“I and Joža Labuda were newbies in the national team. We always stayed together at tournaments and Universiades. I was staying with him also in Tokyo. I am not sure if it was the third or the fourth day when I told him: ‘Joža, your eyes are yellow.‘” - “So what?” he said. - ‘It does not mean anything, yellow eyes. Doctor Horák was there with us. He looked at him: ‘He has hepatitis.‘ Unfortunately, that was the end for Joža. He did not play once at the Olympics. He could not even go on a tour of Japan after the Olympics with us. They invited us to different cities and he did not go either. We did not meet with him until at the airport, he had bad luck.” - “Did he at least get the medal?” - “He of course got the medal. He participated in everything with us: training and preparation. He even went to a training with us two or three times there in Japan.” - “Weren´t you scared that you would also get infected with hepatitis?” - “I was lucky because I had suffered from hepatitis before. I was vaccinated. But it was bad luck. It is the same as with my grandson in Tokyo - it was also bad luck. It is so similar that I do not feel well because of it.”
“I went to West Germany and France in 1959 due to volleyball. It was a different world, we made fun of it: ‘Don´t admire it, don´t admire it!‘ It was different, however, the advantage of VŠ Praha was the fact that except Musil, all of us were university students, some were engineers with finished education. So those people looked at it differently. We did not have any problems when we went somewhere, not even in the Red Star team or in the national team.” - “Musil was the 1956 world champion. He was like your dad, wasn´t he quite older?” - “He was a year, two or three years older than the others. It was not such a big difference. However, Musil was like that for me. He was an icon for me both as a person and as a player. He worked in a printing company his whole life. He only did not work there when he worked in Italy as a trainer. But when he was here, he worked shifts in the printing company even when he was in the national team. He did not come to the training many times because he could not. He was such an oddball.”
“My name is Boris Perušič. I was born on 27 July 1940 in Zagreb in the then Yugoslavia. My parents who lived in Czechoslovakia left for Yugoslavia when the Germans invaded Sudetenland because my father came from Yugoslavia and had a Yugoslavian passport and so did my mum. However, when Germans also attacked Yugoslavia in 1941, my parents got up and left for the then Protectorate, to Czechoslovakia. I was born in Zagreb and there were, as everyone knows, huge problems between Christian Croatians and Orthodox Serbians there during the war. The Ustasha movement, the then Croatian police started to be interested in dad, so my parents returned to Teplice where I was growing up and where I spent my early childhood and started to attend school.”
“I was [in preparation] for my future placement at the seasonal station in Burgas from 1 July 1968. I was taking care of receiving planes, checking-in, tourists, and everything connected to it. I went to the airport on 20 August in the evening. The tourists who were supposed to return home after midnight on 21 August arrived there in the evening. And the plane unexpectedly did not arrive, we did not know what was happening. Mobile phones did not exist, the airport did not have a connection with Prague. Telex did not work, the Bulgarians immediately took away our radios. I was staying g at the airport in Sunny Beach, 105 people were waiting at the airport and they did not know what was going on either. Only after some time I got a telex from my colleague who worked at the airport operation control in Prague saying: ‘Boris, the Russians invaded the airport, hang on in there, we are also hanging on!‘ I still have the telex. I would always say: ‘Metod, when the worst times come, I will take it out (and show) that you had betrayed.‘ That was fun, but it was a problem because the plane did not land and many people stayed there. And many other tourists who arrived by train. Sunny Beach was full of Czechs who were going down to Yugoslavia by train.“
Boris Perušič was born on 27 July 1940 in Croatian Zagreb. His father was Serbian born in 1908 and he spent his childhood in the Bosnian town of Zenica. His parents died when he was little. The child was adopted by Czech Josef Novák who knew the orphan´s parents and who worked in mines in Zenica. With him, he arrived through Vienna in Teplice where he had relatives. Boris Perušič´s father got married to a Sudeten German in Teplice. He decided to leave Teplice after the Nazi occupation of Sudetenland by the German Reich in Autumn 1938. He and his wife moved to the then Yugoslavia. Their son Boris was born in Zagreb in 1940. However, the Germans also invaded Yugoslavia and the Perušičs returned to Teplice. Since bloody conflicts between Christian Croatians and Orthodox Serbians began in Yugoslavia, Boris Perušič´s father was in danger of death. The family survived the war in Teplice without greater problems. They could stay there after the war even despite his mother´s German origin and they were not deported. Boris Perušič could speak Czech, German, and Serbo-Croatian very well already as a child. After elementary school, Boris Perušič attended secondary school – so-called eleven-year secondary school. He did many sports since his childhood; when he was seventeen years old, he started to play volleyball competitively in Prague where he was admitted to Prague University of Economics and Business (VŠE). A year later he qualified for an A team of the first league volleyball team Slavia VŠ Praha. With them, he won the Czechoslovak championship and he played in Men´s European Volleyball Championship in 1959. He graduated from Prague University of Economics and Business in 1962 where he studied Air Transport. He spent two years of military service in Red Star Prague where he played the highest volleyball league. He represented Czechoslovakia in the 1963 European championship in Romania. Next year, he qualified for Summer Olympics in Tokyo where he won a silver medal with the national team. He played for the team that won the World Championship in Prague in 1966. He retired from the national team to work for Czechoslovak Airlines in 1967. At the time of the Warsaw Pact troops occupation on the 21st of August 1968, he represented Czechoslovak Airlines in Bulgarian Burgas and there he had to take care of the tourists who could not fly back home. Czechoslovak Airlines sent him as a representative to Belgrade in 1969 and for two years he worked and at the same time played the highest Yugoslavian volleyball league for the Red Star team. He had problems with a Czechoslovak ambassador Jozef Nálepka in Yugoslavia. That is why he did not get a chance to represent Czechoslovak Airlines in Australia. In the following years, he represented Czechoslovak Airlines in Syria, the Federal Republic of Germany, or Singapore. His grandson Ondřej Perušič represented Czechia in beach volleyball at the 2021 Summer Olympics in Tokyo. He and David Schweiner did not advance to the following group because of the coronavirus infection. They were the number two team in the FIVB World Ranking in 2021. Boris Perušič was living in Jevany in 2021.
Zápas o zlato na olympiádě v Tokiu 1964. Proti sovětskému dvojbloku smečuje Golián. Boris Perušič je druhý zleva
The gold medal match at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Golián is spiking against the Soviet double-block. Boris Perušič is second from the left
Zápas o zlato na olympiádě v Tokiu 1964. Proti sovětskému dvojbloku smečuje Golián. Boris Perušič je druhý zleva
The gold medal match at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Golián is spiking against the Soviet double-block. Boris Perušič is second from the left
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