If the former Czechoslovakia had a version of Rush Limbaugh on the Eastern Bloc radio dial, Bobby Holik might have become a talk show host. As it is, nine years of surfing the AM landscape while stuck in New Jersey Turnpike traffic has given the Devils center a radio-ready spiel for just about everything. Gun control? AIDS? Drugs? Gary Condit? Holik wants to talk about all of it. The only thing he doesn't want to talk about, as he chases his two dogs up a Wyoming mountain, where he makes his offseason home, is hockey: "It feels too far away." ½ Holik is 6'4" and weighs tk pounds. He has the sort of granite chin that the Soviets used to paint in propaganda posters. Add the crescent scar running across the front lobe of his headóa souvenir from an operation in which surgeons borrowed bone from his skull to reconstruct his right cheekóand he's the last person you'd expect to stare at cliffs and muse that "views like this make me think about the way Monet saw the morning." ½ But the longer you listen to him, the more Holik makes you reconsider everything you've ever thought about athletes and anger. "Sometimes," he says, nodding toward the other Nike naturalists also are up for an early morning hike, "you just have to stop and realize what's around you.

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If the NHL's center had a personality to match his play, he'd be ornery and uncooperative this morning, probing you for weakness, needling you every chance he gets until he wears you down and makes you snap. He'd bully you with his size, intimidate you with his hollow-point eyes. That's the way he drives opponents crazy. After all, Holik's father, Jaroslov, set records for scoring and penalty minutes on his club team in Jihlava, a mall city of 50,000 located east of Prague. But because he wanted his son to have more polish, Bobby has the air of a prep school grad poured into an ironworker's body. "I think my father wishes I wouldn't have turned out so much like him," he sighs. "The hockey player side of me is quite a bit darker than the other side." The other The truth about Holik is that he's more arrogant than angry. As he whistles to his dogs, Barkley and Butch, and starts jogging back to his Suburban, he puts it this way: "I couldn't play anything that wasn't a contact sport. It's only through contact that you can put other players in their place." See. There it is, that smugness. In a world where smarts are measured by the aesthetic ways players conceal their cheap shots, Holik is a straight A-student with an attitude. Just listen to the words rivals use to describe him: needling, irritating, just plain rde. "He's an opinionated guy," says Devils defensemen Ken Danekyo. "Too opinionated, sometimes." Uncharacteristically, Holik was at a loss for words when his Devils squandered a chance to repeat as Stanley Cup champions in June, losing Game Six in a collapse at home and then squandering their last chance to beat the Avalanche on the road in Denver. "I don't know what to say," he told reporters, looking as lost as a philosophy student confounded by Prost. "I've never been in this position before." Shell-shocked, he piled his wife, daughter and dogs into the Suburban and set the OnStar to Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Jackson is like Aspen for the Cowboy set, a tiny valley of wealth where the buffalo roam and the powerful try not to look silly in Stetsons. Out at the airport, Air Force Two is idling while Dick Cheney takes a few hours away from the world's problems. (Holik voted for the Republican ticket in his first election as an U.S. citizen last year.) Not too far away, Ted Turner counts his AOL stock. For Holik, it's as far as he can get from New Jersey but it's also where he's fallen in love with the idea of being a frontiersman. "I come from a place where everything was controlled under the Soviets," he says. "You know, Marx had a great idea, but it was just an idea. Out here, you have your plot of land and people do what they want." Though the first wave of Czechs has been playing in the NHL for more than a decade, none have embraced the U.S. to quite this extent. Jaromir Jagr may be playing in the nation's capitol, but he still goes back to run his sports bar in Prague in the off-season. Sabres' goalie Dominik Hasek openly broods about the effects of raising his children here. Even the Devils' first-line sharpshooters, Patrik Elias and Petr Sykora, lapse into Czech when surrounded by their teammates. ("I talk to them about that," he says. "It's just rude.") But Holik's well-to-do parents raised him to become a U.S. citizen, letting him watch NHL games on a private satellite dish atop their home, tutoring him in English, and schooling him about life in the West as seen first-hand by Jarislov, who traveled as the star of his club team and later coach of the country's junior national team. When his sister, a tennis player, defected in 1984, Bobby says, "it was no big deal," as if it her life was an inevitable march to that moment. (In fact, it was a big deal. His father lost his army commission and place as the head of the Czech army team and got bumped down to an assistant coach of his club team in Jihlava.) Bobby's own move came with the help of the expatriated Czech Ivan Lendl, who lived in Hartford and sat on the board of the Whalers when the team secured his rights with the tenth pick of the 1989 draft. But all this is ancient history that Holik brushes off with an impatient wave. "My father said, 'You're not sticking around here, you're playing in the NHL.' I was 19 when I packed my bags and, woosh, started a new life here. I went from childhood to adulthood in one transatlantic flight and never looked back." His favorite music is delta blues and one of his New Jersey buddies is the man who gave Born in the USA its back beat: The E Street Band drummer Max Weinberg. The two have more than hockey in common (Weinberg has season tickets). The drummer's wife travels in the same equestrian circles as Renee Holik, a no nonsense blonde who jumps horses competitively. In fact, a typical summer afternoon finds the Holiks bringing their four-year-old daughter to a stable where several of their horses live, including a silver German Holsteiner named Big Capitol. While it's tempting to imagine Holik kicking it out in the wild, he doesn't ride for the same reason he doesn't mountain climb with rope gear or white water raft along the Snake River: "I'm not an adrenaline freak. I get enough adrenaline rushes through the year." Still, he looks perfectly at ease wandering past the manicured jumping courses and the five-star stalls, where no one bothers him with impolite questions about the dark crudity of the day job that pays for it all. Since the Holiks are in the market to buy one of the ranches advertised in the windows of chic real estate shops in town, it's not surprising that he went to arbitration this summer, asking the Devils to make him the team's highest paid player. (It's a distinction now held by Martin Brodeur). He traded his hiking shoes for wing tips and flew to New York for the hearing, only to find that he wasn't as prepared as he thought to spend an afternoon hearing himself described as a player in decline, unworthy of the $4.7 million he sought. He didn't leave a loser: He was awarded an $800,000 raise over the $2.7 million that he made last season. But he was furious that Lou Lamoriello, the only GM he's known in his nine years in New Jersey, would be so willing to trash talk his game. In what may turn out to be the most shortsighted business move since Lethal Weapon 4, Lamoriello saved $1.2 million but may lose Holik after this season. Holik was a fourth-line player on the Devils infamous crash line until he held out in 1996, demanding a larger role on the team. Since then, he's become its most intimidating and provocative presence in the middle ó and the reason why the elite NHL clubs hate pulling off exit 16 of the New Jersey Turnpike. "I know I come across as arrogant or an a-hole," he says as he flops down at his favorite coffee bar and sips an addictive concoction of frozen ice, soy milk, African cocoa and Colombian coffee. "But the second I start thinking about that I'm in trouble. I just play and don't think about getting someone angry. Most likely I will, but the only moments I regret are the ones where I hesitate on the ice or feel sorry for someone. You have to go all out every time. The moment you start analyzing, time passes you by." Until his hearing, he seemed not to mind spending his peak playing years in the shadow of the Rangers, who should get a daytime Emmy for the soap opera that was the Eric Lindros deal. Ask him what bothers him about the suburban town where he lives and he has to think long and hard before coming up with: "Sidewalks. There aren't enough sidewalks. My parents visit and there's nowhere for them to go to take walks." But after Holik heard what Lamoriello had to say, he made up his mind that it was time to at least visit bigger hockey markets. "The most mind blowing thing for me was that after nine years of hearing him talk about sacrificing for the good of the team, all they wanted to talk about was my numbers," Holik says. "Your team can tell you all they want, but in arbitration the truth comes out. So now I have to do my part too." This isn't a threat, at least not one aimed at the new season. Holik was uneven in seven games against Toronto, logging just four points while allowing Matts Sundin nine. But he exploded in the next round, keeping Pittsburgh's Mario Lemieux to just three assists over 15 spirit-sapping periods. It sent the Devils into the finals for the second straight year, though they seemed stuck in neutral against the multi-dimensional Avalanche and Holik never got the match-up with Joe Sacik that might have focused him better. "Throughout the playoffs we only played well enough to beat the other team, not our best," he says, inhaling the last of his Frappuccino so fast that his eyes get glassy from brain freeze. "It took an awfully long time to catch up with us but in then it finally did. So now I have to start over. It's going to be a grind. But I like grinds. I don't like easy games." It's late in the day and he decides to head down to the banks of the Snake River so his golden-haired daughter, Hannah, can swim and his dogs can chase birds. One of them, a chocolate lab named Gogo, comes out from the water limping and Holik holds its paw up to his eye, worried that a pebble may be lodged in a crack in the skin. In one of those made-for-a-publicist moments, he cradles the 40-pound dog in his arms and carries it to the car. "I know he has a reputation," his wife Renee says, watching him. "But if he was the same way off the ice as he is on it, we wouldn't have a life like … this." Doesn't she ever worry about him when he leaves for work? "Well, Bobby does have a way of getting people angry. And it's not your average anger. He really gets under people's skin. I don't worry about him getting hurt in a regular game. But there's only so much other players can take. One day, I'm afraid he's going to provoke someone to the breaking point." Daneyko, the Devils seen-it-all defenseman, just rolls his eyes. "He respects opponents, or at least he says he does. But then he does this stuff to make them slash and gash him and it rolls off his back. He even gets on guys nerves in practice." Holik revels in playing the renaissance rough guy, taking in a Picasso exhibit, for instance, before spending a night trying to floor Mark Messier. ("Now he plays dirty," Holik grins.) "He's got Philadelphia covered from one side to another," says Devils' coach Larry Robinson. "His thirst for knowledge about the U.S. is remarkable." There are places he still wants to explore ó the lush green hills of the Deep South, for instance, or the ruins of Mexico. But for now, he's happy playing Czech Cowboy. On a walk through the Grand Teton National Park he spies some barbed wire. "Did you know barbed wire revolutionized the west," he suddenly offers. "Farmers didn't have to spend all their time building wood fences." Somebody get this guy a talk show, quick.

This article appears in the October 1 issue of ESPN The Magazine.