) he returned and with the team he won the title at the World Championships, in 1996 in Vienna. He is one of the most important personalities of Czechoslovak and Czech hockey, he was stated in the Hall of Fame of the International Hockey Federation. Luděk Bukač died on April 20, 2019.
Hrdinové 20. století odcházejí. Nesmíme zapomenout. Dokumentujeme a vyprávíme jejich příběhy. Záleží vám na odkazu minulých generací, na občanských postojích, demokracii a vzdělávání? Pomozte nám!
