Life After Retirement
In the spring of 1968, Bican was told that he would be allowed to take a coaching job abroad. He impressed the Belgian team Tongeren and they hired him as a coach, where he had some success taking them from Division 4 to Division 2.
Around this time, Pelé was heading for his "1000th" goal and many journalists were looking for another player who had scored a thousand goals. Former Austrian player "Bimbo" Binder suggested Bican, who he claimed had scored 5000 goals. When reporters asked Bican why he hadn't made more of a fuss over his goalscoring feats, he simply said "who'd have believed me if I said I'd scored five times as many goals as Pelé?!" However to score this 5000 goals he should have kept an average of 185 goals/year along all his 27 years of career, a fact that would be extremely unlikely to go unnoticed, so counting league goals Bican scored 643.
Josef "Pepi" Bican spent the last few months of his life in hospital with heart problems. He had hoped to be home for Christmas, but died less than 2 weeks before that, at the age of 88.
Read more about this topic: Josef Bican
Famous quotes containing the words life and/or retirement:
“Have a care over my people. You have my people—do you that which I ought to do. They are my people.... See unto them—see unto them, for they are my charge.... I care not for myself; my life is not dear to me. My care is for my people. I pray God, whoever succeedeth me, be as careful of them as I am.”
—Elizabeth I (1533–1603)
“The student who secures his coveted leisure and retirement by systematically shirking any labor necessary to man obtains but an ignoble and unprofitable leisure, defrauding himself of the experience which alone can make leisure fruitful.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)