Vaclav Nedomansky’s Hall of Fame journey started with a secret dash to freedom in 1974 (2024)

They pack lightly, loading three cheap, vinyl suitcases, all different sizes, into the back of the road-worn dark blue Citroen.

The luggage is filled with jeans and T-shirts. Summer clothes.

Mom, Dad and their young son dress casually hoping to avoid suspicion in a nation where suspicion is a way of life and a form of currency.

It is a Friday afternoon in the summer of 1974. A natural departure time for one of the greatest Czechoslovak hockey players, Vaclav Nedomansky, his wife, Vera, and their son Vashi, not yet 4, to be heading for a summer vacation.

Before leaving their life in occupied Czechoslovakia, they rehearse their story over and over again. They count on the hiss of the shower in their spartan Bratislava apartment to muffle their voices, assuming electronic listening devices will hear them if they’re not careful.

Despite their life of relative ease in the Russian-controlled country, Nedomansky has to sell hockey memorabilia and a bit of fine Czechoslovak crystal to acquaintances in Germany to raise money for the second-hand car.

The family’s planned vacation to Switzerland is a perk available only to the communist country’s top officials and its most celebrated athletes, like the 30-year-old Nedomansky. The passport he has used to travel the world as a member of the national hockey team has been collected by officials, but the family has personal passports that allow limited travel. If they return, they’ll be forced to give those passports back and move to their new home in Brno. If they return …

Shortly after they get in the car and drive away, they approach their first obstacle, the border of Austria. As they line up behind a couple of other cars, they wait and they worry. Did a suspicious neighbor call ahead to border officials? Did young Vashi blurt out details about a move to Canada?

“Any reasonable doubt could be trouble,” Nedomansky knows.

But their fears are unfounded and they’re through the border in minutes. Vienna, only 50 miles from their home in Bratislava, is the first stop on their “vacation.”

Then it’s 300 miles through Innsbruck and another 200 miles to cross over into Switzerland. The Citroen, derisively known as The Duck, shimmies and sways from side to side as it labors up and down the winding mountain roads. But they take their time. They’re just a family on vacation.

“I was acting logically and smart,” Nedomansky says. “I fooled them all. I did what was necessary.”

Since the early 1960s, when the big, graceful center first began playing the equivalent of professional hockey in Czechoslovakia, he had regularly traveled to North America. And while NHL players and later World Hockey Association players were then forbidden from playing in the Olympics or world championships, Nedomansky longed to test his mettle against those players.

More, he longed for freedom and for his family to experience it, too.

His defection helped change the nature of the game at the highest level. Eventually, 20 players fled communist-ruled countries and played in the NHL. Nedomansky was the first. Some 45 years later, on Nov. 18, he will be recognized with the game’s highest honor, induction into the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto.

Nedomansky’s defection was the first fissure in the Iron Curtain. In his homeland, he was revered, a national sporting treasure, a folklore hero.

“He was almost like, I’m Catholic so remember that, almost a God-like figure,” Peter Stastny, a Hall of Famer and one of the most prolific scorers of his generation, said during a phone call from Bratislava.

When you mention Nedomansky to Stastny, there is a palpable blend of awe and excitement.

“He was bigger than life,” Stastny said. “Are you kidding me? I loved the guy. He was so dominant.”

When kids gathered on the streets to play hockey in Bratislava you were either Nedomansky or Stan Mikita, the great Chicago Blackhawks star who was adopted by his uncle and aunt in St. Catharines, Ontario, before going on to a Hall of Fame career in Chicago.

Youngsters clamored to wear either Nedomansky’s 14 or Makita’s 21.

They were both proud of their heritage, Stastny said, and they were elite hockey players. The perfect combination for young boys looking for idols.

At the end of each season, as Stastny was showing potential as one of the top young players in Czechoslovakia, some of the junior players were given the chance to play a game or two with the senior team in Bratislava.

One year, Stastny played on a line with Nedomansky.

Back in the junior dressing room after those games, Stastny proclaimed to his teammates that his career was complete.

“I was ready to hang my skates on the nail,” Stastny said. “I had just achieved everything I had ever dreamed of.”

Stastny finished his career second only to Wayne Gretzky in points produced during the 1980s and was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1998.

“I’m so happy for him,” Stastny said of Nedomansky’s enshrinement. “I’ve always revered him.”

In the months leading up to Nedomansky’s clandestine summer trip to Zurich, officials from the fledgling Atlanta Flames, GM Cliff Fletcher and a young up-and-comer named David Poile, quietly visited him at his home in Bratislava. They took note of the trophies and souvenirs of a hockey life already well-lived if not well-documented in North America.

They returned to Europe after Nedomansky’s defection and hoped to sign him to an NHL deal to play in Atlanta. But they were not alone.

Nedomansky also met with sports and entertainment impresario John F. Bassett, new owner of the Toronto Toros of the WHA.

The World Hockey Association was making life uncomfortable for the NHL at the time, signing established players like Bobby Hull and enticing rising young stars like Mark Napier, Mark Messier and Wayne Gretzky. The NHL’s agreement with the International Ice Hockey Federation that prevented European players from jumping straight into the NHL was also a problem. Nedomansky was 30 years old. He didn’t want to wait to play at the top level.

“Everything was telling me Toronto,” Nedomansky recalled.

And so he and his family joined Bassett on a flight from Zurich to Montreal and then on to Toronto.

Legendary Toronto sportswriter George Gross was there when the flight landed. There are pictures of Nedomansky; Vera, a top skier in Czechoslovakia; and Vashi making their way through the terminal.

Gross’ stories on the defection in the Toronto Sun would earn him a national sportswriting award in Canada and it was the first glimpse most fans got of the great Nedomansky.

Vashi recalls being a terror on the flight across the Atlantic and as the family went through customs, he was waving a cap gun. Still, there is a picture of him happily sipping on a cold drink while sitting on his father’s lap.

“I remember all of it like yesterday,” Vashi said.

The smells, the bright lights, the colors of the clothing that people were wearing. The McDonald’s golden arches and the enticing smells and tastes therein.

“And everyone’s smiling,” he said.

Just like his family.

Before they left Czechoslovakia, Nedomansky managed to remove a few precious keepsakes from the family home in Bratislava. It had to be done quietly to avoid arousing suspicion.

By the time his father got to the Bratislava apartment after the defection, government officials had already locked it down.

What happened to the valuables inside? Apparently, neighbors and police took what they wanted.

“Obviously, it makes you mad, but what can you do?” Nedomansky said.

That was just the beginning of the effort to erase Nedomansky in his homeland.

Former teammates were told he died in a car accident in North America. They were forbidden to speak his name. His accomplishments were scrubbed from the record books and his image was stricken from team photos.

A few years later, when Nedomansky played for the Detroit Red Wings in an exhibition game against the Soviet Wings, the broadcast in Russia referred to him only by his number.

He took four slashing penalties in the first period and then scored the game-winning goal.

“I slashed the sh*t out of them,” he happily told his son for a documentary film Vashi is producing about his father called “Big Ned.”

While he wasn’t mentioned in that Russian broadcast, his name rang out in Czechoslovakian hockey lore. At the 1968 Olympics, the underdog Czechoslovaks defeated the powerful Russians, 5-4, ending up with a silver medal based on the tie-breaking system at the time. Nedomansky had five goals and two assists in the seven-game tournament.

That summer, Russia sent half a million troops into Czechoslovakia to crush more liberal political reforms that were underway, the start of an occupation that would last two decades.

That hockey victory was seen as a small triumph over the country’s oppressors and ”5-4″ graffiti began to surface on buildings and other public places in the months after the Soviet occupation began.

The following year, at the world championships in Stockholm, the Czechoslovaks defeated the Russians twice. Nedomansky recalls the Russians tripping, spearing and losing their cool. They were not good losers, he said.

He also recalled the fans in Sweden cheering on the underdogs to a surprise victory.

“All that together, it was just great stuff,” Nedomansky said.

Ethan Scheiner is a professor of political science and director of the international relations major at the University of California, Davis. He is writing a book about the intersection of hockey and politics in Czechoslovakia during the Soviet occupation.

After the Russian invasion, Czechoslovaks believed that Russian power over their lives extended to sporting events. There was a wide segment of the population that believed the Russians wouldn’t allow the Czechoslovak hockey teams to beat them, Scheiner said. That’s why those victories on the international stage were such emotional affairs.

“They were all pinning their hopes on these hockey matches,” Scheiner said. “This was a country that felt just utterly impotent.”

Tennis great Martina Navratilova left Czechoslovakia a year after Nedomansky did and cited the victories by the hockey team over the Russians as a catalyst for her departure.

Losing the country’s greatest sporting heroes was a huge blow to the communist government.

“Nobody had done it before,” Scheiner said. “It really was a stunning moment.

“They all thought about leaving. It’s a genuinely difficult position being the first one. He is really, genuinely a hero.”

Nedomansky’s defection sent ripples throughout the hockey world at home.

“It’s as though Wayne Gretzky had disappeared and people didn’t know,” Stastny said.

People found ways to listen to Voice of America and Radio Free Europe and other forbidden Western sources of information.

“I was grateful to him,” Stastny said. “We were so sad when he left.”

The first time he spent real time with Nedomansky, Stastny was still playing for the Czechoslovakian national team in North America. It was in Hartford and Nedomansky organized a dinner with members of the national team, including Jiri Holik, uncle to future NHL star Bobby Holik, and Stastny.

“I was listening to every word,” Stastny said.

“I remember what they had. There was fried chicken in a basket, a wooden basket. I’d never seen anything like it,” Stastny said. And, oh yes, there were some beers as well, he added with a laugh.

When the Stastnys, first Peter and Anton and then a year later Marian, engineered their own escapes, Nedomansky treated them as brothers-in-arms.

Stastny and Nedomansky spoke on the phone regularly once Stastny was in Quebec.

When the Nordiques played in Detroit, Nedomansky hosted dinners at home or at local restaurants.

“I felt like I was in seventh heaven every time I could talk to him,” Stastny said.

Even as Stastny’s career took off, his reverence for Nedomansky remained. When Stastny was asked to be the GM of Team Slovakia for the 2004 World Cup of Hockey, he asked Nedomansky to be part of the scouting staff.

“He left a huge, huge, huge impossible-to-fill void,” Stastny said.

Bobby Holik grew up with the name “Big Ned” ringing in his ears.

His father, Jaroslav, and uncle, Jiri, were longtime members of the national team and contemporaries and friends of Nedomansky.

Bobby Holik came to North America in 1990, the 10th-overall pick of the Hartford Whalers a year earlier. In some ways, he was in the first generation of European players who could entertain an NHL career without having to escape his homeland to fulfill that dream. One of the top power forwards of his generation, Holik played more than 1,300 NHL games and won two Stanley Cups with the New Jersey Devils.

“I’ve been hearing about Big Ned since I can remember,” Holik said.

“It’s not hard to mix geopolitics and hockey at that time. What comes next is the inspiration he provided at least to me and I hope to other Czech and Slovak players.”

Looking out his window at the mountains of Wyoming, Holik likened Nedomansky’s defection to the first settlers who carved a trail through the American West.

“For Big Ned, that was extremely courageous,” he said.

Holik referenced a book about North American explorers William Clark and Meriwether Lewis, “Undaunted Courage.”

“I think there could be a book about Big Ned called the same way,” Holik said.

“It’s something that should be memorized and talked about by the younger players. People need to be educated about what that society was like. The lies. It’s called whitewashing history.”

Holik said there should be no misconceptions about life under Soviet occupation.

“That was the life and death of people,” he said. “They were trying to break their spirit. … He’s the one that showed us the way. He had to succeed. He couldn’t go back.”

Holik lists off some of the greats of his generation who know Nedomansky’s story well, including future Hall of Famer Marian Hossa and longtime Devils great Patrik Elias.

“My friends. They couldn’t do what they did if Big Ned didn’t open the door,” Holik said.

Once he settled in North America, the Citroen was replaced by a brand new Thunderbird. Later, Nedomansky’s Volkswagen camper was his favored mode of transport. Not long after his Toros career started, he bought a home in the Toronto area, and he and Vera had a daughter, Victoria.

But beyond the unabashed color and bounty of North American life, this had always been about testing his limits as a player. Nedomansky found himself suiting up with players like Paul Henderson and Frank Mahovlich, two heroes of the famous 1972 Summit Series between Canada and Russia.

Mahovlich and Nedomansky played together for three full seasons in the WHA, first in Toronto and then when the team abruptly moved to Alabama and became the Birmingham Bulls.

In 1976, the two good friends headed south for training camp. Nedomansky remembers getting pulled over by the police during their journey.

“Frank told them, we have to go, we have practice in Birmingham, Alabama,” Nedomansky recalled. “They said, no guys, you’re going to jail. You can practice on Monday. But they let us go after that.”

Years later, when Vashi played minor pro hockey in Birmingham, Nedomansky heard a fan screaming for him to get off the ice and let some of the young players have a chance.

“They thought it was me,” Nedomansky said with a hearty laugh.

Mahovlich, whose parents had emigrated from Croatia, made a point of trying to find Czechoslovakian restaurants when they were on the road and the two were frequent dinner companions at home.

“He would introduce you to different foods and he loved to cook,” Mahovlich recalled.

In the offseason, the Nedomanskys visited Mahovlich, who was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1981, at his cottage north of Toronto.

“He was a real gentleman,” Mahovlich said. “The kindest person you’d ever want to meet. He had so much talent.”

While Nedomansky’s arrival in North America changed the face of the NHL game, it wasn’t immediately celebrated.

“Our time, they really hated us, many of them. Honest,” said former WHA and NHL player Dan Labraaten, a native of Leksand, Sweden. “We took their jobs from some of them.”

While many of the first Europeans who came to play in North America absorbed heaps of physical abuse and social isolation, it might have been worse for Nedomansky.

“I think when he came, to be such a big star in Europe, he had a little harder time when he came to the WHA,” Labraaten said. “To be honest, there were quite a bit of goons there.”

Twelve games into his second season with the Bulls, and with Nedomansky wearying of the league’s goon tactics, WHA and NHL teams swung a historic trade. The Bulls were looking to get tougher and shed salary, so they sent Nedomansky and talented forward Tim Sheehy to the Detroit Red Wings for Steve Durbano and Dave Hanson.

Gilles Leger, GM of the Bulls, showed up for dinner at Nedomansky’s apartment to break the news. Sheehy was there as well, and at one point Leger said simply: “I just traded you to Detroit.”

“Tim jumped up and almost beat him up,” Nedomansky said.

The joke was that Birmingham had traded 100 goals for about 10,000 penalty minutes.

The WHA shut down a little more than a year later and the Hartford Whalers, Winnipeg Jets, Edmonton Oilers and Quebec Nordiques joined the NHL.

“Years later, I talked to Gilles Leger at the draft in Pittsburgh and he said ‘Tim, we had to trade you. We got $100,000 for you guys,’” Sheehy recalled.

Dennis Hull met Nedomansky for the first time less than 48 hours after Team Canada electrified the world in Game 8 of the 1972 Summit Series in Moscow.

Few people remember that the Canadians finished their international odyssey that fall with an exhibition game against the Czechoslovakian national team in Prague. The legend of that game is that the 23 most sober players were in the Canadian lineup.

Hull was walking to the rink in Prague when he was approached by a distinguished-looking local.

“This tall, handsome guy started chatting me up and asking about the NHL and Canada and all of that stuff,” Hull recalled.

Finally, Hull begged off the conversation saying he had to get ready for the game.

Playing with Jean Ratelle and Rod Gilbert, Hull noticed the opposing centerman looked familiar.

It was, of course, Nedomansky.

“He took the puck, went through everybody and scored,” Hull said laughing.

Five years later, the two were teammates in Detroit and Hull was playing the final season of his distinguished NHL career.

Teammates, linemates … and roommates, as it turned out, in a home in Windsor, Ontario, owned by NHLer Pat Boutette.

“We were like the Odd Couple,” Hull said. “I was Felix Unger.”

The two drove together to the old Olympia, often in Nedomansky’s Volkswagen Westfalia camper. Longtime Red Wings trainer Ross ‘Lefty’ Wilson would always rib them when they arrived for work.

“He used to give us a hard time. He would say, ‘oh, here are the big stars from Windsor,’” Hull recalled.

One day, Nedomansky asked Hull, one of the sharpest wits of the NHL, to give him something to fire back at Wilson.

“So I taught him something to say to Lefty,” Hull said.

The next day the routine unfolded as usual with Wilson welcoming the big stars from Windsor.

“And Big Ned says to him, ‘get off my case, tomato face,’” Hull said. “So Lefty was speechless for one of the few times in his life.”

Like so many who entered Nedomansky’s orbit, they remain close. Hull visits Nedomansky at his new home in California whenever he can.

“He still tells the stories,” Nedomansky said with a laugh.

“He was fabulous,” Hull said. “He ended up being one of my best friends.

“He was a superstar. He could do everything with the puck. I was just at the end of my career so I wasn’t much help to him, but we scored a few goals.”

In some ways Nedomansky’s accomplishments have been easy to overlook for more recent generations of hockey players and fans. He came to North America well into his career and joined a rebel league that would ultimately fold. Players that followed him to North America — the Stastnys, Sergei Fedorov, Igor Larionov, Alexander Mogilny — would enjoy more on-ice success and become true stars in the NHL in a way that eluded Nedomansky.

That disconnect would continue even after his selection as a Hall of Famer.

When the NHL Network introduced the six-member Class of 2019 they did so in a segment that ran almost 13 minutes. It mentioned Nedomansky only at the beginning of the segment and didn’t even include a picture of him. There were no mentions of his accomplishments or impact on the game, a sharp departure from the other members of the class.

Not that Nedomansky came for stardom. He came to play the game, finishing with 421 games played and 278 points.

After his playing career, he coached in Germany and Austria before joining the Los Angeles Kings as a scout, a position he landed thanks to longtime friend and teammate Rogie Vachon.

The two were neighbors in Detroit for several years and when both moved to California after their playing days ended, they spent a great deal of time together.

“We’ve been very close friends for many, many years,” said Vachon, who was inducted into the Hall of Fame after a long wait back in 2016. “I hired him as a scout and it turned out very well. He’s a great person. He’s very knowledgeable.”

After Nedomansky was chosen for the 2019 Hall of Fame class, Vachon said, “I called him right away. I told him it was a little bit like me; I had to wait over 30 years before I got in.”

Bob Owen was a scout for the Kings when Nedomansky joined the team.

“He’s a very instinctive person,” Owen said. “You don’t teach him who’s good and who’s not good. … That’s why Rogie trusted him so much.”

Owen, who still does some scouting for Winnipeg, said he was focused on helping Nedomansky learn the ins and outs of the job. “… Scheduling, the paperwork, organizing your thoughts, putting them on paper, putting those thoughts into lists,” he said. “That’s the part that we worked on the most.”

The two grew close as they traveled and Nedomansky eventually shared his story with Owen.

“He went through so much,” Owen said. “I would just look at him in amazement that I had the privilege to be associated with Ned.

“I knew the name obviously and I knew the player, but getting to know the man was amazing.”

Owen traveled with Nedomansky in November of 1991 on his first trip back to Czechoslovakia since his defection.

The two met in Frankfurt and stopped in Munich for a game. They drove through Vienna and crossed into Czechoslovakia en route to Hodonin, his hometown and where his mother lived until her death at age 92.

“Ned never let me touch the wheel of a car in Europe because I followed the rules too much for him,” Owen said. But the morning they were leaving Munich, he asked Owen to drive.

“I knew he was really nervous,” Owen said.

The closer they got to the Czechoslovak border the more nervous Nedomansky became. Owen asked if Nedomansky’s mother knew they were coming. He said he didn’t want to tell her, that he was fearful issues at the border would scuttle the visit.

Owen tried to assure Nedomansky, by then a Canadian citizen, he had nothing to fear.

So just before the border, Nedomansky called his mother.

“I said, guess what? I’m close by. I’ll be at your house in half an hour,” he said. “And then, all of a sudden, we are in front of the border.”

Owen said stunned border guards immediately recognized Nedomansky.

“Nobody there could take their eyes off him,” Owen said. “They couldn’t believe what they were seeing.”

After a few pictures and some handshakes, the two departed for Hodonin. When they arrived, word quickly spread: The town’s favorite son was back.

“People were just stopping in their tracks,” Owen said.

As they climbed the stairs to his mother’s second-floor apartment, the home where Nedomasky grew up and where she lived for 60 years, time and distance melted.

“I was very nervous,” Nedomansky said. “You always dream that someone could come in the room and get you. It was a really nervous time. I didn’t realize it was going to be OK.”

Not much had changed in Nedomansky’s childhood home. The small, musty apartment was dimly lit, the mailboxes still in a state of disrepair.

“Not so great memories,” Nedomansky said.

The next day, when the two went to scout a nearby tournament, Nedomansky became the show.

“We’d go to games and it would just be a madhouse,” Owen said. “People would swarm him everywhere we went.”

Nedomansky was apologetic, but Owen was in awe.

“I told him, I’ll watch the games, you just take it all in,” Owen said.

It’s fitting, perhaps, that Nedomansky’s path to the Hall of Fame was in many ways secured by the scouting community. These diligent talent evaluators don’t see the limelight, but they do understand the fabric of the game. They believed their friend and colleague deserved the game’s highest honor.

David Conte is considered the behind-the-scenes architect of the New Jersey Devils’ three championship squads between 1995 and 2003. He was also a key figure in the made-for-Hollywood rise of the expansion Vegas Golden Knights, where he worked alongside Nedomansky to build an expansion team into a Stanley Cup finalist.

But Conte’s interest in Nedomansky dates back years before he became one of the pre-eminent talent evaluators in the business.

When Conte was a senior in high school, he proposed featuring Montreal Canadiens great Jean Beliveau as his topic for a public speaking exercise. Too easy, his teacher insisted. Dig deeper.

Conte had a part-time job at a winery in the Niagara Falls area and he met a Czechoslovak defector there who kept talking about Vaclav Nedomansky.

That he was “the guy,” Conte said. “How everyone wanted to wear No. 14.”

And so Conte made his speech about a man he wouldn’t meet until they were scouting colleagues years later, Conte with the Devils and Nedomansky with the Kings. The two later helped build the Vegas Golden Knights from the ground up.

Conte was a catalyst to Nedomansky’s Hall of Fame campaign. With the help of Golden Knights analytics staffers, he devised statistical comparables with other European greats like Fetisov, Larionov, Valery Kharlamov, Sergei Makarov and Alexander Yakushev.

“He was god-like in that country and he carried himself like a Jean Beliveau, which is the highest honor I could give anybody,” Conte said.

“He’s done more for the game than the game’s done for him.”

Nedomansky hasn’t wasted much time on regret since that flight touched down in Montreal in the summer of 1974.

“I was absolutely, 100 percent sure I’d done the right thing,” he said.

That’s not to say there haven’t been challenges.

Nedomansky and his first wife, Vera, split up in 1983. The divorce came around the same time that Nedomansky lost a lawsuit against his former agent Alan Eagleson, whom he’d sued for breach of contract. The judge ruled that Nedomansky, who had sued Eagleson for $1.7 million, had to pay the soon-to-be disgraced Eagleson $60,000 in court costs.

Later, Eagleson, the former head of the players’ union, would be convicted of fraud and embezzlement and resign from the Hockey Hall of Fame.

But the decision was a huge blow for Nedomansky, who rarely speaks of the matter.

“It broke him,” Vashi said.

Not so much financially, although the costs were significant at that time, but emotionally, his son said.

For Nedomansky, it was a bitter reminder that injustice happens everywhere.

He’s been married to his second wife, Marcela Valusek, for 20 years and they have settled in California. That’s where he was, outside a Trader Joe’s grocery store not far from his Palm Springs home, when the Hall of Fame call came.

What do you say when history calls?

Nedomansky said he thought of Pat Quinn and Pat Burns, who were inducted posthumously.

“This is nicer if you can still be alive,” he said.

That’s not just a throwaway line. A decade ago, Nedomansky was diagnosed with stage 3 colon cancer.

“I almost lost him on too many nights that I don’t care to really look back upon,” Vashi said.

Nedomansky has been cancer-free now for seven years and in the aftermath of confronting his own mortality, he agreed to tell his story and decided that his son should be the one to tell it.

If you ever wonder why or even if things happen for a reason, consider this: During Nedomansky’s days in Detroit, where wins were scarce, he won an old-style shoulder-mounted VHS camera and recorder for being the first star in a game.

The camera became young Vashi’s prized possession and the youngster began making short films with friends. It led to a career in feature film editing and although he followed in his father’s footsteps for a time playing minor pro hockey, Vashi’s calling has taken him to Hollywood. He’s worked with top-name producers including Jerry Bruckheimer, a lifelong hockey fan and now part of the ownership group of the expansion team in Seattle.

Vashi hopes to apply the lessons he’s learned watching and working with people like Bruckheimer, a longtime colleague and friend, on his first long-form production.

“His story has never been told,” Vashi said.

“He’s a very humble and gentle man. And he doesn’t share too much. Something to do with coming from a communist country, where the more you talk the more you can get into trouble. But I think he felt not a duty but more so that it was his legacy to share (his story).”

In the past, he has turned down book offers and other requests to do long-form examinations of his life.

“I didn’t like to open myself completely,” Nedomansky said.

But opening up to the young son who shared in the border-crossing journey and dreams of a better life came a little more naturally.

“I can say what I need to say,” Nedomansky said. “That would be a good way to close down the circle.”

(Top photo courtesy of Vashi Nedomansky/Illustration by The Athletic)