by Marj Roden
As I write this piece, I realize that I will have to keep my written voice a lot more serious than normal, simply because of who it is I am writing about.
Let me tell you about when I first met young Mr. Kraft. It was my rookie year as a reporter with the website Hockey's Future, and I did an article on the Raiders new head coach Kevin McClelland. Now as it happened, I thought it would be interesting to get a few words from the highly-touted rookie from the Czech Republic, Milan Kraft.
He came ambling out of the locker room, and I immediately felt like a dwarf, so I stood at the upper end of a ramp to make the 12 inch difference in our height not appear as obvious. I was also somewhat nervous, because although I had done reporting for the University paper in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan for several years, that was not seen as being as formal as the "real" reporting I was now doing.
When I get nervous, or realize I have majorly put my foot in my mouth, I tend to try and laugh it off (or nervously giggle, depending on one's perspective). And, as luck would have it, I did. I accidently asked Milan how the hockey coaching styles differed between here in Canada and in his homeland of Czechoslovakia.
At this point, he gave me a dagger glare and said, slowly and delibertately, "It's the Czech Republic."
I laughed nervously, feeling my face turning as red as a goal light, and replied, "Oh, you'll have to excuse me, I'm an old timer."
The thing Milan did not know is that when I was in high school (and I will not say how long ago that was!), as a part of the social studies course I took one year, a friend of mine and I represented Czechoslovakia in a Model United Nations exercise. I was known as the "biology expert" in the group due to a long boring speech I'd written on the environment, and my friend was the nuclear war-monger, as she'd signed Czechoslovakia up with a bunch of other delegates at the exercise to nuke the United States. The long and the short of it is, it did take me a little while after that event in my high school career to get use to the name change after Czechoslivakia had divided itself into two.
Anyway, back to the red-faced journalist...
All I earned for my attempt at humour with this young man was another baleful look. At the time, I thought that he simply did not have a sense of humour, but it wasn't that at all.
What I learned, over the two years Milan spent in my hometown of Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, was that he is fiercely proud of coming from the Czech Republic. Anything he takes as a slam against his homeland he will take high offense at, and it is certainly his right. I'm the same way about being Canadian, and I'm sure whenever I travel outside of Canada and someone inadvertently says something I think puts Canada down (other than the value of our dollar...), I'll react in a similar manner to the way Milan reacted.
There is more I could tell you about Milan, but I'll save that for the next few chapters I write in this part of the website.
