NHL Escape: From Car Trunk to Disillusionment

When it came out in 1986 A small encyclopedia of ice hockeyit differed from the sports publications of those times in that it also featured emigrants. So for the first time, fans could read how Václav Nedomanský, Peter Šťastný or Jiří Kocht fared abroad.

The slogans dedicated to them ended with the sentence: He left the Czechoslovakia illegally. Which was factually nonsense.

They left the Republic completely legally, on a valid passport. Whether they went with the club and the national team, or with the family on vacation. They just refused to come back. But none of them secretly swam the Danube or flew to Bavaria on a rogal.

One of the few exceptions to whom the words about illegally leaving the Czechoslovakia would fit was Košice forward Miroslav Ihnačák.

40 years ago, on December 28, 1985, he arrived in Vienna in the trunk of a car with a diplomatic badge, to then continue on to Canada, where he longed to fulfill his dream of the NHL and a blue and white jersey with the Toronto Maple Leafs logo.

Anyone who wanted to become a successful representative in communist Czechoslovakia needed to have an acceptable personnel profile in addition to talent, diligence and health. Miroslav Ihnačák lacked the latter quite fundamentally.

The fact that he came from a peasant family did not matter so much in the normalization years. Worse, he had relatives in the West. Or more precisely – too many relatives. Grandfather went to the USA during the Great Depression, aunt after February 1948, three of Ihnačák’s siblings followed in the 1960s.

Although Miroslav was one of the talents of the Czechoslovak Republic. hockey, he was only allowed to travel abroad if the game was played on the territory of the RVHP.

In 1979, he became European under-18 champion (the tournament was hosted by Poland), and the following season he won silver (the venue of the championship was Pardubice and Hradec Králové), but when in 1981 – as well as this year – the U20 World Championship was held in Minnesota, he was unlucky. His comrades even cut him off the team at the Ruzyne airport.

Another complication occurred in 1982. Peter, a five-year-old older brother of Sparta, fled to Canada. He also struggled with similar problems for a long time. When he was finally nominated at least for the World Cup in Finland, which did not accept refugees from communist countries, he decided to disappear anyway. In the middle of the tournament, he boarded a ferry in Helsinki and went to Sweden, where representatives of Toronto were already waiting for him.

And it was the Maple Leafs who drafted Miroslav to the NHL a few weeks later. They chose him 171st overall.

State security reacted in a predictable way: they confiscated his passport and started following him even more closely. Now he wasn’t even allowed to go to Poland.

Understandably, such things were not written or spoken about publicly in Czechoslovakia. And so uninitiated fans could only argue why the most productive player in the league (66 points in 43 games in the 1984/85 season) did not receive a single invitation to the national team. In contrast to partners from the attack Igor Liba and Ján Vodila.

On the other hand, in Toronto, they were well aware of his performances. General manager Gerry McNamara had a soft spot for the Czech Republic. hockey players, and when he understood that he would not succeed in luring Vladimír Růžička to escape, whom he also drafted in 1982, he focused on Miroslav Ihnačák.

The problem was how to get him across the border. Finally, a secret route through Austria was prepared. For a bribe of 150 thousand Canadian dollars for all involved.

Ihnačák first arrived by train from Košice to Bratislava, where he met the traffickers. “They thought it out well. A diplomatic car came for me, I got in and in the trunk they took me across the border to Vienna,” he said in an interview for the Memory of the Nation.

There, Toronto’s general manager was waiting for him. But in scenes that continued to resemble a spy thriller.

He arrived in Vienna on the day when Palestinian terrorists attacked a group of Israeli tourists in the check-in hall. Balance: 2 dead, 39 injured. The city was in shock, other connections were canceled or diverted.

At least McNamara did not have to worry about the situation at the Vienna airport in the following days. Because he found out on the spot that although Ihnačák’s escape through the Iron Curtain had been orchestrated, his passage from Austria to Canada was not guaranteed.

He tried to contact the embassy, ​​but it was functioning more symbolically during the holidays. When he got to the officials, they didn’t even want to hear about the priority transfer. Ihnačák was for them no name. Like everyone else, they have to go to a refugee camp, only then everything will start to be resolved within the normal immigration procedures.

As many as two natives of Czechoslovakia helped.

Otto Jelinek, Canada’s minister of sport and former world figure skating champion, tried to move the case to the highest places. In turn, the influential journalist George (Juraj) Gross contributed to the success of the event with a great story published in the newspaper The Toronto Sun.

In the end, their argument that the fugitive hockey player is still in Vienna, a city only a few tens of kilometers from the Czechoslovak border and riddled with KGB and StB agents, and therefore at risk of kidnapping, took over.

Ihnačák received the desired stamp from the Canadian government with a special permit to enter the country, and on the second day of January 1986 he headed to the Vienna airport. Not alone. “I had security and five cars drove out of the apartment. Two in front of me, two behind me, and I was in the middle one. There were soldiers from the embassy and Austrian police with submachine guns. The scene was like an action movie,” he described the journey.

Then he boarded a plane and traveled via London and Vancouver to Toronto, where his brother was already waiting for him.

But it was only a partial happy ending.

Just the amount of money the Maple Leafs invested in the running back clearly indicated that Miroslav Ihnačák is not expected somewhere on the third or fourth line. He was to become a star capable of scoring 40 goals per season. He was supposed to lift the languishing Toronto in a similar way as Peter Šťastny did with Quebec.

Even though no one from the club’s management had seen him play, even though for understandable reasons he had no experience in world hockey, he came with the reputation of the best left winger in Europe.

An unpleasant surprise happened already at the airport. As assistant general manager Gord Stellick later put it, they were expecting a burly vase, and instead an inconspicuous 180-centimeter-tall guy came out of transit. At that moment, the first doubts appeared and the head of the PR department was hastily redoing the prepared press release.

Still, the club held a grand welcome at Maple Leaf Gardens. As befits and belongs to a city where hockey is watched like nowhere else in the world.

Quirky owner Harold Ballard ceremoniously presented Miroslav Ihnačák with the number 27 jersey made famous by legends Frank Mahovlich and Darryl Sittler. It was another signal that extraordinary things were expected from the mysterious reinforcement.

“When I saw it, I was scratching my head. This can’t turn out well, I thought. And I was right,” recalled forward Miroslav Fryčer, one of three other emigrants in the team. “Miro was put under enormous pressure from the first moment and never came out of it.”

It didn’t help Ihnačák that, after arriving in Toronto, he wanted to improve the contract he had already signed with the Maple Leafs in Vienna (he had to be admitted to Canada). An angry Ballard never forgot it. He hated the communists and took it as ungratefulness from the man he had just helped escape from the wire country.

Coach Dan Maloney also reacted emotionally, ordering the custodian to throw Ihnačák’s belongings out of the cabin into the corridor.

Therefore, he did not have his premiere until eight days after his arrival. In the game against Buffalo, he started in the Czechoslovak line with Fryčer and his brother Peter, and even though Toronto lost 7:9, he could be satisfied. He scored his first goal.

The journalist was understandably interested in how he likes the tough game in the NHL. “It was more of a stampede. Like here in Czechoslovakia in the line for meat,” he amused them.

In the next match, however, he got to know a completely different face of the overseas competition. The hyped-up game with the Red Wings culminated in an all-player brawl, and he wasn’t surprised when he took a hard hit from Detroit’s backup goaltender on the ice.

After several duels, journalists and fans began to notice that the younger of the Ihnačák brothers not only has a problem with hard play, but is not just any skater either. In addition, he only had one hit the rest of the season and was sent to the farm in early March.

However, it was still considered a natural tax of acclimatization to a different hockey and a different world.

Unfortunately for him, it was not better in the year 1986/87 either. He did not get a permanent place in the lineup and often shuttled between the NHL and the farm. In the next season, the new coach John Brophy, who despised European hockey and mainly valued players’ ability to deal blows, did not give him a chance.

The fans started mocking Ihnačák Miro The Zero and served as ammunition for journalists to fire at the increasingly unpopular general manager McNamara. He once became famous as the scout who discovered defenseman Börje Salming in Sweden and made him the first European star of the NHL, but as time went on it became clear that this time he was not so accurate.

In the spring of 1988, McNamara was fired and replaced by the aforementioned Stellick. Although he came from a Czech emigrant family (his father’s name was originally Stehlíček), he did not suffer from exaggerated respect for his compatriots. His first step in office was the exchange of Fryčer to Detroit, and shortly thereafter he paid the younger of Ihnačák out of a five-year contract.

The former bombastic reinforcement left with a record of 55 matches, 8 goals, 9 assists. One big hockey misunderstanding has become a thing of the past.

“We really believed that he would be the second Peter Šťastný, that he would score a hundred points per season,” Stellick later reflected in his memoirs Hockey, Heartaches and Hal. “When I add up the transfer fee, Ihnačak’s salary and the money for the payout from the contract, I get to the amount of 850 thousand. So every one of his goals cost us 106,250 dollars.”

But Ihnačák has not packed it overseas yet. Detroit gave him a chance, but he joined the NHL there for only one game. At least winning the Calder Cup for the champion of the American Hockey League could be a consolation for him.

Then he signed with Quebec. It was his two best years in Canada, he even became the farm team’s most productive player with 95 points in 77 games. For the Nordiques first team, where young forwards Joe Sakic and Mats Sundin were already shining, but he never started.

In the summer of 1991, he returned permanently to Europe. He went through several German clubs, stopped in Switzerland, then the journey took him to his native Poprad and back to Košice for seven seasons.

In the end, he also played for the national team, which was once banned for political reasons. He has already worn the jersey of independent Slovakia and contributed seven goals to advance to the elite group of the World Cup.

It was quite a strange team. It met Cold War veterans Peter Šťastný and Miroslav Ihnačák, as well as stars of the new era Miroslav Šatan, Róbert Švehla and Róbert Petrovický.

The others were lucky that their careers were no longer managed by party secretaries. And when they wanted to go out to play, they loaded the maximum amount of hockey equipment into the trunk of the car.