Jiří Hřebec

"Those were good, I liked playing those competitions, even though I finished with Bolardt at the end. I really liked the week-long preparations, it was good to train and play and quite a good atmosphere, as it were. They say, these are myths, that Davis Cup is a team competition, tennis is not. I played Davis Cup for myself, that's still the case today, I never played for the state. I wanted to show people I was good, that's why I played it. I didn't play for Kodes, for us to win, for us to be in the Davis Cup finals, not at all. I played it for me, that's how it is to this day, that's bullshit, they have a great team. I know that with the girls. I train with them, most of them, and they basically hate each other. Then they get on the team, they hug each other, they do this thing for the press about what great friends they are. Fed Cup ends and they hate each other, they basically don't even talk to each other at tournaments, I don't want to name names, but they're there. Most of them are like that."

"So Honza Kodeš won Paris in 1970, that's when I drew the most attention to myself. He came back when he won Rolland Garros, I was playing against him in the league, I was unknown to the public, and I had match-balls on him. I lost about ten-eight in the third set in the league, they noticed that here was a young player who could beat the winner of Rolland Garros. That was kind of the first step, I was twenty or nineteen, that's where it started, the public recognized me. A lot of people came to see him, and I almost beat him, they found out that there were other people playing tennis here too. At that time, if it wasn't for Kodeš, none of us would be here. Kodeš kept the tennis here by winning Paris two years in a row, seventy and seventy-one, so we can all lick his heels. If it wasn't for him, tennis wouldn't be at the level it was and is. The communists couldn't have liquidated it, the tennis, like in all the other eastern countries. In East Germany tennis was almost non-existent, in Bulgaria completely. In Russia it was suppressed, it wasn't played there, there were players that you could count on one hand, from those countries. Kodeš pulled us into international tennis when we were twenty-one, it was his doing, whatever he is. He has a lot to do with it, without him there would be no Navrátilová, Lendl, Mandlíková. They're all much younger. Tennis got such a green light here, they couldn't afford to waste tennis at that moment when he was a world star, when he won Paris. They were smart enough to let a few people travel the world to show they had freedom, in quotes. Players could travel the world, but it wasn't quite like that."

"The equipment would be fine as far as that goes, I used to get clothes from Lacoste, just because I participated in international tournaments where they sent me. But we were few, they sent out three or four players. No one else was allowed to go. They would have been better off letting them play, somebody got a later start, so whoever started playing at twenty-two twenty-three internationally, they got liquidated, they didn't play anymore. There were three or four people going out under the Bolsheviks. I was angry a lot and I still brutally hate the Bolsheviks to this day, but I think under the lamp is the least visible. As they say, the biggest darkness. I did terrible things to them. For example, I played for the Red Star League, I was always yelling that one can't play here in this country, and this and that, and I threw all the balls over the fence in the extra league and got my game called off. And nothing. The chairman, the head of the Red Star, was sympathetic to me and liked me in some way, I don't know why, he was always standing behind me terribly, and I was being talked out of everything. Even these political innuendos, here they made me out to be discriminated against, let me joke on the court. I didn't know how to do that, the bullshit in the matches came spontaneously. In those days, it had a touch of something for everyone. It was all against that regime, I said something and I thought the surface, they took me for a rebel. It wasn't deliberate, I wasn't like that, but they annoyed me a lot. The balls were Optimit, you couldn't play with them, we were already playing internationally and it was such a rubber, so for the dogs to play with, it was crazy."

"My dad hired a trainer for me, her name was Mrs. Holečková. Her husband Holecek was a Davis Cup player, but he ran away to America, so he wasn't written about here. And Mrs. Holeckova worked here for an awfully long time, she died a few years ago, she was over ninety. She was very good, her methods as she told them are still valid today, how to play with those legs, technical things. That still works today. I use her methods myself as a coach, she was good. My dad used to pay me for lessons, two or three times a week. As far back as I can remember, my dad bought me two rackets from Australia when I was a kid starting out, I played for about two years. That was incredibly expensive, he gave his whole month's wages for that, I think. It was crazy, it was impossible to get, And I broke them, the rackets, I thought he was going to kill me. But I did, unfortunately I did. I chopped them both up in a rage, so he wasn't like happy for me in this..."