Petr Hejma senior

Petr (Peter) Hejma senior (born June 27, 1944 in Prague , Reich Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia ) is a former German - Czechoslovak ice hockey player ( striker ) who also briefly worked as a coach.

Player career in the ČSSR

Prague's Petr Hejma played for his hometown club Sparta Prague , at times also for Dukla Jihlava and was one of the best center strikers in the first division , the top division of Czechoslovakia. He was a 40-time national player and won the silver medal at the 1968 Olympic Games with the ČSSR.

During a guest appearance by Sparta Prague at the Düsseldorfer EG , he separated from his team and stayed in the Federal Republic of Germany.

Playing career in Germany

This guest performance in Düsseldorf took place on September 15, 1968 in the still uncovered ice rink on Brehmstrasse . Due to continuous rain, the game had to be stopped in the second third when the score was 5: 2 for Prague. After that, he withdrew from his team and wanted to play ice hockey in the West because he saw better prospects for himself and his family. But at the time of the Cold War , this was also a political matter. The angry Czechoslovak Association applied to the World Association IIHF for an 18-month ban. Although Hejma quickly obtained German citizenship , he had to wait the entire year and a half before he was allowed to play professional ice hockey again. Despite several contract offers from North America, he stayed in Düsseldorf and was allowed to play for DEG in the Bundesliga for the 1970/1971 season. He often said later that if he had known how excruciatingly long 18 months without his sport can be, he probably would not have started his escape.

Shortly after Hejma's escape, his wife Marta Hejma-Luzova , also a high-performance athlete (European table tennis champion ), was allowed to leave and then played for Duisburg-Kaiserberg. 1970 son Petr Hejma junior was born, who also became an ice hockey player and played for the DEG and the EHC Freiburg for a while.

In the 1970/71 season, Hejma was immediately top scorer in the Bundesliga and runner-up with DEG. As a member of the well-staffed team of DEG, the goalkeeper Rainer Makatsch (father of actress Heike Makatsch ), Walter Köberle , Vladimír Vacátko and longtime fan idols Otto Schneitberger and Sepp Reif had and some stars in the team of the future coach Xaver Unsinn trained was, he sat at the top playfully and performed magic like the league had hardly seen before. The success was not long in coming, with DEG the crowd favorite became German champions in 1972.

The other seasons were successful. At DEG he was top scorer every year, and in 1975 he was German champion for the second time under coach Chuck Holdaway . In search of new challenges, he switched to league competitor Krefelder EV for the 1976/77 season together with Schneitberger, who was aiming for the coaching job for his new team for the following year . Here, too, he was top scorer and best man in the team. However, since KEV went bankrupt in 1978 , he and Schneitberger moved back to DEG. Hejma played three more successful years for DEG, which continued to play in the top league, but was no longer able to intervene in the battle for the championship. His last active season was the first season with play-offs and was once again rewarded with the runner-up title.

After the end of his career, Hejma worked as an engineer at the Düsseldorfer Stadtwerke and looked after the offspring of the Düsseldorfer EG, where u. a. his son played along.

Short coaching career

In the 80s, Hejma mainly worked for the youth teams, at times he also acted as co-trainer for the Bundesliga team. In the 1989/1990 season, at a time when DEG was on the up again, he was head coach of the DEG team in the play-offs for a short time, as his predecessor, Swede Peter Johansson, who was unpopular with the team, after a 1:10 Defeat against promoted Munich was dismissed. Thus, in the last games of the season, he led DEG to the German championship title in 1990, the first championship title in 15 years.

Despite numerous inquiries from fans and the media, he was not interested in any further training as a coach, completely withdrew from ice hockey and only worked for the municipal utilities. His successor was Hans Zach .

In the Düsseldorf ice hockey environment, Petr Hejma, along with his former teammates Otto Schneitberger and Sepp Reif, as well as Chris Valentine and Peter-John Lee, is still one of the biggest stars of DEG and one of the most likeable and at the same time most successful players ever for the club and in the Have played league.

Hejma is now retired and lives in Hilden.

Career data as a player (Bundesliga)

• Düsseldorfer EG 1970 to 1976 and 1978 to 1981 (9 seasons) - 359 games - 240 goals - 274 assists - 514 points - 261 penalty minutes
• Krefelder EV 1976 to 1978 (2 seasons) - 83 games - 57 goals - 68 assists - 125 points - 52 penalty minutes

Web links

• Petr Hejma at hockeydb.com (English)
• Petr Hejma senior in the Sports-Reference database (English; archived from the original )