PICNIC ON THE CURB
“On April 11, 2000, at 1:27 a.m., in Kyiv, on General Vatutin Avenue (Dnipro District), two cars, a Mercedes-300 and Peugeot-405, collided, resulting in an accident which left four dead. It became known that the Mercedes belonged to Viktor Leonenko, Ukraine’s best soccer player in 1992-1994, who played for Dynamo Kyiv and CSKA. The owner was not in the car.” (From the official Ministry of Internal Affairs report).
They were among us only yesterday — young, cheerful, and exuding health. We rejoiced at their successes, admired their mastery, and lived through their failures together with them. Then the next day these idols passed away in the prime of their popularity and glory. They took their leave suddenly and without saying goodbye. Only the dry accident reports flashed out the familiar names, increasing the tragic list of picnics on the curb.
Yes, as a Mikhail Bulgakov character said, “Man is mortal, but this isn’t the problem. The problem is that sometimes he is mortal unexpectedly, and this is the crux of the matter.” This phrase applies best of all to the tragedy that stunned all soccer fans a few hours after the Moscow Central Army Club (CSKA) had won the 1991 USSR Cup final. Immediately after the banquet, CSKA goalie Mikhail Yeriomin, who, according to eyewitnesses, had drunk only one glass of champagne, went to the airport. A friend of his was at the wheel. There was nobody to save one of the match heroes from a terrible lot. The head-on collision was so strong that the windshield shattered into tiny pieces that thrust into the player’s brain. Yeriomin was rushed to an emergency hospital, where he died a few hours later.
The aficionados of flamboyant Georgian soccer, whose number especially increased after Tbilisi Dynamo won the UEFA Cups’ Cup, had a day of mourning on December 13, 1982, when Vitaly Daraseliya was killed an a car crash. A brilliant player displaying a wide range of techniques, he scored the decisive goal against the East Germany’s Carl Zeiss team in the popular club tournament final. Gone was the Dynamo spirit, its joster who had played for the USSR national team in the Spanish world championship the summer that year and who had, it seemed, only a brilliant career ahead of him. For Vitaly was only twenty-five. The exact place of the accident was only traced a few days later, when the search party found the remains of the vehicle.
Two lives were claimed by an auto accident on December 21, 1992. Yes, it is extremely difficult to foresee your own destiny even if you are such a shrewd man as Stepan Betsa dubbed in Kyiv as the prophet Stepan. He sometimes managed to guess exactly the outcome of soccer battles, like, for instance, with the Vienna Rapid vs. Kyiv Dynamo match. He made a prediction and decided to visit Dnipropetrovsk together with his Dynamo teammate Anatoly Sasko. The Mercedes in which the friends went skidded on an icy road turn. Sasko died on the spot and Betsa soon thereafter in a hospital bed.
The same ill fate waylaid on the highway two more Dynamo and Dnipro players. One of them, Dnipropetrovsk player Mykola Kudrytsky, USSR champion of 1988, had to face it a long way from Ukraine. One of the first Soviet transfer players in the promised land, Kudrytsky became the leader of B’nai Yehuda in Tel Aviv and the idol of the local public from his very first games. In the spring of 1994, the halfback went to Haifa to rub shoulders with the Ukrainian national team which came there for a training session. Early in the morning of March 16 Mykola was returning to Tel-Aviv and, trying to pass a truck at a speed of 100 km/h, he lost control of his car and hit a boundary post. According to the Israeli medical personnel who arrived at the scene, the driver could well have avoided death had he fastened his seat belt.
And six months later, death claimed another well-known Ukrainian soccer player, former Kyiv Dynamo and Simferopol Tavriya goalie Viktor Yurkovsky. Doctors struggled for three days to save the life of the 41- year-old athlete, who had had an accident on September 28 on the 22nd kilometer of the Simferopol- Bakhchisaray highway, but all their efforts proved useless.
It is difficult to say where you can win or lose. On the hot morning of August 12, 1983, Italian Artemio Franchi, died failing to make a turn. He was famous because, according to a version, he hid the Golden Nike, the cup awarded once in four years to the world’s strongest national team, in his home during World War II. And exactly a week later the world of soccer was shocked again by tragic news: one of the Old World’s best forwards, Pole Kazimierz Dejna, found his death overseas in a US automobile accident. And this black list is, unfortunately, far from complete.
