An oasis in the desert

Sporting News, The, Feb 28, 1994 by Bruce Schoenfeld

You can get better odds on Radek Bonk's future than anything else in Las Vegas

Las Vegas Boulevard blinks and glitters, burning neon red into the dark desert sky. Wayne Newton is on stage at the Sands. Not far away at the Thomas & Mack Center, where the International Hockey League's Las Vegas Thunder have beaten the San Diego Gulls, two Czech women sit at a table with the sport's latest teen phenomenon and try to render his thoughts into English.

They've said Radek Bonk has passed his driving test and that he doesn't like hockey fights. But they seem to disagree about the most interesting thing that has happened to Bonk since he arrived in the United States last year from the town of Koprivnice in the Czech Republic.

As the women argue in Czech, giving the loosest possible interpretation to the job of interpreter, Bonk sits silently, his puppy eyes shifting from one of them to the other. He is the first underage European to play pro hockey in North America, and he's doing it in -- of all places -- Las Vegas, so he would seem to have interesting stories to tell. But how can he tell them if he can't get a word in?

Finally, the interpreters have an answer ready. The older Czech woman, grim-lipped and disapproving, turns her head as the younger one leans forward to talk. "Radek has met a girl," she says.

No wonder his English is improving.

Radek Bonk, just 18 last month, lives with his parents and is expected to be the No. 1 pick in the NHL entry draft June 28 and 29 in Hartford. On the ice, he has been compared to Eric Lindros, fellow Czech Jaromir Jagr, and a bigger, stronger Mark Messier. "His skill-size combination is as good as any I've seen outside of Mario Lemieux," Thunder General Manager Bob Strumm says. "To do what he has done against veteran players is just amazing.

"He's an irritant to the opposition the way he hits people and uses his stick."

Anaheim scout Paul Fenton says, "He's a kid playing in a man's league, and it's phenomenal what he has already done. If you didn't know he was 18 and you saw him out there, you would have no idea"

Off the ice, you would know. His mother cooks him goulash, and his father makes him take afternoon naps. While waiting for Bonk to finish an interview, a young girl in black jeans sits quietly with his parents, looking the way you would look if your boyfriend had been named to the All-Star team and passed his driver's test in the same month.

This would seem almost quaint if Bonk were doing his apprenticeship like the rest of the sport's 18-year-olds: playing in one of Canada's three junior leagues, walking the main street of Kamloops, British Columbia, or Owen Sound, Ontario, with the collar of his letter jacket flipped up to protect his neck from the cold, dominating games against the very teen-agers who will fill the majority of NHL roster spots in, say, four to six years. Instead, Bonk's introduction to North America is Las Vegas, where the sees a "Girls of Glitter Gulch" advertisement on the Thomas & Mack Center boards every time he takes a faceoff. Many of his teammates have NHL experience. Nearly all are older by a decade or more.

Not that Las Vegas feels too much different to Bonk than Owen Sound might, or, for that matter, Koprivnice. He hadn't been able to cruise The Strip until he got his driver's license. He is not old enough to drink or gamble. "I play, I train, I listen to music, I learn English, I relax," he says -- or, rather, the Czech women say it for him, for surely he would say that if he could. Adds one, by way of commentary: "He is just normal."

On a team of veterans trying to work their way back to the NHL, Bonk is one of two players under 24. "When you say something to him, he thanks you," says Brent Ashton, who has 998 games of NHL experience and rooms with Bonk on the road. "He's willing to learn the game the way we play it here."

He had the chance to do that at 17 because of Strumm, who figured that because his IHL expansion club had no working agreement with an NHL franchise and had to pay and procure its talent independently, he might as well get the best players available. That included an adolescent center who wasn't yet eligible for the NHL draft.

Bonk already was playing in a North American style, a rambunctiously physical imitation of Lindros, his favorite player, that had put him in a Czech First Division penalty box for much of the '92-93 season. He scored only five goals in 30 games for Zlin, the quality footwear capital of the Odra Valley, but even at 16 showed enough promise that scouts from every NHL team began researching flight schedules to Prague.

But Strumm made it easy. "Sometimes people are afraid to climb the mountain and peek over the other side,"he says. "I read Bill Veeck's book, |Veeck as in Wreck,' a long time ago. I learned at a young age when there's a loophole out there, you take advantage of it. If it doesn't say in the rulebook you can't change the size of the goal at one end between periods, I guess you try that until they change the rule."