101 Greats of European Basketball
Create successful ePaper yourself
Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.
A Czech<br />
legend<br />
The name certainly sounds familiar. Jiri<br />
Zidek has been a colleague <strong>of</strong> mine, working<br />
as a columnist for Euroleague.net and<br />
as a color commentator on Euroleague.<br />
TV. He is also one <strong>of</strong> the few men – and<br />
the first <strong>European</strong> – to have won both the<br />
NCAA Tournament and the EuroLeague championship,<br />
with UCLA in 1995 and Zalgiris in 1999, respectively.<br />
It’s true that Zidek certainly deserves his own<br />
place among the greats, due to his many great accomplishments.<br />
But first I wish to write about another Jiri<br />
Zidek, his father.<br />
Exactly 30 years before Jiri Zidek Jr.’s success with<br />
Zalgiris in Munich back in 1999, Jiri Zidek Sr won the<br />
Saporta Cup title with his team, Slavia Prague. Dinamo<br />
Tbilisi, representing the Soviet Union, and Slavia, representing<br />
Czechoslovakia, played the title game on April<br />
17, 1969. Slavia won 80-74. As far as I know, the Zideks<br />
are the only case in which a father and son have won a<br />
title in <strong>European</strong> club competitions. A year before that,<br />
Zidek Sr. was the star <strong>of</strong> a historic game – the 1968 Saporta<br />
Cup final in Athens, Greece on April 4, 1968. Slavia<br />
faced AEK at Panathinaiko Stadium. Officially, it was a<br />
sellout <strong>of</strong> 52,880, but most reports claim there were<br />
between 60,000 and 80,000 fans on hand if you count<br />
those who cheered from outside because they couldn’t<br />
make it into the stadium. AEK beat Slavia 89-82 to win<br />
the first <strong>European</strong> title for a Greek basketball club, but<br />
the star <strong>of</strong> the game was Zidek Sr., who scored 31 points.<br />
Slavia, a team full <strong>of</strong> Jiris<br />
Born in Prague, Czechoslovakia on February 8,<br />
1944, Zidek Sr. spent the best and biggest part <strong>of</strong> his<br />
career with Slavia, a team that had a great sporting<br />
rivalry with Spartak Brno to be the best in the country<br />
throughout the 1960s and the 1970s. Slavia was<br />
known as “The Jiris” because many times its starting<br />
five featured Jiri Ruzicka, Jiri Stasny, Jiri Ammer, Jiri<br />
Zednicek and Jiri Zidek, with Jiri Konopasek coming<br />
<strong>of</strong>f the bench. Spartak was represented by Kamil Brabenec,<br />
Zdenek and Jan Bobrovsky, Vladimir Pistalek,<br />
Frantisek Konvicka, Frantisek Pokorny and Zdenek<br />
Konecny. All <strong>of</strong> them played together on a strong<br />
Czechoslovakian national team that won the silver<br />
medal at the 1967 EuroBasket in Helsinki, Finland.<br />
Czechoslovakia was defeated by the Soviet Union, 87-<br />
79, in the title game, but Zidek had 23 points against<br />
giants like Vladimir Andreev and Alzhan Zarmuhamedov.<br />
Zidek averaged 13.8 points in that tournament.<br />
Two years later, Czechoslovakia won the bronze medal<br />
at the 1969 EuroBasket in Naples, Italy, with Zidek averaging<br />
12.6 points.<br />
Zidek was the top scorer (18.6 ppg.) at the 1970<br />
World Cup in Ljubljana, Yugoslavia. He scored even<br />
more (20.4 ppg.) at the 1971 EuroBasket in Essen, West<br />
Germany, and enjoyed a strong performance (12.7 ppg.,<br />
4.8 rebounds) at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich.<br />
Overall, Zidek played 257 games with the Czechoslovakian<br />
national team. There is no evidence <strong>of</strong> how many<br />
points he scored with his national team, but in a phone<br />
conversation, Zidek Sr. gave me rough numbers <strong>of</strong> his<br />
great career:<br />
• Played pr<strong>of</strong>essional basketball for 18 years.<br />
• Scored an estimated 13,000 points.<br />
• Won six league titles with Slavia.<br />
<strong>101</strong> greats <strong>of</strong> european basketball<br />
Jiri Zidek<br />
Z