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The making of a quarterback

Few people know it, but Libor Navrátil is a sports celebrity

By Dave Faries
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
July 4th, 2007 issue

STEPHANIE ANDERSON/The Prague Post
An engineer at work: Libor Navrátil ponders events during a recent game against the Prague Panthers.
The Navrátil file


Age: 31
Birthplace: Ostrava, north Moravia
Profession: Quarterback for Prague Lions, civil
engineer
Honors: Four-time championship winner of the Česká liga amerického
fotbalu (ČLAF), two-time most valuable player of the Czech Super Bowl

Libor Navrátil remembers that momentous winter clearly, when revelers broke through the wall in Berlin and Czechoslovaks crowded onto Wenceslas Square demanding an end to the communist regime. He was barely a teenager.
Images from that time still resonate in Navrátil’s mind almost 20 years later. There were shadowy videos of police confronting students, media coverage showing thousands of people jingling keys, wild celebrations. But what he saw next on television from his home in Ostrava captivated him: an American football game.
Not just any game, but the Super Bowl — full of noise, people and excitement.
“I made a decision right then,” he says. “If a team comes here, I will be part of it.”
Navrátil is now a veteran quarterback for the Prague Lions with a laundry list of accomplishments. Four times he has led teams to championships in the Česká liga amerického fotbalu (ČLAF). In 1997 and again in 2005 the league named him MVP of the Czech Super Bowl. Twice he earned recognition as the country’s top American-style football player.
Navrátil seems to possess all the trappings and traits of celebrity stardom — money, Hollywood looks, the guts to hang in the pocket and stare down a blitzing linebacker. But, as he points out, “it’s a long way to the NFL from Europe.”
Players in the ČLAF don’t sign multimillion crown contracts. In fact, most actually pay to take part — as much as 5,000 Kč ($234) a year. So they must hold day jobs or find other ways to to finance their roster spots.
Work hard, play hard
Navrátil works as a project manager for Kajima, a global construction management firm. No one in the office knows how he spends his hours after work or why he often drags in Monday mornings, limping to keep the weight off a battered leg, perhaps holding a sore arm as he moves through the corridors. Czech football players win, lose and suffer in obscurity.
Within Kajima, however, he fills a high-profile position, handling budgets, schedules, delivery of materials and so on, a never-ending convoy of detail and drudgery … and deadlines. Or, as he puts it: “I work for a Japanese company and we don’t have eight-hour days.”
To do both — to suit up all spring and summer knowing few people will ever hear of your exploits and to direct the movement of people, machinery and fortunes in a job where accomplishment means promotion — sounds a little extraordinary.
But Navrátil saw something on that TV screen back in 1990 he couldn’t shake. So, last year while overseeing construction on a project near Brno he would rush to his car after work and hustle back to Prague for practice. He returned from a business trip to Japan earlier this season just before a critical EFAF Cup elimination game against Winterthur in Switzerland, one the Lions dropped 35–21.
“If I had more time to practice, maybe things would have been different.”
Passion play
Some people value time in other ways, especially loved ones watching guys spending it in large chunks on a game that brings few material rewards. The ČLAF season lasts five months, including pre-season training. Teams work out two or three times a week. They ride buses to Příbram, Havířov and Bratislava. They have international games and scrimmages. A year ago, Navrátil even helped coach the Czech junior national team, young players still trying to learn an unfamiliar game. It’s a schedule that wears thin for most guys when the constant demands finally get the best of their families.
The veteran QB says his love of football has been hard on his girlfriend.
“Sometimes we fight about it, but she’s been with me a long time and she understands.”
Not that Navrátil places football before everything in life. His smile broadens to an impossibly big grin when speaking about road games in Havířov, near Ostrava. His mother always shows up to cheer.
As a child, Navrátil watched two older brothers sketch out technical diagrams of engines and bridges for class assignments. One now works as an auto mechanic; the other preceded Libor in civil engineering.
“I loved watching them work on their drawings,” Navrátil recalls. “So that’s what I wanted to do.” He earned a degree from the University of Ostrava in 1999.
Football, however, is Navrátil’s passion.
When speaking about the sport, something indefinable creeps into his words, shaping their tone, filling them with a profound sense of, well, ownership — at once thoughtful, intense, passionate, respectful. In Winterthur, Navrátil fought off jet lag and rallied the Lions, throwing two touchdown passes in the second half. Then, with two minutes remaining, disaster: an interception at the goal line. “We had trips to the left,” he says with the razor-sharp memory of an athlete mulling the complexities of rotating zones and A gap stunts. “They blitzed from the strong side. I tried to roll away from it but our weak side receiver broke back late. I threw low, where I thought only our wide receiver could reach it, but the defensive back did a hell of a job.”
On a shoestring
The first game he ever played, back in 1993, the coach stuck Navrátil at tight end. “I made two catches,” he recalls, this time bursting into a satisfied smile. “The only two catches of the game.”
That was for the Ostrava Steelers. A U.S. coach arrived in town in 1993 to form a team in the newly founded Czech league. True to his promise, Navrátil  signed up. Four years later, the 21-year-old led his home town squad to the ČLAF championship. Then money ran short. The team collapsed into bankruptcy in 2000.
Czech football operates on a shoestring. Sponsorships and the money players kick in carry only so far when there are bus trips, referees and rented facilities, often too short to meet the required 100 yards. They scrimp whenever possible.
“This year we pretty much practiced on gravel,” Navrátil says of the well-worn primary-school playground that hosted Lions workouts all season. For tackling drills players gather in the corners, where a little grass still pokes through the trampled sod. During games he wears the same shoulder pads he bought that first season.
“We live off gifts,” he explains. “It’s hard, but that’s how it is.”
The anonymous star of Czech football knows the commitment he and his teammates and every other player in the league make to football sounds crazy under the circumstances. He turns 32 in September. His girlfriend hints at marriage plans. And job responsibilities continue to grow.
“Sooner or later I will have to decide which way to go,” he acknowledges. “I’m paying to play football. I get paid to work.”
Keep in mind, however, what brought Navrátil to the capital. Ever since he bested the Lions in the ’97 title game, Prague had courted the Moravian star. When Ostrava folded, a Lions representative called and asked, “What if we help you find a job in Prague?”
The long hours, frantic trips from distant cities just to practice — it all makes sense. “I came to Prague to play football,” the quarterback says.
When he does eventually retire to his full-time job, Navrátil wants it to be as a winner on an international stage, leading the national team to the European championship. “It would be the peak of my career,” he says — a career that began with a few hours planted in front of a TV, back when the endless possibilities of a changing world converged on a patch of turf, thousands of miles away.
There’s another thing that keeps him going, though. Navrátil visited the United States for three weeks once and bought tickets to a couple of NFL games. Looking on as the Miami Dolphins and San Diego Chargers battled under the California sun, he noticed something. Those hulking, highly paid superstars weren’t all that different from him.
“I thought ‘They’re just human,’ ” he says. “They make mistakes, they make the wrong reads.”
For Czech football to reach a point where people take notice will require time. Players still make glaring errors, but improve with each season. Navrátil envisions marketing, television coverage, a 10,000-seat stadium. With youth programs now teaching 12-year-olds the mechanics of the game, he says, kids who love football have a future. But it’s a long way to the NFL.
After 15 years in the ČLAF and a few games as a spectator in U.S. sporting cathedrals, Navrátil can’t help but wonder, “If I had grown up in the United States and picked up a football at 6 and had coaching, would I be at that level?”
Then he shakes his head. “That’s something I’ll never know.”

Dave Faries can be reached at dfaries@praguepost.com


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