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Champion
Hockey is a team sport where equipment plays a critical role. The holder of the record for the fastest shot, Bobby Hull, played hockey from 1957 to 1980. Does that mean that equipment has not improved since then? No, no. Equipment has evolved a lot. I don’t know what the contest where he set the record was like because they used wooden sticks at the time. These are more advanced and I believe that our best players would hit the puck a few miles per hour faster. Owing to new materials, the equipment is becoming lighter each year, sticks are stiffer where they need to be and more elastic in places where we need them to be. I am convinced that there is still room for improvement. Technology is advancing and I’m sure they’ll find new materials and production methods.
What is your attitude towards technology in general? Average I’d say. I’m no expert, but I’m also not completely averse to it. As a kid, I didn’t have any toy car collection; that never impressed me. But I liked assembling them and that is how I got quite a few of them.
Do you still own a Maserati? Yes, still. A few players in the club bought sports cars and we had a Ferrari, a Bentley, a Porsche, and all the Mercedes classes. I wanted to be a bit different and bought a Maserati.
There is a commercial on TV with Claudia Schiffer who says something along the lines of: The French are more relaxed and have a greater sense of humour than Germans, but that is also how they build their cars and that is why I’d choose a German car. The same is true of Italians. Maserati is Italian ... I didn’t think about that back then because I liked the car a lot, but now the Italian poor handy-work is starting to show so I don’t know if my next car will be Italian (laughs). It’s my car for daily use, I don’t race it.
The famed California State Route 1 begins in Los Angeles and ends in Leggeto, Northern California. Have you driven on it? I’m often on that road, but considering that there are a lot of people in Los Angeles, it is often quite congested so we move at a snail’s pace on it and can’t really drive. But I haven’t gone further north because I haven’t yet had an opportunity to do this. After the season, I usually hurry back home instead of taking the time to explore the route.
Has hockey become the number one sport in Los Angeles? I don’t think so. I think the basketball players from the Lakers are still better known even though hockey has been gaining a lot of recognition lately, certainly more than before. The two titles have contributed a lot to this, as has the fact that we didn’t have a strong Lakers team at the time. The city certainly lives for hockey, but it’s still not the most popular sport. Los Angeles is an interesting city. People go and see the teams that are winning. Six years ago, when we weren’t winning, our bleachers were pretty empty. LA is a winning city. If you win, people will take you seriously, they’ll want to meet you, follow you, but otherwise ... they won’t talk bad about you, but they also won’t cheer you on.
You have been in the US since 2005. What strikes you most when you return to Slovenia for the summer? Have you adopted the American way of thinking? I certainly have. It would be difficult not to. As far as I know my character, I can say that I try to make the best out of every situation. I think they work more in America than they do in Europe in general, not only in Slovenia. Stores are open from six in the morning and from Monday to Sunday from six in the morning till nine in the evening. This will never happen here. People there devote more time to working and earning a living, while we take it more slowly here and enjoy life. Americans are perhaps a bit more decisive in their efforts and willing to do everything, while Slovenians are somewhat more reserved in this respect, unsure about our chances of success.
In sports, the American way of thinking works?
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Of course. If you want to make it in America, let’s say in hockey, and you know that your technique is not the best, you’ll fight to make it. Not everyone has this in them, but I think they have this in their blood, while we don’t as much.
Soon after arriving in Los Angeles, you said that you would like to win the NHL title. Many smirked at this because the LA Kings had never won the Stanley Cup before, not even with Wayne Gretzky. Did you always believe that this was possible or were these statements purely for selfmotivation? If you don’t set the bar high for yourself, you’ll never reach your potential or be able to push yourself. As for every other player, the most important thing for me was to first get into the NHL, then settle down and play. Once you achieve this goal, the next one is winning the championship. It’s a normal progression. I was aware ... or perhaps not aware at the time how difficult it would be, but the goal of every player in the NHL is to win the Stanley Cup. After a few seasons, many people probably laughed at me when I said that our manager had the vision of how to build a team, and it took a bit longer perhaps than many had expected. But it’s not important how long it took, only that we succeeded.
Was it easier the first time or second time around? When you first win the cup, they take you a bit more seriously. For 45 years, the cup had never come to LA. The first time, it was a bit easier in the playoffs than it was this season when we had to give it our all across the three seven-game series. If you take a look at the individual games, it seems it would have been much harder to win the second title than it was to win the first, but on the other hand, we had the experience to know a few things.
A new season awaits you with the same goal. How will you motivate yourself for it con-
sidering that you have won the Stanley Cup twice over the last three years? There are probably many who are now hungrier for it than the LA Kings? There certainly are and it’s much easier to win the cup than to defend it. We’ll have a target on our back ... I think that motivation is unnecessary. What motivates us is the memory of how good it was to climb to the top of the mountain and stay there. The partying afterwards, taking the cup to your home town – all of that’s great, but the feeling after the last game when everything’s truly over is indescribable. That’s what motivates us, but what pushes us on is the knowledge that we are capable of winning the cup. Two years ago, when we first won the trophy, we weren’t sure that it wasn’t just luck that had something to do with it. If maybe things had lined up in our favour... But now, after the second victory, we have proven that we can do it multiple times.
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Kopi, prvak Anže Kopitar je od leta 2005 razpet med dvema državama – ZDA oziroma Los Angelesom, kjer živi, in Slovenijo, kjer opravlja poletne priprave na novo sezono. Visok več kot meter in devetdeset ter težak malo več kot sto kilogramov je podpisal
pogodbo z moštvom Los Angeles Kings, ki nastopa v NHL, najtežjem hokejskem tekmovanju na svetu. Stanleyjev pokal, petnajst kilogramov in pol težko priznanje, narejeno iz zlitine srebra in niklja, je prvič dvignil v zrak po koncu predlanske sezone ter to ponovil še letos. La Kingsi pred tem nikoli niso bili prvaki, niti takrat ne, ko je zanje igral Wayne Gretzky.