Personal Life
In June 1985, Fetisov was involved in a car accident that killed his younger brother Anatoly, who was 18 years old at the time and a prospect within the HC CSKA Moscow system.
Twelve years later, following a private party on June 13, 1997, Fetisov, along with teammate Vladimir Konstantinov and team masseur Sergei Mnatsakanov, hired a limousine to drive them home after celebrating the Detroit Red Wings' Stanley Cup triumph. The driver, Richard Gnida, whose license was suspended at the time for drunk driving, lost control of the limousine and hit a tree on the median of Woodward Avenue, in Birmingham, Michigan, a suburb north of Detroit. Konstantinov spent several weeks in a coma before finally pulling through. He also suffered from serious head injuries and paralysis, while Fetisov escaped with relatively minor injuries and was able to play the following season. Mnatsakanov sustained heavy head injuries and also spent some time in a coma. He has had a considerably more difficult recovery than Konstantinov. The driver was charged with and convicted of driving with a suspended license.
Read more about this topic: Viacheslav Fetisov
Famous quotes containing the words personal and/or life:
“The pursuit of Fashion is the attempt of the middle class to co-opt tragedy. In adopting the clothing, speech, and personal habits of those in straitened, dangerous, or pitiful circumstances, the middle class seeks to have what it feels to be the exigent and nonequivocal experiences had by those it emulates.”
—David Mamet (b. 1947)
“The time comes when each one of us has to give up as illusions the expectations which, in his youth, he pinned upon his fellow- men, and when he may learn how much difficulty and pain has been added to his life by their ill-will.”
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)