František Valošek

"Vítkovice had a wonderful Mannschaft. I and the other boys used to go to Vítkovice on foot. We walked from Frýdek to Vratimov across the bridge to Komarka. There was a bus which stopped in Vítkovice. Vítkovice had a crowded playground, they chased us, kids. There was a canal right behind the fence, and they chased us, kids, into the canal. We were in the canal, and all I could see were football boots. At that time, Bouzek, Sčolka, Bican, who were players of Silesian Ostrava, played, Vejvoda played, and Vasil Buchta, and Alex Markusek, those two were foreign soldiers who came with General Svoboda. Markusek was a tanker who liberated Ostrava and stayed here, Alex. When I finished my career in Baník and went to NH, Markusek was the director of the NH stadium. As we had a division of labour, always at a quarter to seven in the morning, I know that the Soviet films Osvoboždenie and other pro-Soviet popularized films were shown. He came down and started—I can't talk foul—and he started, 'Did you see the movie? I've never seen such rubbish.' I got along with Alex because I played with him since I was a raw recruit. Alex says: 'How did they come up with that? That the field kitchen was behind the tanks? We didn't see the field kitchen for two weeks. We were locked in a tank, and we peed in a bucket, we defecated in it too.' 'And what did you eat?' 'We arrived, found out there was a freshly shot horse, cut off a piece of meat and ate it raw. Word of honour.' He emphasized that it was hot in the tank. They sweated, smelled, excreted, and defecated. Sometimes it was impossible to get out of the tank for four or five days. What a delight to be there."

“Two days before the finals, Vytlačil whistled as it started to rain and - Show me the shoes! I came with bardejovkas and lisovkas. How he scolded me, man. I tell him - Coach, I was afraid that I wouldn't get Adidas shoes, so I took Sevens. Come on, let's go! Not far from us were two omnia booths, they were owned by Adolf Dassler and Rudi Dassler, they were Puma and Adidas. We came into the room, me in sweatpants, Vytlačil spoke perfect German, he was a Viennese Czech. When they were in Chile, they made a contract with Adidas. I don't know German. He probably started explaining to him what an idiot I am that I don't have football boots. What happened? Adolf Dassler put me in a chair similar to the one I'm sitting in now, it had a tripod like at Baťa, where the attendants knelt and tried on shoes. It was Adi Dassler, he went and came with three boxes, he knelt down, I dropped my sneaker, I had light socks on. He untied the laces and put on my football boot, tied it. I had to put on the other one myself. I said – Ist gut, prima. A few words that I know in German. He said – Nein, muss gehen! And I had to walk on the carpet. Vytlačil finally pushed me out and shouted - Get out of here, so I don't see you, you disgrace. I was glad to rush out of that room, and in two days I came out onto the field in those shoes.”

"

"That Viktor Staněk went to earn extra money and took an extra night shift. At our facility, at number one, he was inspecting with the locksmiths, the coulisses and that. They were poking, the cage, a lot of signals blaring, slowly, it didn't even go six meters per second, it was just clink, clink, clink, pull to measure and check the coulisses. They had the first, second, and third floor, and on the second floor, they had a break, so they were cleaning around the shaft. They were going down to the third floor. Viktor Staněk was on the roof, they had a full carriage, and one of the mineworkers started up sixty or eighty on a full carriage. But the carriage was right next to the shaft, which had a railing, like a roof. But since it was full, the log fell out and flew over the gate and eighty meters down the shaft. Viktor was standing there on the third floor, just like the locksmith three years ago. The roof of the cage was standing by the rail yard. Viktor Staněk was sticking out as he bent over, and the log fell on his head. Viktor fell face down on the rails and was dead. Thus our measurer, who had so many mortals measured, perished in such a manner. I come to the shaft at six in the morning like always, I see a flower, and I say – What happened? Viktor is dead. I thought I was going to pass out because I've been through a lot with him, when measuring outside, after those trips outside, in the winter, in the heat. He would also speak at the funerals of other miners who died during that period, comforting the family. An excellent fellow.”

"It was the chant of the entire audience, but when we had class at Baník, a group of Slovaks used to gather in the corner on the left side, the Slovak metalworkers, they had a siren that sounded terrible. The guy sat in the first row, no, actually, the first row was for standing only, but he was turning that crank, and it made a horrible sound. They and the Ostrava crowd cheered us on when we played against Czech clubs. But when we played against Prešov, Nitra or Trnava they encouraged their teams. Sometimes at the beginning, it seems, twenty thousand people came, but the three hundred guys from Slovakia, the match hadn't even started yet and - Pome Žilina, pome Žilina! It was already on.”

“During the next two years, when I mainly sailed the Děčín boat, many German women made a living, one could say, by prostitution. They were girls, 17, 18, 20 or 22 years old, when, for example, they lost their parents in the bombing. I don't know how it worked, but I can say that in Magdeburg, there was a boat, one of which was turned into a restaurant. We called it U Féry; many girls used to go there, and they made a living that way. Everything was done secretly. The helmsman was not allowed to know where the crew of three people was. When Franta, a colleague, and I sailed with the helmsman Ličeník, and he sailed with his wife, she would be terribly mean if she found out about the girls. The second thing was the fear of the wasserschutzpolizei, the river police. They would check the boats, and if they found the girls, they took them to their boat and ashore. The girls operated in a specific manner – they boarded in Magdeburg, and sailed for five or six days to Dresden, so the ride was long, 350 kilometres to Dresden. In Dresden, they got off, and whoever was driving from above grabbed the young guys and got on. There were forty-five of us trained boys, and we were distributed evenly.”

"Also a mention, the travelling, not around the whole world, but a large part of the world, from Tokyo to Lake Titicaca, Bolivia, La Paz, all those countries. We didn't just play football; we saw a lot of monuments, the Cairo Museum, the Cheops Pyramid, back when you could still walk to the top of the Cheops Pyramid, on the sidewalk, some of the players went up, I stayed below. Tehran Museum, many places, Fuji, the sacred mountain of Japan, Lake Titicaca. Landing the plane at 4080 meters high in La Paz, as soon as they opened the door, there were four beds on wheels and several oxygen masks ready below. Suddenly, as one stepped onto the stairs, one's head began to spin. And we were young people, athletes, what about older people, they put them straight on the beds, and the oxygen mask went right on their faces. In La Paz, we played football walking. It wasn't possible to run. As I say, these are the memorable things. We experienced visits to embassies, and they treated us wonderfully. Cairo, and in Tehran, the engineer Karmelita, a guy from Kunčičky, was off duty, he would even go to training with us."

"Evenings were off, it was terribly hot on that deck, it was made out of iron - we would - you couldn't walk there in tennis shoes or leather shoes, you could only walk in clogs there. All boatmen and the entire Elbe industry existed on ships in clogs, beautiful linden clogs, they were made in the GDR. We knew how to move in it. Winter came, and we sailed in winter, we got up in the morning and the deck was like at the Vítkovice stadium, covered with ice. It was impossible to even walk through it. In short, that's how it was, when I worked as a boatman, as I say, I spent almost four years there."

"There was one family in our tenement, it was the Hrabec family. They had two sons around the age of around 23 or 24. The old Mr Hrabec worked at SK Ostravica, he worked as a groundskeeper on the field. It was a wooden stand, and he had two balloons in his cupboard at home. During the war, everything was difficult, it was unattainable goods, and Mrs Hrabcová washed clothes in a stream down below. And there was a boiler where she used to cook. When I was three or four years old, my mother would say, 'Mrs. Hrabcová...' 'I'll take him, I'll take František.' And I went down to the playground, Mr Hrabec lent me a ball, and I practised against the wall there. I stayed with them. Then they went home, and I went with them. I have been spending a lot of time on that playground since I was a child. When her two sons came in the afternoon, they would play with me in the hall. That was something."

"Well, maybe I see it as doping because the consultant Novotný would hand out C and B vitamins before the match. In short, as we sat on the common bench behind each other, the locker was so tiny, he walked and had one vitamin C tablet and another B vitamin tablet. He had two ampoules unscrewed, but he also had another one. Hold out your hand! It was a small pill. He broke it into half – Eat it, swallow it, wash it down with soda! Mr Consultant, what is this, the small one? Don't worry - swallow and drink! And I have said it before, I was playing football all night, we were taking that, it was the phenmetrazine. Obese women were in demand for it. They wanted to lose weight and - Get it, Franta, phenmetrazine! Whoever swallowed it had a loss of appetite, and their weight went down. We took it. He didn't give it to everyone in the cubicle, he had them selected, he gave it to five guys who needed a boost, me too. I was indeed tossing and turning all night long, just thinking about football and what was supposed to be done better, and I couldn't fall asleep. That was the only thing I assumed could be called doping. The drug was unobtainable, only by prescription, and I know that women were on the lookout for it.''