Jakub Zboril could not wait. He and older brother Adam were off to Velke Mezirici, about 20 minutes away from their home in Brno, Czechia, for a weekend sleepover with Pavel Zacha, Zboril’s longtime friend.
The visit did not go as the 12-year-old Zboril expected.
Breakfast started with vitamins. After they ate, the boys had to go running at a nearby soccer field. Then the three hockey players were tasked with stickhandling in Zacha’s garage.
After lunch, they thought they’d have an hour of Xbox. Thirty minutes later, they were firmly told to drop their controllers and resume training.
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“After one day, we called our dad crying,” Zboril recalls with a smile. “‘Hey, come pick us up! We want to go home!’”
Zacha did not understand. This was his daily life. His father, also named Pavel, insisted.
A planned life
The elder Pavel has not lacked for professions. He was a police officer. He founded an advertising firm. He opened a Lego shop. He owned a supermarket. He launched a tennis academy. He is currently a lawyer and author.
Above everything else, he and his wife, Ilona, thought of themselves as parents.
In 1988, first child Monika was born. Leona, their second daughter, arrived two years later. They would become good tennis players.
By 1997, Ilona was pregnant again. Her husband spent entire days pondering his third child’s future. He wanted to relocate his expanding family from its urban apartment in Brno for fresher air and larger surroundings. He thought how art, music and language would expand his child’s knowledge.
His mind, though, always returned to sports.
He was an excellent athlete. He ran, skied, swam and played volleyball, soccer, tennis and handball. In college, he was a heptathlon champion who enjoyed the 100-meter dash just as much as the long jump.
Through experience, study and contemplation, he developed a hypothesis: An active child could live a healthy, happy and fulfilled life. Just being outdoors and playing sports, however, would not do. He surmised that regular and regimented training from a toddler’s age would optimize development.
He pitched his plan to his wife. Ilona gave her approval.
Shortly after their third child was born, the family moved to a house in Velke Mezirici, the elder Pavel’s hometown. He built a gym in the basement. By that fall, he was helping his first son dangle from bars he attached to the basement walls and go down a slide in hopes of activating the infant’s hand-eye coordination.
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Baby Pavel was 5 months old. He was starting the first leg of a parenting experiment.
“He basically planned it,” Zacha says of his path, “before I was born.”
Training with a purpose
Zacha, now 26 and a first-year Bruin, still remembers the prize he wanted. It was a 1970 Chevrolet muscle car, the kind of American fastback he never saw in Czechia.
Zacha was of the age when the promise of a Hot Wheels car made sprints worthwhile.
Zacha cannot remember the details of the challenge. But he recalls his father promising him the Chevy if he completed a 400-meter dash under a certain time. It took Zacha months of work before the car was his.
By then, Zacha’s father was convinced of his experiment’s virtue. As a toddler, Zacha recalled, his son rarely cried. He was always happy. He was not sick.
Zacha’s father transformed the gym, which he had outgrown, into a multipurpose facility. A 5-year-old Zacha whacked balls at the tennis net his father drew on one of the walls. He shot pucks at another wall, which his dad eventually reinforced with padding because of the strength of his shot. He skated on the synthetic ice his father installed on the basement floor.
Under the watch of his father, who had quit working to oversee his son’s development, Zacha played volleyball, tennis, soccer and basketball. His best sport was hockey. It was no coincidence that it was his favorite.
Zacha was 2 1/2 when his father took him to the nearest rink, just about every morning, for solo skating and stickhandling. In the afternoon, Zacha was on the ice with other kids.
By the elder Zacha’s recollection, his son participated in his first tournament with 8- and 9-year-olds. The boy was 4 years and 10 months old. His on-ice talent was obvious. So was his love of being at the rink.
While Ilona, a banker, made the family’s income, Pavel drove his son to school and hockey in Brno. They practiced English during their commutes. He solicited sponsors to fund his 6-year-old boy’s travel to hockey tournaments in France and Switzerland. He negotiated with officials from TK Prostejov, a top Czech tennis academy pursuing his son.
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“The philosophy I always heard was that if you can win the Stanley Cup and Wimbledon at the same time, that would be great,” Zacha recalls with a smile. “There were very big ambitions and goals I had to reach. It was fun for me to think about it. Of course, when you turn a certain age, you know it’s impossible to play Wimbledon and the Stanley Cup at the same time.”
When Zacha was 12 years old, he stopped playing tennis to pursue hockey. His father came to a conclusion.
The two would relocate to Liberec. There, Zacha would play for Bili Tygri Liberec with 1995-born players. His father had convinced the club to pay for an apartment plus expenses for food.
“At that age — 12, 13, 14 — you start realizing a little bit what they’ve done for you,” Zacha says of his mother and father. “Those memories, it’s like, ‘OK, this is not normal what they’re going through.’ I started realizing what they’ve done. I wanted to work out and go on the ice myself a little more, not to give back, but for them to see that they appreciate that I’m doing it not just because he’s telling me.”
In Liberec, Zacha’s dad cleaned, did his son’s laundry, prepared his protein shakes and cooked his meals. Some of his work at the stove left room for improvement.
“Czech meals are heavy, so he tried to read and learn about it and tried to make really healthy meals,” Zacha recalls. “They were really hard to eat, because he didn’t know how to make them. So we had a couple fights about that. I just couldn’t eat it. Then he tasted it and was like, ‘No, this is not something I can do.’ But he learned his way.”
It was during their time in Liberec that the son sometimes pushed back against the father. Some of the older Bili Tygri players stayed at a hotel. The 15-year-old Zacha wanted to hang out with his teammates. His father urged him to focus on his training, nutrition and recovery.
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“Sometimes we had little fights over that stuff because I wanted more free time,” Zacha says. “I was 15 years old with puberty. All the people around you are doing different things. But I’m happy I stuck with it.”
Zacha signed his first pro contract when he was 16 years old. In 2013-14, he played with and against the men of the Czech Extraliga.
In 2014-15, Zacha left Czechia to play for Sarnia of the OHL. His English took off. While living with his billet family, Zacha learned to do his laundry and prepare his meals. Ex-NHLer Patrik Stefan, then his agent, paid for Milos Peca, Zacha’s trainer in Czechia, to relocate to Sarnia for three months to oversee his workouts.
After Zacha’s OHL season, the Devils picked him at No. 6 in the 2015 draft. A picture of Zacha pulling on his New Jersey uniform is the cover photo of Strategie Uspěšné Výchovy, one of his father’s three books on childhood.
“No. Never,” Zacha’s father wrote in an email when asked if he ever feared he was doing the wrong thing. “Pavel loved hockey from the very beginning. During nearly 24 years of everyday training, he never told me he didn’t want to go practice or play the match. Hockey is his life. He chose it as his mainstream. But his family had done everything for him to do his favorite sport.”
‘I think I’d be OK’
Zacha has always been told he is an old soul. It may be because he had to grow up fast.
He always played against older players. He left home when he was 12. He moved to a new continent and learned a new language four years later.
Not all of this served him well. He did not fulfill his potential in New Jersey, perhaps, because of his seriousness.
“The biggest problem I had when I came to the NHL was short-term memory,” Zacha says. “Because there are so many games here. There wasn’t that many games when I was 13, 14, 15. You could have a bad game on Sunday and have five days to try not to think about it because it was so long ago. Now, if you have back-to-back or if we have six in nine, if you’re thinking about the last game …
“That’s what kind of got me the first couple years. I was like, ‘Ah man, I had a bad game before.’ But it was already another game.”
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Times have changed. Zacha scored a career-high 57 points this season, 19 more than his previous best. He has clicked as the No. 2 left wing next to David Krejci and David Pastrnak. He has been just as good at second-line center when Krejci has been unavailable.
By now, Zacha is used to hearing two regular questions. First, would he have made the NHL without his father’s training?
“It seemed like I had a lot of talent. But I didn’t have a lot more than everyone else,” Zacha says. “I think I’d be OK. Everyone who’s here started working really hard. Pasta told me that when he went to Sweden, he started working really hard. Everyone had their own ways. I could probably make it. But not hold it for that long.”
If anything, Zacha believes his father’s philosophy helped him learn the importance of commitment. When his father learned that Jaromir Jagr, for example, did 1,000 squats a day, he encouraged his son to do the same. Had he fallen short of his hockey dream, Zacha could have applied what he learned to something else.
“If I didn’t make it in sports, how I was raised, I was ambitious enough to go another route,” Zacha says, “and hopefully be successful in that way.”
The other query he receives is whether he’d do something similar if he has children. Zacha laughs this one off. His wedding is this summer in Czechia.
“You never know,” Zacha says. “Maybe you retire, you have kids, you have time and you think, ‘OK, maybe I’ll give them everything they want like my dad did.’ That’s what he thought was going to be the best for me. Maybe that’s what I’m going to be thinking in the future too. But luckily I don’t have to think about it yet.”
Zacha acknowledges he did not experience a normal childhood. It may not have worked for others.
“He’s the only one I’ve seen in my life,” Zboril says. “It just shows how much he loves the game of hockey going through this. So many guys and young kids would just quit on the spot and would become resistant toward hockey. He made it to the top level. He still enjoys it. I think I would be one of those guys that would quit.”
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Zboril’s close friend was one of three Bruins to play in all 82 games. The Bruins won 65 of those 82. Monday against the Panthers, they hope to record their first of 16 more wins.
“We are proud of Pavel,” Zacha’s father wrote, speaking for himself and his wife. “The goal was achieved. His young boy dream became reality.”
(Top photo: Jamie Squire / Getty Images)
