JIRI ZIDEK - 101 Greats of European Basketball

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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