If you’re one of my American friends in America reading this, you probably haven’t heard about the horrible airplane crash yesterday. Understandable. It’s a big world and bad stuff is happening all the time, pretty much everywhere.
Jan Marek, born December 31, 1979, died September 7th, 2011
It happened in Russia, in a city called Jaroslavl, which I’d never heard of before but they are apparently big enough to have a hockey team in the KHL. The team, Lokomotiv Jaroslavl, was on its way to Belarus for a game. The plane hit the control tower’s antenna while taking off and crashed, killing 43 people. Pretty much the whole team, including 3 Czech players: Jan Marek, Josef Vašiček and Karel Rachunek.
I knew Jan Marek. Well, I’d met him. He was a student of mine. For about two or three lessons. I don’t know how he found out about our school, his girlfriend called to set up the lessons because he was quite shy about his English – which, if memory serves me correctly, was not great. Anyway, he told me he played for Sparta and wanted to learn English because he was trying to get into the NHL. Good luck with that, I thought, rather sarcastically, but I was impressed just that he played for Sparta.
See, I always assume that professional athletes are going to be giants but that’s not true, certainly not with hockey players. I think short might actually be an advantage to a skater, low center of gravity and all that. Anyway, he was shorter than me and I’m not tall. He was seriously muscular, though.
He offered me free tickets to a Sparta game and I declined, because I’m not a serious sports fan and didn’t know anybody else who would want to go. My son Sam was about 2 at the time. Today, he would never forgive me for turning down tickets to a hockey game.
The English lessons didn’t work out too well. After a couple of sessions he just stopped coming. I don’t know if he wasn’t impressed with me as a teacher, if he found a better school, maybe the team set him up with a tutor, or if he was offended that I turned down the offer of free tickets. Or maybe that’s when he started playing in the Russian league, and he didn’t really need English.
Well, a few years later we started seeing his name a lot as his career took off. He played on the Czech national team and was a pretty big star. Because he’d been a student of mine, he became our family’s favorite hockey player. And he didn’t let us down.
His death, and those of Vašiček and Rachunek, are a great loss to Czech hockey.
My heart goes out to their families and friends. They will not be forgotten.
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