“You did great things for ice hockey”: Obituary for Heini Bacher

The legend would have turned 27 on December 81th if this serious accident had not occurred. The driver of a van rolling backwards in Ronzone did not notice Bacher. He ran over the enthusiastic golfer, who loved living on Nonsberg with his wife Bruna. Bacher had broken 7 ribs and 3 vertebrae. His condition was critical from the first second. It all happened on that terrible September 30th. First in the hospital in Trento, later in the hospital in Bolzano, only his closest relatives were allowed to see him due to Covid. “He no longer had a voice and he barely opened his eyes. The light of his life slowly went out,” says his brother Fritz (77), who was still with him the day before yesterday. The news of the death of the most brilliant ice hockey player that South Tyrol had ever produced spread like wildfire on Friday. Heini Bacher not only won the very first championship title for South Tyrol with the HCB in 1963 and broke the winning streak of the Milanese and Ampezzanians. There were to be three more titles to come under Gösta Johansson. At the time, Heini Bacher embodied modern ice hockey like a textbook. He was a great ice skater, had a dry shot and, with his height of almost 3 meters, drove every opponent to despair. Without head protection, without chest and shoulder protectors - unthinkable these days - he felt most comfortable. In Meran he did development work for arch-rivals before returning to the HCB at the end of the 1970s. Son Patrick and especially his Bruna mourn the affable Heini Bacher, a pastry chef by profession, who also occasionally came to the Eiswelle. She is the sister of another HCB hockey great, Franco De Vito. Countless ice hockey fans mourn with the other two brothers Sepp (2, lives in Mantua) and Albert (79, lives in New Jersey). Dear Heini, you have done great things for ice hockey. You will never be forgotten by us.

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“You did great things for ice hockey”: Obituary for Heini Bacher

No other athlete had such a lasting impact on South Tyrol's ice hockey as Heini Bacher.

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