The Last Bogatyr of Kladno
The rink sounds older at night. Compressors hum behind the boards; edges hiss in tight half-moons; a stick taps twice—code, courtesy, warning. In Kladno, under low municipal light, number 68 leans over a defensive zone draw on the right dot. The goalie seals the post. The linesman’s hand drops. The puck slaps and skitters. The other side wins it high, slides it to the wall, and a winger younger by three decades tries to turn the corner.
Jaromír Jagr shades to the kickplate and offers the inside shoulder like a door shutting. His toe-curve blade wedges against the yellow, a small lever that makes the lane narrower than it looks. The younger man gets two feet, maybe three, and then he doesn’t. The puck coughs loose. A defenseman rims it off glass. The building exhales. It is a small play, nothing to save for the highlight reel, but it keeps a gate that needs keeping. He stands a post. Not defying time—keeping a vow.
There’s a name for this kind of champion in the old songs of the region. The byliny tell of Ilya Muromets, peasant-born, stilled through early adulthood until pilgrims come and give him a strange blessing—the strength of twelve poured into a body that had been quiet. Ilya takes service with Prince Vladimir and rides not to conquer but to keep. He clears roads of bandits like Nightingale the Robber; he stands watch when cities need it; he ages into devotion at the Pechersk Lavra. In those songs, greatness is measured less by distance traveled than by what you hold for others—the gate kept, the road made passable, the people who sleep because you are awake.
Rytíři Kladno are literally the Knights. The image isn’t imported decoration; it is native to the sweater. Jagr fits the figure almost too neatly: a regional knight who rode hard miles, then came home to stand his post.
Even his number is an oath you can see. Sixty-eight: a stitched vow tied by family memory to 1968, when a courageous spring was crushed and a generation learned the cost of hope. He took the number early and never put it down. Watch 68 move along the half-wall and the past travels with him, not as a brand but as a banner. In the stands you can sometimes see the lineage made plain: a grandfather touching the same numerals on a child’s jersey and naming a year the boy didn’t live through but somehow wears. The number is a small portable relic. It binds a player to a memory and a place.
The biographical ledger—no wife, no children—can be read cruelly if one wishes. Better to say simply that what would have been given to a household has been given to a rink and a city. He has kept himself available: for road trips, call-ups, late nights and early lifts, and now for unglamorous minutes at home. Some build a house with family; he has kept a house of ice for other people’s children.
Before he came home again, he rode. The KHL years were winters in a foreign court, a professional choice many make when one league closes and another opens. Whatever else those years were, they were hard miles that proved the craft travels. His forties in the NHL were the errand circuit—short deals, midseason arrivals, new colors over the same job description. Teams in need called, and a stranger came to town. You could see the room sit up on the nights he dressed. The touch was still there, the early pass that makes linemates better; the body was still a lever on the wall; the sense of where the puck would be was an old man’s second sight. Function over romance: hired strength lent where needed.
On the road, reputation packs itself. Character must be carried in person. When a tabloid-ready threat surfaced years ago—blackmail with a gossip-rag sheen—he answered with daylight. Go ahead and post it, he said. Not bravado so much as a refusal to play the game that breeds in shadows. The bandit in the thicket withered once named, and the road cleared.
Every errand ends at a gate. His did in Kladno, back where the professional story began, back where the rink knows his first edges and his last. Part owner and, on some nights, player, he is at once emblem and instrument—an old sword mounted on the wall that can still be taken down and swung when the city needs noise in the corridors. This is not nostalgia. Before his return the club wobbled: too many empty seats, sponsors nervous, numbers that make accountants stare at the floor. Owner now, he pulled on the sweater because bodies at the glass keep lights on. His presence draws a crowd; a living legend on a lineup card changes the mood of a town.
When he dresses, the effects are plain. Turnstiles click more. The light seems less tired. Kids gather at the glass, their breath fogging ovals. The bench sits up. Teammates straighten. It is hard to measure this without falling into soft language, but every room knows the difference between a night on which the elder is present and a night on which he is only a rumor. Presence sharpens people.
On the ice, the job is the same as it was on the road and in the songs: keep the wall, clear the road. A good night from 68 now is not end-to-end; it is a series of small acts that make other people’s big acts possible. A reverse check at the hashmarks to pry a man off the boards. A soft chip into a pocket where a faster teammate can skate onto it in stride. A controlled exit when the line looks tired—blade flat, hands quiet, angle correct, the puck slid to safety so legs can change. None of it is loud. All of it is important.
The rituals that make this possible are a rule more than a mystery. He is known for them: late-night skates under fluorescents, repetition until the steel knows the edge, recovery that would bore a saint. The point isn’t that he cheats time; it’s that he spends it well. Work done again becomes a form of devotion. If there is a pilgrims’ blessing in his story, it is this—no lightning-strike miracle, only the daily sacrament of doing. Longevity isn’t luck. It is a vow given to habit, renewed in public where failure can be witnessed.
He has said in interviews he would like the time between retirement and death to be as short as possible. You can hear it as a dark joke. Another reading is plainer and kinder: a man who prefers to die in harness rather than sitting in a room that smells like old rain, waiting. Many epics honor that preference. The good death in the tales is not martyrdom for attention; it is a quiet settling of accounts after the last watch.
What matters about this in Kladno are the civic effects as much as the personal ones. The presence of a part-owner who still makes himself available to take shifts says something to a town that has had its share of hard winters. It says that strength—whatever remains of it in a fifty-three-year-old body—belongs to the place that made it. It says that a number worn for a national wound can be worn for a local promise too. From the seats you can track that promise in small ways: children at practice the next morning trying the same soft chip to space; a run on 68s for the bottoms of sticks and the backs of hoodies; men at the end of the row whose eyes are wiser than their words telling the person beside them that this is how the game is supposed to be played. Even the ledgers feel it. Nights he dresses, there are more tickets torn, more steam off the food stands, more reasons for a sponsor to say yes.
Because this is the world and not a song, not every night is clean. There will be shifts when the younger winger does turn the corner. There will be pucks that do not cooperate and sticks that break. The attractive hagiography would hide those nights. The truer praise is to count them. To keep a gate is to be beaten at the gate sometimes and take the late skate anyway. To clear the road is to swing the blade into brush that grows back. The vow does not guarantee success; it guarantees return.
The scenes after games are where all of it simplifies. A last drift to center as the crowd leaves; a raised stick, small and careful; the rink emptying itself of noise. The last person on the ice is often the one who has been there longest. He makes slow circles that are less about training than about making sure the place is all right. He stops, picks a puck from the small pile at the wall, banks it softly off the boards, catches it on the tape, does it again, then lays the stick across the bench like a mace. One more look at the ice. The door opens to the tunnel, and he goes.
The myth helps because it fixes the verbs. Without it, the temptation is to talk about the “ageless wonder,” to make a poster out of a person. The bogatyr frame insists on function. You keep. You clear. You stand. You return. And in the end, you lay the stick down and let someone else pick it up. Maybe that is why the story moves people who don’t know the first thing about hockey. The image is older than sport. In every town there is a gate. In every generation, someone gives their back to it.
Another defensive draw, another tap on the boards. The other team wins it again; the puck goes high; the lane narrows like a door closing. People stand without meaning to. A kid cranes his neck to watch what happens in the bad corner where the glass stutters and the camera angle is never quite right. The old knight leans, turns, levers, clears. The clock jerks forward. Somewhere in the stands a man points to a number and says a year. A boy nods as if he understands, and maybe he does.
Later, everything is quiet. Fluorescents hum. The cold shows itself in breath. A slow circle, a puck banked and caught, the stick laid gently where the wall meets the world. The city sleeps, and the gate holds.
Brandon McNeice is a Philadelphia-based writer of fiction, poetry, and essays. His work appears or is forthcoming in SmokeLong Quarterly, Plough, Front Porch Republic, Beyond Words, Sport Literate, The Rush Magazine, and Flash Frog.