Petr Klima was one of the first passengers off the Northwest Airlines plane that delivered him to freedom and a new life in America. He was just a few steps out of the tarmac at Metro Airport when I stopped him to introduce myself with a few words that nearly had him rushing back onto the airplane.
In perhaps the stupidest thing I’d ever done in my newspaper career — and I made my share of mistakes — I spoke to him in Russian. I knew it would be pointless to try to speak English; he didn’t know a word. Well, maybe one: beer.
But I was also pretty sure that since he had grown up behind the Iron Curtain, in a country controlled by the Soviet Union since Red Army tanks rolled into Prague in 1968, that he’d learned to speak Russian — like it or not. It was mandatory in schools throughout the USSR’s satellite countries like East German, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Romania, and all the others.
“Ochen’ pryatno,” I said. “Mozhno govorit’ po- Russki, pozhaluista?” (“A pleasure to meet you. Might we speak in Russian, please?”
Immediately, all the color drained from his face, his twinkling topaz eyes bulging. His handshake went limp. He turned to the man next to him — his interpreter, it turned out — with a panic-stricken look, and together they rushed off without saying a word.
I saw Petr a few days later at the Red Wings’ training camp in Port Huron. He wouldn’t even look at me. It took months to earn his trust.
“I thought you were KGB for sure,” he told me later, over a beer of course.
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Once he became convinced I was actually just another media schmuck and not some Soviet spy operative, his attitude softened. In quick time thereafter, we became as close as can be while respecting that fine line that existed between players and reporters. He was a good man.
Which is why we mourn the news Klima died suddenly Thursday at home in the Czech Republic. He was 58.
Despite his rather checkered career, Petr was always approachable, never shying away from the most difficult questions. And there were many, especially after his frequent off-ice shenanigans that typically involved a few too many beers (and in my experience with him, a few too many was a concept he never embraced).
The most notorious of those times, fans of a certain age will remember, involved a premature end-of-season party involving several players, the night before what would be their final playoff game of the season in Edmonton.
A routine bed check at the 11 p.m. curfew revealed some players were missing. Colin Campbell, assistant to coach Jacques Demers, and Neal Smith, assistant to general manager Jim Devellano, approached a hotel worker and asked where visiting NHL teams enjoyed gathering for a drink.
The response: Goose Loonies, a popular nightclub in Edmonton.
After a quick cab ride, Campbell and Smith stepped into the club and found nearly half their team. It was well after midnight. This wasn’t a case of being a few minutes late for bed check; this was a group of guys gathering to have one more for the road — quite literally — before their season ended.
They were behind in their seven-game set with the Oilers, one of the greatest teams ever assembled, three games to one. They knew Wayne Gretzky and his teammates had no intention of returning to Detroit for a Game 6. This series was over, and everybody knew it. So some of the players decided to toast another pretty damned good season, reaching the Stanley Cup semifinals for the second straight year, regardless of silly team rules like curfews for grown men.
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For the record, Klima was injured at the time and wasn’t playing. But his teammates were angry with him, accusing him of taking his running partner, Bob Probert, with him. Probert had his own demons with alcohol (and drugs), but he was also having a superb postseason. He broke Gordie Howe’s playoff scoring record that spring.
Like Probert, Klima resisted efforts by the team (and a few judges) to help end his drinking habits. But he did try. With apologies in advance to the Friends of Bill W., I remember a road trip that took the Wings to Vancouver. On arrival, I did a little research and found an AA meeting not far from the team’s hotel. Petr agreed to tag along, reluctantly I believe, though I was convinced he was serious about trying to stay out of trouble.
After the meeting, I asked how he was feeling. “I feel like having a beer,” he said. Which is probably what he did after we parted ways.
He also felt supremely confident of his hockey skills, his abilities to do things with the puck at such speeds that left his teammates speechless. Ask Steve Yzerman.
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I remember a time, a few years after Klima’s arrival in Detroit, during a Wings practice. I was standing near the home team’s bench at The Joe when he skated by at the end of the drill and used his stick to point to the rafters.
“Someday,” he said, raising his stick high above his head, “Number 85 will be there too.”
“Petr,” I replied, “I would like nothing better than to write that story.”
But that someday never came. In an effort to right a perceived wrong on draft day a few years earlier, Detroit unloaded Klima in a ridiculous package that included No. 1 overall (1986) pick Joe Murphy and Adam Graves to Edmonton for a much lighter package that included Jimmy Carson, the Grosse Point native the Wings passed on to take Murphy. Carson remains the only teenager in the NHL to score more than 50 goals in a single season. The other guy? Wayne Gretzky.
But Carson’s career was well into its decline by the time he arrived in Detroit. The guys the Wings traded all had their names engraved on the Stanley Cup. And Klima had a memorable role on that 1990 Oilers team.
As in Detroit, he was constantly in and out of the dog house in Edmonton. And during the Finals that spring, he was a permanent resident of la chateau bow wow. The Oilers’ coaching staff was so aggravated with Klima that he sat, and sat, and sat on the Edmonton bench — playing just a single shift through two overtime periods.
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Then, in the third overtime, when exhaustion becomes a serious factor even among these world-class athletes, Klima got the call. He skated into the Boston zone, took a pass as he skated over the blue line and wristed a dart into the Bruins’ net for the winning goal — a play he made look shockingly easy.
And so it was, he said.
“I could have scored that goal in my socks,” he told me after the game. “I didn’t even need skates.”
So yes, they remember him well in Edmonton, much as we do here around Detroit.
Klima played 786 games through 13 seasons in the NHL, including 306 games in Detroit during which he scored 130 goals among 223 points.
We’ll never see his No. 85 in the rafters. No one will argue he belongs in the Hockey Hall of Fame. But if there was a Hall of Fame for athletes following their playing careers, Klima would absolutely be in that conversation.
He changed the lives of many young men.
While living in suburban Detroit after his career, Klima was the owner, GM and head coach of six independent youth hockey teams in the region, working with boys ages 8-13. Many of his players were imported from the Czech Republic. He would house them, feed them and nurture their lives on and off the ice.
His mission: To help them overcome the issues he faced when he arrived in North America, not knowing the language and customs, no friends; a uniquely foreign life outside of hockey.
“Instead of bringing the kids over here when they’re 16 and 17, we want to bring them early so they can learn the language, learn the culture and learn the hockey style,” Klima told an Edmonton reporter in 2010 for a story. “I have seen so many players go back home (to Europe) because they get homesick, they don’t know the language and they’re not confident.”
Klima essentially taught important survival skills, the kind he learned the hard way while giving us all so many reasons to cheer.
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And if our paths crossed today, I’d shake his hand and whisper one more Russian word: spaciba. Thank you. For all you did to help drag that once-beleaguered Detroit franchise out of the “Dead Wings” era.
But this time, I like to think, he would respond with that big, toothy grin of his that lit up the Red Wings’ dressing room during a memorable time in Hockeytown. And probably offer me a beer.
Keith Gave covered the Red Wings for the Free Press from 1985-1998. He has written three books from his sportswriting days: The Russian Five, Vlad The Impaler and A Miracle Of Their Own, and served as writer-producer for the award-winning documentary, The Russian Five.