JIRI ZIDEK - 101 Greats of European Basketball

Jiri
Zidek
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A Czech
legend
The name certainly sounds familiar. Jiri
Zidek has been a colleague of mine, working
as a columnist for Euroleague.net and
as a color commentator on Euroleague.
TV. He is also one of the few men – and
the first European – to have won both the
NCAA Tournament and the EuroLeague championship,
with UCLA in 1995 and Zalgiris in 1999, respectively.
It’s true that Zidek certainly deserves his own
place among the greats, due to his many great accomplishments.
But first I wish to write about another Jiri
Zidek, his father.
Exactly 30 years before Jiri Zidek Jr.’s success with
Zalgiris in Munich back in 1999, Jiri Zidek Sr won the
Saporta Cup title with his team, Slavia Prague. Dinamo
Tbilisi, representing the Soviet Union, and Slavia, representing
Czechoslovakia, played the title game on April
17, 1969. Slavia won 80-74. As far as I know, the Zideks
are the only case in which a father and son have won a
title in European club competitions. A year before that,
Zidek Sr. was the star of a historic game – the 1968 Saporta
Cup final in Athens, Greece on April 4, 1968. Slavia
faced AEK at Panathinaiko Stadium. Officially, it was a
sellout of 52,880, but most reports claim there were
between 60,000 and 80,000 fans on hand if you count
those who cheered from outside because they couldn’t
make it into the stadium. AEK beat Slavia 89-82 to win
the first European title for a Greek basketball club, but
the star of the game was Zidek Sr., who scored 31 points.
Slavia, a team full of Jiris
Born in Prague, Czechoslovakia on February 8,
1944, Zidek Sr. spent the best and biggest part of his
career with Slavia, a team that had a great sporting
rivalry with Spartak Brno to be the best in the country
throughout the 1960s and the 1970s. Slavia was
known as “The Jiris” because many times its starting
five featured Jiri Ruzicka, Jiri Stasny, Jiri Ammer, Jiri
Zednicek and Jiri Zidek, with Jiri Konopasek coming
off the bench. Spartak was represented by Kamil Brabenec,
Zdenek and Jan Bobrovsky, Vladimir Pistalek,
Frantisek Konvicka, Frantisek Pokorny and Zdenek
Konecny. All of them played together on a strong
Czechoslovakian national team that won the silver
medal at the 1967 EuroBasket in Helsinki, Finland.
Czechoslovakia was defeated by the Soviet Union, 87-
79, in the title game, but Zidek had 23 points against
giants like Vladimir Andreev and Alzhan Zarmuhamedov.
Zidek averaged 13.8 points in that tournament.
Two years later, Czechoslovakia won the bronze medal
at the 1969 EuroBasket in Naples, Italy, with Zidek averaging
12.6 points.
Zidek was the top scorer (18.6 ppg.) at the 1970
World Cup in Ljubljana, Yugoslavia. He scored even
more (20.4 ppg.) at the 1971 EuroBasket in Essen, West
Germany, and enjoyed a strong performance (12.7 ppg.,
4.8 rebounds) at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich.
Overall, Zidek played 257 games with the Czechoslovakian
national team. There is no evidence of how many
points he scored with his national team, but in a phone
conversation, Zidek Sr. gave me rough numbers of his
great career:
• Played professional basketball for 18 years.
• Scored an estimated 13,000 points.
• Won six league titles with Slavia.
101 greats of european basketball
Jiri Zidek
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Vladimir Stankovic
• Was the Czechoslovakian League’s scoring champion
10 times and averaged around 30 points.
• His single-best scoring game was 68 points
against Olomouc.
That Slavia squad boasted a powerful team able to
beat anyone. For instance, Zidek Sr. scored 35 points
against Real Madrid in the 1965-66 season, 36 against
Simmenthal Milano and did even better against Belgian
side Racing – 40 points in Belgium and 48 at home! He
tallied 54 points in another game against Madrid. That
season, Zidek led Slavia to the first-ever Final Four, host
by FIBA in Bologna, Italy. Slavia suffered a 77-72 loss
to Simmenthal in the final despite 20 points by Zidek.
At the end of the season, Zidek was named a member
of the European continental team for 1966. In another
Final Four played in Madrid, Spain, in 1967, Slavia once
again lost against Simmenthal Milano, 103-97, in the
semifinals. Slavia managed to beat Olimpija Ljubljana
88-83 in the third-place game.
An atypical center
At 2.06 meters tall and based on today’s standards,
Zidek Sr. was more a forward than a center, but he
played in the “five” position and successfully fought
against taller opponents. His best weapons were the
fundamentals. He was a talented player who could hit
both his outside jumper and a hard-to-guard hook shot.
Zidek was also a great rebounder and had the spirit of
a natural fighter.
Zidek Sr. told me that back in 1968, the Boston Celtics
showed interest in him, but it was impossible and
unthinkable for him to get out of Czechoslovakia. “I had
many offers from the biggest clubs in Europe, but we
lived in the communist era, without personal freedom.
Getting out of the country in a legal way was almost
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impossible,” Zidek Sr. said. He was one of the true European
basketball legends in the 1960s and the 1970s.
After playing one season for Olomouc, he was granted
permission to work outside his country and finished
his brilliant career in Finland. At age 38, Zidek Sr. was a
player-coach with Forza Alku for two seasons.
He remembers well his battles in the paint against
Dino Meneghin, Kreso Cosic, Clifford Luyk and Trajko
Rajkovic. Zidek Sr. spoke with me about the great Ivo
Daneu, his rivalry against CSKA that went beyond
sports, and especially, about his great friendship with
Radivoj Korac, who tragically passed away in a car crash
in 1969. When I asked him why there are no great basketball
players in the Czech Republic like in the old days,
Zidek didn’t have a clear answer. “Maybe it is because
basketball is not as popular as football and ice hockey,”
he said. “There is not enough money for basketball.
Maybe players lack that passion for basketball nowadays.”
But of course, that is changing, as the Czechs
had a new EuroLeague champion, Jan Vesely, with Fenerbahce
Istanbul in 2017.
Jiri Zidek Jr. managed to achieve a lot of the things
Jiri Zidek Sr. couldn’t do. Zidek Jr. won the EuroLeague
title, played three years in the NBA and wore the jerseys
of European basketball powerhouses like Zalgiris and
Real Madrid, one of the dreams that his father had. But
if I had to choose one of them – with all due respect to
my friend Jiri Jr. – I would choose Zidek Sr., considered
by many as the best Czech player of all-time.
Jiri Zidek Sr, a Czech legend.
Jiri Zidek
101 greats of european basketball
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