“I had a contract there for three years and after three years I decided not to try again,” he explains in retrospect.
“I think I was a bit stubborn, vain and, like most of my playing career, I had my truth that was clear and now I see that the truth was somewhere else or somewhere in between,” he reveals the former professional hockey player, who then spent a successful career in the national extralega, from which he only briefly bounced twice in Switzerland and later also played in the third highest competition in Germany.
Fighters have disappeared from the NHL and hockey is moving towards floorball. Passage from Příklepvideo: Sport.cz
“I decided to leave and try to join the NHL somewhere else, but once you leave the NHL, it’s hard to come back, but at that moment it seemed like the best solution and so I decided”, back in his turn to Philadelphia, where he shuttled between the first team of Flyers and the Phantoms reserve.
He left for America at the age of 20 and returned before his 23rd birthday. “We can tell ourselves that maybe I would have been there if I had held out, or I would have ended up worse than I did, so now it doesn’t matter,” says the top center.
A record number of Czech goalkeepers have entered the NHL. Is a new Hašek growing here? We are discussing in Příklepvideo: Sport.cz
“I did what I thought was right and in the end I had a different life on the other side of the planet,” adds Divíšek club HC Letci Letňany., Now 43, where he currently works as general manager.
You can find more in Příklep’s video. You can also play the entire episode of Sport.cz in podcast form.
