Krolak Cup Founder Lived Tall Tales, Had Big Heart

From building an ice rink in the desert to transforming himself into an Olympic trophy-provider overnight, Bob Krolak’s life is one tall tale after another.

He helped lay down the ice for an NHL tournament at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, flew to Sweden to make a cold call to one of the finest glassmakers in the world and enrolled his daughter in hockey under cover as a boy named Mike. 

Locally, Krolak is a legend for his involvement with the Krolak Cup, an international exchange that brings young hockey players from Huddinge, Sweden, to Northbrook for games, tourism and a weeklong stay with members of the Northbrook Bluehawks and the Glenview Stars. Players from the Chicago area also travel to Sweden for a similar host stay, as part of a cross-cultural exchange that has resulted in thousands of international friendships over the past 11 years.

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This year’s tournament, taking place at the North Shore Ice Arena in Northbrook this week, will be bittersweet. The opening ceremonies Wednesday celebrate not just the participants but also the life and legend of tournament founder Bob Krolak, who suffered from Parkinson’s for the past 14 years of his life and passed away just two weeks ago at age 78. 

‘The Bob Krolak Story’

Hockey parent Doug Brooks first met Bob Krolak at the Northbrook rink, where his son was playing a game for the Glenview Stars, as part of the 2006 international tournament. The following year, along with his wife Deborah, he helped Krolak write and publish his autobiography, titled I Was There But I Didn’t Know It: The Bob Krolak Story.

It was Krolak’s stories that drew Brooks in. There was a story involving a female Russian KGB agent, the story of how Krolak helped build a 13,000-square-foot ice rink on State Street in downtown Chicago, and of course, the story of how Krolak cold-called his way in to the 1980 Olympics. 

“He had lots of stories,” Brooks says. “Every one I was able to validate was true.”

Krolak’s finest story, perhaps, was about how he came to sell trophies to the Olympics—a business in which he had no prior experience. In 1980, while working for a gas company, Krolak decided he would like to go into the trophy business. He asked a friend he had met through one of his international hockey exchanges to line up an interview with one of the most highly regarded glass companies in Sweden.  

But the company’s president kept taking calls during the conversation, Krolak told Brooks. So he walked out and took off down the street, where he talked the other glass companies in the same small town into supplying glass for trophies he planned to sell. Next, he cold-called the Olympics committee, which was then preparing for the games in Lake Placid, New York, and talked them into letting him provide the participation awards. Krolak put the finishing touches on the awards in his basement, then drove through the night from Oak Lawn to deliver them to Lake Placid.   

In 1991, Krolak pulled off a similar stunt when he heard that Caesars Palace in Las Vegas was planning to build an ice rink in the dessert for a tournament between the New York Rangers and the Los Angeles Kings. He called Caesars Palace and offered to provide a special kind of ice he claimed could deflect the sun. When he learned that someone else was already contracted. Krolak paid his way to Las Vegas anyway and talked his way into a room at Caesars Palace and a role in helping to lay down the ice. He later parlayed that experience into volunteering with the Chicago Park District to create an ice rink on State Street. 

“To his dying day, he was planning the next big event,” says Brooks. Lately, Krolak had been talking about bringing a softball tournament called the “Super 60” back to Chicago. 

“He was full of ideas,” adds Brooks. “He didn’t just think of them, he went after them.” 

A Lifetime Love Affair With Hockey

Krolak’s entrepreneurial streak was obvious early on. Growing up in the Back of the Yards neighborhood on Chicago’s south side, Krolak noticed how coal fell to the ground as workers shoveled it off the trains, and came back later with his wagon to pick up the coal and sell it. He did the same thing with blocks of ice, selling the chips from his wagon, according to Brooks. 

As an adult, ice figured prominently in Krolak’s life. Specifically, hockey became his life, after he moved to Oak Lawn with his wife to raise his two daughters, Sandra and Melissa. There, he became president of the Oak Hockey club, and became so involved that—as he told Sports Illustrated for a 1974 article about the growth of hockey—his wife begged him to let his daughter Melissa play on the all boys squad. Her first season, she went by “Mike,” and the players assumed she was one of them—until she wore a dress to the awards banquet. 

From his position as president of Oak Lawn’s hockey club, Krolak went on to join the state hockey board, where he helped make facemasks mandatory for the sport and first got involved with international exchanges. 

As he tells it in the book he wrote with Brooks, it all started when the Swedish Consul General in Chicago asked Krolak to help out a Swedish team that had planned to come to Chicago to play in 1974. Krolak helped line up games, host families and a tourism schedule, and from then on, the exchanges took on a life of their own. He developed contacts in Sweden, particularly in suburban Huddinge, as well as a host of interested teams in Chicago. 

“As word got around, teams would come to me asking how they could get involved,” he wrote in his book. “I never turned a team down. I always tried to work it so they could get their exchange.”

Generous to a fault, he would charge the participants exactly what it cost for travel, transportation and other expenses. When someone couldn’t go, he returned their funds—meaning he frequently lost money. 

“He covered a lot of it himself personally,” Brooks said. “There was always something that came up that added to the cost of the event.” 

That was just Krolak’s way, however. 

“He repeatedly found himself in a situation where he had the opportunity to do something for other people at no reward for himself,” Brooks says. “Here’s the phrase that I heard over and over and over again: ‘I figured if I did this, something good would happen.’” 

Friendships Formed Across Thousands of Miles 

The Fishers are among hundreds of local families who have benefited from Krolak’s international exchange. All four of their children traveled to Sweden to play hockey, and the Fishers have hosted Swedish players many times.

“My wife and I have dear friends in Huddinge that we met 11 years ago that we’ve stayed in contact with,” says Bob Fisher, whose family has also hosted six or seven kids at their home in Northbrook.

“They end up exchanging sweatshirts, and at certain points in time, you’re not sure which is the American kid and which is the Swede,” he says. “If more kids realized how similar they were to kids around the world, it would be a better world.” 

At Wednesday night’s opening ceremonies, one of the tournament’s previous chairs will speak about Krolak, and the friends and families gathered will bow their heads in silence for him before the games begin, according to tournament organizer Sarah McNally. During the closing ceremonies on Sunday, Brooks will speak, and the organizers will plant a tree at the rink in Krolak’s honor. 

“I’m very touched by what the tournament’s done for my family,” says McNally, whose two sons have participated and who has hosted seven Swedish players over the years. “It’s always been about friendship.” 

This year, as always, Krolak was looking forward to seeing old friends from near and far, Brooks said. He always dreamed of going back to Sweden one more time, although his illness ultimately made it too difficult to travel. 

He made his last trip to Sweden in 2007, along with Brooks and his family. They brought along 400 copies of the book, which Brooks hoped that Krolak would sell, in order to make some profit. Instead, he gave them away, one after the other, to kids he knew through the exchanges. 

“He’d smile as kids walked up to him, and say, ‘What’s your name?’’ and autograph the book for them,” Brooks recalls. “They loved him and he loved them.”

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