Natália Hejková

* 1954

  • “During the November 1989 events, I was on the bus. Twice. Once we went to Hungary and once to Poland, we had matches. And the head of the Ružomberok cellulose works [the factory sponsored the team] Communist party organisation went there with us which was unpleasant bcause we couldn’t show how happy we were that all the things were happening. The year 1989 is the strongest experience of my life even though I couldn’t participate in any of the events because whenever something was going on, I was on that bus. But I sat at the TV all days long and I’m still touched when… those deciding moments, I always cried that it wasn’t possible. And I always remembered my dad and I felt sorry that he had not lived long enough to see this. It’s really something so touching and when I first saw on TV that… to abandon the leading power of the [Communist] Party, I thought, not yet, for goodness’ sake, it could revert to the wrong side yet. For reals, I still remember those events perfectly well, it’s the most magnificent event, that something like this actually happened. And I’m grateful to all those who participated in it and who did it for all of us.”

  • “I remember the 1968 perfectly clearly, those are such times when one lives the history and it stays fixed in the mememory. I still remember how they shot Kennedy, I also remember how they announced it, or I remember when Gagarin flew to space and our neighbour called, “A guy flew into space!” And I asked, “What is space?” So, this is the way I remember the 1968. My dad, I think it was such a moment when he felt that something could change, a different era would come. Because, the family still felt that they ran away from Communism after the October revolution in Russia and they came to Czechoslovakia where the same thing started in 1948. He felt that something new and different could begin.”

  • „Apparently, basketball was meant to be. I tried all the sports, really, from playing football to, I don’t know, diving, yes, I did diving, too. But I left this one quickly, once, I had a bad dive, I messed up a somersault and I discovered that if one hits water badly, it hurts badly. And when I was fourteen, a friend of mine said that she started doing basketball and obviously, I wanted to try it as well. Sport, that was for sure, it was a given, and then it became clear that it would be games. At the time when I was deciding for basketball, I was playing tennis, not too well but I played, and games, it means that there’s someone playing against you and you need to win over them. And that was what I liked for sure. Basketball won over tennis probably for the reason that it included a group of people who would enrich your life. You can be friends with them, probably, or you can manipulate them, but it doesn’t matter, it was more fun than being on one’s own. Moreover, basketball is a sport where you don’t need to be in a top physical condition, I think, that when you’re not inn top form, you can use your head. It’s a game and you can mislead some, win over them by outsmarting them, inventing something they do not expect. That was probably the thing that ended up attracting me to basketball.”

  • „The most interesting story is that of my great-aunt who ended up living in Prague. I and my sister considered her our grandma because we had none other. She escaped through a fictional marriage with some Romanian and through Romania, she got to Prague in some steerage. So this our great-aunt, we called her grannie, or, alternately, grannie Nata, to differentiate, got to Prague this way and I’m named after her so I’m Natalia. Maybe I inherited a bit of her bellicose character. She not only moved to Prague where she got married, she married a Russian emigre again, she was called an ‘aventuriste’ by her family, she was the youngest of those six sisters and when she was seventeen, she left the family house and went to work as a nurse for the White soldiers in the civil war after the Revolution (of 1917) and she ended up losing an eye in the civil war. So, she only had one eye but she was still optimistic and tough. And it showed when we played cards when I was a child. It usually ended up with both of us crying, she cried, I cried because we had argued that she is cheating and she took offense that she cannot be cheating, no way, that she doesn’t see because she only has ne eye. My mom always came to calm us down and she would say “Let it be, let her have her way, she is an old person.” And I said to mom “Let her have her own way, she’s a child.” It was interesting indeed. And she did not end up only with the White Army but during the Prague Uprising [of 1945], she was obviously one of the first people who went to the barricades, along with her husband, although it can’t be really said that she’d carry the standard first, but her husband was an engineer, not sure what was his field of expertise, and they summoned him, there was a gossip going around that the Prague Castle is all… so he went to do some research whether it’s true or not, one has to survey it. And at that occasion, they ended up on the barricades and he fell and she was seriously injured but she survived. They were hit by a grenade.”

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Basketball was my destiny

High school graduation photograph
1972
High school graduation photograph 1972
zdroj: Postbellum

Natália Hejková was born on the 7th of April in 1954 in Žilina in Slovaka as the second daughter of an engineer and of a teacher. Since her childhood, it was apparent that she was quite talented for sports. She may well tried all sports from football through diving to tennis. When she was fourteen, she discovered baseball and that decided for the rest of her life. After having graduated from high school, she enrolled the Faculty of Law at the Charles University in Prague where he immediately joined the Slavia VŠ [vysoká škola ~ university, college, students’ team] Praha, she wore their jersey for the next seven years. When she graduated from the university, she was offered a post in the Slovak team SCP Ružomberok [Severoslovenské celulózky a papierne ~ North Slovakian Cellulose and Paper Works]. At that time, professional basketball did not exist in Czechoslovakia so she got a job in the paper mills where she went to ‘sit through’ half of the hours and the half of her hours she spent at team practice. When she was 33, she reached the conclusion that it was the best time to end her player career. She got a job as a quality controller in one of the local companies and at the same time, she started to coach a girls’ team. In 1986, the Ružomberok team fell from the first league to the second and Natália Hejková got his first chance to coach this women’s club, so far only conditionally. Under her guidance, the team improved its performance so she became a regular coach. She successfully coached the RRR team for another sixteen years. In the third year of her coaching career, Ružomberok won the Czechoslovak league for the first time and later on, the team won the Euroleague twice. After she left Ružomberok in 2003, she was offered a coaching job in MKB Euroleasing Sopron in Hungary. Three times, she led the team to participate in the Euroleague, three times they became Hungary’s vicechampions. In 2006, she switched to Spartak Moscow Region whom she lead to win two Russian championship titles and two in the Euroleague. Her next stop was Dynamo Moscow in the 2008/2009 season and in 2011, she moved to Valencia in Spain but she did not stay there for long. In 2012, she was appointed the chief coach in the ZVVZ USK Praha [Závody na výrobu vzduchotechnických zařízení Univerzitní sportovní klub ~ Air Treatment Technology Production Plant University Sports Club] where she has been working since today. As the assistant to the head coach of the Russian national team, Igor Grudin, she won the title of European champions at the European championship in 2007 in Italy and bronze medal at the Summer Olympic Games in Beijing in 2008. For her achievements spanning many years, she was awarded the honorary title of the „Most succesful Slovak basketball coach of the 20th century” and in 2018, she was inducted to the Slovak basketball hall of fame, in 2019, to the FIBA hall of fame.