A life for ice hockey

Ice hockey expert Günter Klein accompanied the ice hockey globetrotter for many years. In the “Frankfurter Rundschau” he now traces the adventurous life of Bernd Haakes. You can read excerpts about the ice hockey globetrotter, who also left a deep mark in South Tyrol, in this article.

On January 14th of this year, Bernd Haake turned 77 years old. That day he decided to stop coaching ice hockey. This year, as he usually does in the summer, he spent a lot of time at his second home in Pullach, goes swimming at Lake Starnberg at every opportunity and - unfortunately far too rarely - visits his South Tyrolean friends on Lake Garda.

Bernd Haake as he lives and breathes: The 77-year-old is always full of enthusiasm and zest for action.

By the way: an offer just recently came in. From Madrid. He refused. Barcelona, he would have done that with enthusiasm, that's an old dream. Bernd Haake, coach of CF Barcelona. Like Pep Guardiola used to. Just ice hockey. But unfortunately: “In Barcelona, the ice rink right next to the Camp Nou was closed in the middle of last season. Now they drive 60 kilometers to every training and game.”

Playing career ended at the age of 27 Bernd Haake, who ended his playing career at the age of 27, was rarely in the front row as a coach. But he had a profitable assistant coaching record in Germany in the 1s with the national team, then with the Kölner Haien and the Iserlohn Roosters. “I was the first German coach under a Russian head coach,” he remembers the time from 1980 to 1994 in Cologne with Vladimir Wassiljew, whose one story remained in his memory: He adhered to the doctrine that the players during training not allowed to drink. Haake: “We hid the water from him.” Without the balancing Haake, taskmaster Vasiliev would not have worked. As a tandem, however, they became German champions and were only a penalty shootout against Jokerit Helsinki away from winning the European Cup in 1997.

The German is also a big name in women's ice hockey and coached the Lithuania women's national team. © Social Media

Above all, Bernd Haake was drawn out into the wide world. He comes from Westphalia, where he later ran 2 ice rinks with his wife Maria and was a teacher of biology, German and sports. But then ice hockey took hold of him. He became national coach in Spain in 1977, spent six months in Australia and says that the curious highlight of his career was that he led the team from Windhoek to the Namibian championship title in the dry ice hockey variant of inline hockey. Canada, the USA, New Zealand, Brazil and South Africa were other coaching stations... and then of course South Tyrol.

Haake went down in the history of local ice hockey with the “Millennium” championship title in 2000. It was the HCB's 16th overall. Asiago was defeated in the final. After 3 seasons together with his decades-long companion and young coach Axel Blancbois in Fassa, he also tamed the Broncos of the Fuggerstadt and became Serie B champions. He has many friends in South Tyrol and all kinds of dumplings are his favorite dish.

Most recently he was a trainer in Lithuania for 11 years Bernd Haake spent the last 11 years in Lithuania, where he was national coach. First with men, then with women. He counted that he attended “37 A World Championships and 52 B, C, Under 18 or women’s tournaments” in his various roles or simply as an interested person. There are also almost a dozen Olympic tournaments.

At 77, Bernd Haake becomes aware of how the former bad riders around him are saying goodbye to the sport or, unfortunately, some of them are also saying goodbye to life. Recently, in the fog of dementia, Bob Murdoch, who had been a coach in Cologne, died. “Unfortunately I couldn’t fly to the funeral because we were celebrating our golden anniversary,” he says. But he learned that 3000 people had come to say goodbye and that the legendary George Kingston was the eulogist.

Haake has known him since the early 1970s. And Kingston is a formidable hockey icon. He led Canada to the world championship title at the 1994 World Cup in Bolzano (and Milan) after “only” silver at the Olympics in Lillehammer. He was then the German head coach from 1994 to 1998 – and Haake’s assistant in Lithuania until 2018. “With our promotion to the World Cup Division I. Division Group A, George stopped. He was almost 80 at the time.” Now he is 84. “And it is still running,” says Haake. Kingston was an ultra-long distance runner, taking part in competitions of up to 100 miles. Now he lives alternately in warm Palm Springs and on a lake in Canada.

Bernd Haake leaves a back door open At some point you have to let go of what is going on in your life. Despite his good intentions, Bernd Haake cannot do it completely. Once you've been captivated by ice hockey, the sport won't let you go. Also according to the motto: Knowledge is power. Hardly anyone from the scene knows the connections in as much detail as Haake. Leading a training session, standing on the boards, but that's over. Haake-O-Ton: “Unless a trainer is needed somewhere in South Tyrol from January onwards…”.

The coaching competition is therefore warned; the intrepid (old) lion has not forgotten how to roar.

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A life for ice hockey

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