Don't fall for anything
Jan Ludvig
ice hockey
Wayne Gretzky. During his career, he built a reputation as an unparalleled hockey phenomenon and a polite, understated professional when it came to public statements. That’s why he caused a major stir in the NHL after a game against the New Jersey Devils in November 1983, when he declared that the team was a “Mickey Mouse organization” that embarrassed the league with how poor their team was.
The Oilers had won 13-4, and Gretzky, who had recorded eight points that night, felt sorry for the Devils’ goalies who had to endure such humiliation. Especially since one of them, Ron Low, was his friend. That comment from the greatest player of all time is still remembered in the league today. As is the next Oilers game in New Jersey, where the arena was packed, many fans wore Mickey Mouse-themed gear, and Gretzky was booed relentlessly.
And you know what? I played in that humiliating game too. I’m sure some of those thirteen goals went in even after my mistake.
At the same time, I was the one who scored for a 2-0 Devils lead in the fourth minute, which was the last moment of joy we had that evening. Then the meltdown began. Later that season, when we played in Edmonton again and, as always after that infamous comment, wanted to beat them no matter what, I had a chance to break a 3-3 tie late in the game but hit the post.
What you can do… I could have been famous. But that’s not why I’m mentioning all this.
I’m telling this story because some guy named Jan Ludvig even found himself in this kind of environment. This little scrapper, barely 176 centimeters tall, born in a communist madhouse and raised on a modest part of periphery town Liberec played in the NHL in the 1980s and lasted seven seasons.
Just because he had a dream. And because he did something about it.
That included marching through Slovenian mountains with a loaded machine gun at his back, calloused hands from swinging a pickaxe in a refugee camp, fear, uncertainty, and… yes, even the guts to take his fate into his own hands at a time when in is country it was highly frowned upon. When it was even condemned and threatened that you might never see your family again.
But only because of that could Jan Ludvig from Liberec play against Gretzky in his prime years.
Because of that, Jan Ludvig from Liberec could shake hands with his idols, people he often knew only from worn-out hockey cards his aunt sent him.
Because of that, Jan Ludvig from Liberec is proud he made the biggest decision of his life and turned his dream into reality.
The noise was unlike anything else I’ve ever heard in my life.
Russian MiGs were looping over Liberec, nosediving towards the rooftops before pulling up just above the buildings. The deafening roar of the engines and the persistent impression that this time the jet would actually crash into a roof are etched deep into my mind. The sound still echoes in my head; even after all these years, I can recall it vividly, along with the sense of humiliation and intimidation these maneuvers were meant to provoke. We stood with our school group on a grassy hill and trembling.
In August 1968, I was not quite seven years old, and because we weren’t allowed outside for some time, I stayed home with my mom, who would burst into tears every so often. Meanwhile, my dad was driving around Liberec, spray-painting slogans on Russian tanks. From his stories, I also know how a tank track got stuck in the town square, damaging the arcade, which became the subject of a famous photo. People stood around, threw paving stones, and shouted at the Russians to get the hell out. One of the soldiers then poked his head out of the tank, grabbed a machine gun, and fired into the crowd.
Today, a banner with the names of nine victims of that shooting hangs at the town hall.
Our entire family, along with thousands of others, attended their funeral. I remember a young woman standing next to me, who I was staring at. Suddenly, she fainted. I can still clearly picture how her eyes rolled back, showing only the whites, before she collapsed. At the time, I thought she had died. People rushed to help her, and our parents led us kids away.
I have some pretty strong memories from that time, which significantly shaped my opinion of communists.
Just returning from our summer vacation in Yugoslavia and reading in Austrian newspapers that Czechoslovakia had been occupied was a shock. My parents had a heated argument in the car. I sat silently in the back seat of our old convertible—an elegant 1934 car my dad had cut with a blowtorch, fitted with a Wartburg engine, and turned into a real rocket. I listened and, through my childish eyes, only perceived the tears and raised voices. Dad wanted to stay abroad, while mom was against it, worried about what would happen to the rest of the family.
We wouldn’t have been the only ones among our relatives to emigrate. My aunt and uncle fled in ’68, and the idol of our family, an uncle on my father’s side, had managed to escape right after the war. His name was Rudolf Protiva, and he was a pilot in England during World War II. He experienced exactly how the pilots from England were initially celebrated, only to be imprisoned by communists if they didn’t manage to escape in time.
But in school, we weren’t taught any of this. When they told us history, I’d ask my dad why he told me something completely different than my teachers. His answer was: “Take those books, turn them upside down, and that’s how it really was.”
Over the course of my life, I kept discovering how they lied to us. Over and over, constantly lying.
At sixteen, when I traveled with the national team to Canada for three weeks—which shocked me in itself because I didn’t expect the comrades would let me go—I finally realized how much they were lying to us back home. I’d heard about how imperialists exploited people, how there was hunger in the West, endless queues for everything, and constant shootings. But all I saw were smiles on people’s faces, polite people being kind to each other, cleanliness, and order everywhere. And the guys from the junior teams we played against, drifting their Chevrolets in front of the arenas just to show off their rides. Meanwhile, we stood there in heavy green jackets with red ties, staring, until the political officer with us led us aside so we wouldn’t see too much.
When we returned, my textile industry teacher at the school spouted the same nonsense about how crime thrived in America and Canada, how messy it was, and how everything was bad. And I, having just been there a few days earlier, raised my hand and asked something along the lines of: “Comrade professor, why do people emigrate from here to America, and I’ve never heard of an American emigrating here?” Just asking that was pure insolence, but I even added—to show off, I admit—that I had just been there and hadn’t seen anything he was talking about.
The bald teacher, whose name I remember to this day, turned so red I thought the veins on his temples would burst. He told me to report to his office after class. There, he began lecturing me about how the Soviet Union had been wronged during World War II and so on.
“If you question the socialist philosophy of our state one more time, remember, you’ll pay dearly for it,” he said as he dismissed me.
That wasn’t the only example of my inconvenient questioning.
“Why?” was my favorite and frequent question, though it wasn’t very popular back then. The answers tended to be along the lines that I was a bastard. A spoiled brat.
This applied to hockey too. I asked a lot there as well because I wanted my coaches to explain the reasoning behind things. Nothing more. Yet many of them took offense. They didn’t understand that I wasn’t trying to undermine their authority. On the contrary, I’d have respected them even more if they’d just answered my questions and explained a few things.
But that wasn’t popular at the time. Especially with kids, things simply weren’t explained. Nobody explained anything.
I, however, wanted to listen. I wanted to improve. I just needed to know why some things had to be done a certain way. Yes, I was a little rascal. But looking back, I know that if everyone around you keeps telling you that you’re this or that, at some point, you start acting like it.
So you think I’m a bastard? Fine, I’ll be one…
Of course, I had long hair for that time, and it was routine for someone to tell me to get it cut. It’s no wonder I’ve never had a positive relationship with authority figures. Mind you, this doesn’t apply to people who actually know something about life. I can snap to attention and listen to them. But communists who preached one thing and acted differently never earned my respect. Their mantra was that we were all the same, equally rewarded, while they had villas by the lakes and lived like pigs in clover.
I’ve despised that hypocrisy since I was a kid. Absolutely despised it.
My aunt, who emigrated to Canada with my uncle in 1968, used to send me hockey cards. The letters always arrived opened and resealed, but the pictures of famous players remained intact, and I would stick them onto my schoolbooks.
Bobby Clarke from Philadelphia adorned my first reader. A toothless curly-haired guy with no helmet. The symbol of the Broad Street Bullies, who dominated the NHL in the 1970s.
During practises, I pretended to be him. I imagined how Bobby would move, shoot, or fight for the puck, and I’d try to embody him that day. I’d tell my teammates ahead: "Guys, today I’m when he declared Václav Nedomanský." Sometimes I was Vláďa Martinec, other times Ivan Hlinka, famous Czech players in those days.
Those guys were my idols too, and I could at least watch them on TV. Back then, we had one channel on a boxy TV set, mostly airing Soviet war films or other propaganda. But they also broadcast hockey games, which my dad and I watched with intense passion. We lived in an apartment building where making noise was forbidden—neighbors would bang their brooms against the ceiling if we got too loud. Or if we played one-on-one hockey in the apartment, with me shooting a sock-ball using a small sawed-off stick. My dad would be Holeček or Dzurilla in goal.
He taught me to skate on a frozen pond by an old bakery, and he also took me to play night hockey with the old guys at the rink. He worked in a local silk fabric factory, and the ice time they got was often at 2 a.m. So, I’d go to bed at 4 p.m., wake up at midnight, and off we went. As a little kid, I skated between these factory workers, who seemed like NHL stars to me. Legends of my childhood. I still remember a man named František Hegediš—a short, hunchbacked, angry guy who once broke a hockey stick over my back in frustration. But he could also be incredibly kind, letting me on the ice a few minutes early after he had parked his zamboni.
That’s how I learned to play well enough to make it to the youth national team. At the U18 European Championship, we even beat the Russians in the final, and my line with Slovaks Jáno Vodila and Miro Ihnačák performed so well that I started gaining interest from league teams. And since I always gravitated toward Litvínov, I chose Cheza.
That’s where a small kid from Liberec with a runny nose had the chance to play alongside a real legend at the peak of his career.
Though it was only for a few shifts, I played with Ivan Hlinka.
It was a preseason game against Dukla Litoměřice. I was on the right wing, Ivan at center. At one point, he passed to me, and I took a clumsy long-distance shot. The goalie easily saved it.
Back on the bench, Ivan looked at me and said, "Listen, kid. Just because I pass the puck to you doesn’t mean I’m giving it to you. I’m only lending it. You’re not going to score from the blue line with that floater of yours. Give it back to me, put your stick on the ice, and go to the net. I’ll get it to you at the right moment, don’t worry."
Three shifts later, he passed to me, and I immediately returned the puck, doing exactly as he instructed. Stick on the ice, rushing toward the net. He deked past two defenders, faked out the goalie, and suddenly the puck landed perfectly on my stick for an easy tap-in into an open net. I didn’t even have to shoot—he passed it so sharply that it simply ricocheted off my blade into the goal.
I stared at him, dumbfounded. I was convinced I had just played with a hockey god. Everything he said would happen, did.
But Litvínov wasn’t the right fit for me as an outsider. Everything revolved around Ivan’s game. If things didn’t go well, he’d shorten the rotation to just one and a half lines, effectively benching us younger players. We’d sit on the bench, pull our socks over our heads to stay warm, and wait. That wasn’t my idea of fun, so twice I got upset, packed my gear and guitar, and hopped on a train back to Liberec to play in the lower league. At least there, I was on the ice a lot during games, and that was what I enjoyed.
And funny is, that about two years after my short stint in Litvínov, I faced Ivan as an opponent in the NHL.
None of that experience in his club also changed my admiration for Ivan. After the revolution in 1989, we even briefly did business together. We were both involved in the factory which produced hockey gear.
And that led to a great story…
At an employee gathering for about three hundred seamstresses the company bought coffee for the ladies, beer for the men, and hired a band. A classic small-town cultural hall scene: guitar, drums, bass, and a singer playing popular hits of the time.
Ivan suddenly turned to me and said, "Kid, you play guitar, right? How about we sing something?"
"Uh... What do you want to sing?"
He named beautiful song from one Cech singer. „Can you play it?"
"I’m not sure if I can do it off the top of my head, but yeah, I’ll figure it out."
"Wait," Ivan said, got up, and walked to the stage. He handed the bandleader a fifty-crown note, told the guys to take a shot, and said we’d take over for a while.
I sat on the steps, grabbed a guitar, and Ivan Hlinka, ever the gentleman, national ice hockey idol, took the microphone and began to sing: "When you walk down the path where roses wither, where trees grow without leaves…"
It was such a wonderful moment. The seamstresses just sit there in awe.
It’s not easy for me to talk about this, but one of my main reasons for fleeding my home country was deeply personal: I knew that if I stayed, I’d drink myself to death.
From the age of sixteen, when I joined the adult team, I also entered adult life in every sense. Officially, we were all listed as employees of construction company and received money for playing hockey. School became secondary. My routine became a 9 a.m. practice, done by 11 a.m., and straight to the pub. That was my daily schedule.
I couldn’t break out of that routine on my own—not in the environment of communist Czechoslovakia. At the same time, I realized this lifestyle was a path straight to hell. It would consume me. I knew that if I didn’t change something, I’d soon meet my end.
So, I wanted to run away—partly from myself. And partly from the feeling that I didn’t belong here. At school, at hockey, in everyday life, there was always someone trying to clip my wings, to turn me into someone else. Just another face in the crowd. Every day, I encountered resistance, negativity, and misunderstanding. Maybe those people were right in some ways, but it just frustrated me. The only two places I felt good were on the ice with a stick or at a table with a guitar and a freshly poured beer.
Later, I tried explaining this to my Canadian and American teammates, but they never truly understood. How could they? Communism was such an artificially constructed world. It was a fairytale that looked great on paper—where everyone was supposed to be the same and have the same—but it had nothing to do with nature. In nature, not everyone has the same. Everyone is different, with varying levels of effort and ambition.
What finally pushed me was a conversation with my dad. One night, he woke me up.
I came to, realizing he was sitting on the edge of my bed. Startled, I asked what was going on.
He just stared at me and said, "Listen, you’ve got to get out of here. You need to leave. There’s no place for you here."
I was shocked because I hadn’t spoken to anyone—not even him—about my thoughts of leaving. He just knew. Somehow, he sensed what was on my mind.
In truth, I had felt the urge to stay in Canada ever since I was sixteen when we toured there with the national team. I thought about going to my aunt and uncle in Edmonton. But I knew that if I defected as a minor, my parents would be jailed back home. I promised myself that as soon as I was of age, I’d leave.
And so, in the summer of 1981, a few months after my dad’s late-night talk, I booked a vacation trip through the state travel agency.
Honestly, I didn’t expect to get any of the necessary stamps you needed to get from authorities at that time to travel out of the country.
I needed approvals from my school and the military. I already had draft orders for a military hockey team.
The principal of the textile engineering school gave me a lecture, but he signed the form.
Wow! Surprise number one…
But I had zero expectations when walking into the military office. A cocky kid from a family of emigrants, with draft orders in hand? That’s a combination guaranteed to be rejected.
I walked in and timidly said, "Good day."
"What do you want?" barked the man in uniform, adorned with medals, a cap pushed low over his forehead. I’d heard he was a major.
"Comrade Major!" he corrected me sharply.
"Comrade Major, my name is Jan Ludvig. I play hockey here, and I’m about to join the army, but I’d like to take a trip to Yugoslavia first. I’ve booked a vacation and I need your stamp."
He stared at me for what felt like an eternity, then finally said, "Comrade Ludvig, I’ll give it to you—but don’t you dare stay there."
"Comrade Major," I said in the most casual tone I could muster, "I love traveling, but if I’m away from my mom for more than two weeks, I start missing her terribly."
He kept staring at me and then muttered, "I hope you’re not lying."
Then he stamped my paper.
I walked out in disbelief. No way. Against all odds, I suddenly had everything I needed to leave the country.
Everything except the money.
I had only reserved the trip. I couldn’t buy it earlier because I needed the approvals first—and I simply didn’t have enough cash. Even though I was earning money from hockey, I still came up short.
So, I started selling off whatever I could.
My motorcycle. My Adidas skates—the latest model we got through the national team—which I sold to one of my closest friends and a future long-time local hockey manager. I gradually sold my entire gear. People asked why, and I’d reply, "Oh, I’ll get new stuff in Trenčín." I even knocked on the door of the late local legend whose jersey hangs in the arena rafters, with my skis and poles in hand. When he asked what I wanted, I told him straight up—I needed money. He bought them from me, helped me out, and eventually, I scraped together enough for the trip.
We fled as a group of three: me, my friend Pavel Jelínek, and a girl I was dating at the time, who later became my first wife.
She was the first person I told about my plan. On a school hike through the woods, I said, "Look, I’m leaving this place. I’m emigrating to Canada. What do you think about coming with me?" She replied that she couldn’t leave her mom behind. She lived with her single mom and didn’t want to leave her alone. I understood, but I wanted her to know I’d leave at the first opportunity.
She was my first girlfriend. I trusted her. In my naivety, I didn’t even think she might tell anyone.
A week later, she came back saying she had changed her mind. She had talked to her mother, and her mom gave her blessing.
Pavel was a good friend, someone I went out with to listen to music and party. The moment I mentioned my plan to him, he was immediately on board to join us.
Looking back, it sends chills down my spine to think how little we knew about the world, how clueless we were about what we were doing or where we were going. What emigration really meant. How it was done. So many people, including my relatives, had escaped, yet we never got any clear information on how to do it.
I didn’t tell my parents a word. I knew they would be interrogated after my escape, so I did it for their sake. So they wouldn’t have anything to say and couldn’t be accused of knowing about my plan and not stopping me. It seemed better that way.
The only exception was my closest friend, musician Martin Červinka. I gave him a letter to drop into my parents’ mailbox two weeks after my departure. I trusted him.
I ran away with the thought that I’d never return. I had seen what happened to my aunt and uncle when they lost their citizenship. I prepared myself for the reality that I might never see my mom, dad, or friends again. That’s why it was the hardest decision of my life.
Even though my parents were later allowed by the regime to visit me in Canada, one at a time, I wasn’t allowed to return home for nine years. Once my emigration became public, a sentence came down: two years in prison if I crossed the border back. They stripped me of my citizenship too.
There is lot more in Jan Ludvig's story....
How exactly he crossed the borders in Yugoslavia?
How he earned money in refugee camp in Austria?
How he found himself in Edmonton Oilers' team at the start of their golden era?
How 80's NHL brutality formed his view of hockey?
What Scott Stevens' fists had taught him?
What part of players' character he focused on as NHL scout?
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