Political Scientist Explores Hockey and Cold War Politics in New Book
On the face of it, UC Davis political scientist Ethan Scheiner says he shouldn’t have written his latest book, Freedom to Win: A Cold War Story of the Courageous Hockey Team That Fought the Soviets for the Soul of Its People—and Olympic Gold.
An authority on Japanese politics and elections around the world, Scheiner knew relatively little about hockey or Czechoslovakia when he started researching the Czechoslovak team that upset the Soviet Union on the ice a year after Soviet-led forces crushed the 1968 period of liberalization known as Prague Spring.
His expertise expanded dramatically during his seven years of researching and writing Freedom to Win, which recounts the story of a group of hockey players from a small Czechoslovak town who inspired their country by defeating the Soviet team at the 1969 World Championships. Their tale is set against the history of Czechoslovakia from 1948, when the Communist Party snatched power in a coup, to the fall of the communist state in 1989. The book culminates with the Czech hockey team’s victory over the Russians for the Olympic gold medal in 1998.
Scheiner, a professor in the Department of Political Science, said he chose to write Freedom to Win as narrative nonfiction rather than in the academic style used in his previous books to make it accessible to a wide audience.
“This was a story about individual people placed in really dramatic circumstances,” he said. “I want regular people to know this dramatic, extraordinary story.”
Roots in an undergraduate course
Freedom to Win came about because of a political science course Scheiner launched in spring 2016 on sports and politics. Midway through the course, after covering the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S., he panicked, thinking he might run out of material to teach about other countries.
“The backstory really is, I was afraid of disappointing my students,” he said.
Searching online late one night, Scheiner came across a book — Breakaway by Tal Pinchevsky — about hockey players from the former Eastern Bloc who defected to the West. The opening pages described the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and kidnapping of Czechoslovak reformist leader Alexander Dubček in August 1968, and how the 1969 hockey games inspired Czechs and Slovaks to take to the streets to protest the Soviet crackdown on their freedoms and their country’s occupation.
Google searches initially turned up little information written in English, but Scheiner kept looking. Each new detail he uncovered, like the imprisonment of the entire national hockey team before the 1950 World Championships, hooked him even more.
“I really started becoming obsessed,” he recalled. “My wife said, ‘Well, this is obviously your next book.’ And I'm sitting there going, ‘It is not obviously my next book.’”
Additional research would change his mind. He began focusing on two central players on Czechoslovakia’s team: brothers Jaroslav and Jiri Holík. Soon after, Scheiner discovered that Jaroslav’s son, Robert, had retired in Wyoming after playing 18 seasons in the National Hockey League. Scheiner mailed him a letter in the spring of 2017, describing his interest in writing about Czechoslovak hockey and politics.
“I thought that would be the end of it,” he said. “After about two weeks, all of a sudden I get a phone call from him, and he says, ‘Hi, this is Bobby Holík. I read your letter, and I think your project is great.’”
Five days later, Scheiner flew to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where he spent hours interviewing Holík. The connection led to introductions and more interviews the following year in Europe with Holík’s uncle Jiri, his mother and other legends of Czechoslovak hockey.
Among other people he later interviewed was tennis legend Martina Navratilova, who was 12 years old and living in her native Czechoslovakia when her country’s team became the first ever to beat the Soviets twice in one world championships at the 1969 games. The Soviets ultimately won the double-round robin tournament, but Navratilova gave Scheiner his book title when she told him that the games showed Czechoslovakia’s people that they still had the “freedom to win.”
Critical acclaim
Advance reviews of Freedom to Win, which was released on July 4 by Pegasus Books, suggest that Scheiner more than overcame that fear of disappointing his students — thrilling longtime followers of hockey and Czechoslovakia’s history far beyond his classroom.
Szymon Szemberg, a retired official of the International Ice Hockey Federation, in a tweet called the book “a superb piece of research and writing.”
“History at its gripping best,” according to longtime hockey writer Stan Fischler.
“‘Freedom to Win’ is … a celebration of courage, hope and human dignity, a story for the ages that needed to be told, especially right now,” journalist and author John Carlin wrote in a blurb for the book’s back cover.
Scheiner said Carlin’s 2008 book, Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation, inspired him to create his course on sports and politics. Playing the Enemy was also the basis of the 2009 movie Invictus about how Nelson Mandela used the 1985 Rugby World Cup to help unify South Africa post-apartheid.
Life lesson in following a passion
Scheiner said writing Freedom to Win also taught him a life lesson that he shares with his students: following an “obsession” can give life new purpose.
“I felt such joy and excitement every day to get up and learn more about this extraordinary story and to let other people know about it,” he said. “So what I tell my students now is, ‘Look, when you find something that pulls at you this way, that's actually a sign that it's something you should be pursuing in your life.’ There’s a reason we have passions, because they're the kinds of things that make our lives really meaningful.”
Witness history and watch Game 1 of the 1969 Ice Hockey World Championships