Sometimes at night, Bobby Holik can still see himself in the living room in Jihlava, with his older sister. They hear the old man slam the door downstairs. Father’s heavy feet take the stairs one by one, and when he gets to the top of the three-family house where they live, Jaroslav Holik sets down his equipment bag with a thud. As if on a reviewing line, Bobby and Andrea stand at attention. Jaroslav looks every bit the man with the most penalty minutes on his team. He rustles his kids’ hair with cracked and blistered fingers, and they exhale. For the rest of the evening, he tells them stories of where he’s been. Because the government lets him travel abroad with his club team, he’s seen what lies beyond the Soviet missile silo on the outskirts of town. He’s determined that his kids will see the West too. Jaroslav spends his salary on a tutor so they can learn English, and on a satellite dish so they can watch American sports.

When Andrea, a tennis player, defects to the U.S. in 1984, Jaroslav loses his military commission and his job as head coach of the Czech army team. But he urges his Bobby to keep studying and training. To stay tough and be smart. Your time will come, he tells his son.

Bobby was raised to be a hockey star. And, as much as any kid growing up today in our heartland, he was raised to be an American. His time came in 1989, just as the Iron Curtain was lifting. Czechs were still rare in the NHL, but Ivan Lendl, the tennis star who lived in Hartford and sat on the board of the Whalers, used his clout to help move Holik to the U.S. “I was 19 when I packed my bags and, whoosh, started a new life here,” Holik says. Then he frowns slightly. “I think my father wishes I wouldn’t have turned out as bruising as he was. The hockey player side of me is quite a bit darker than the other side.”

For a map connecting those two sides, the 31-year-old Holik offers a crescent scar that runs across his head -- a souvenir from an operation to borrow bone from his skull to reconstruct his right cheek, which had developed cysts from the pounding he’d taken during his life on the boards. The tough-guy scar crowns the face of a thoughtful searcher cast into the landscape of a changed America.

The day was Sept. 19, and the New Jersey Devils were the first pro team to visit New York City after the World Trade Center attacks. The quickest bus route from the Jersey Meadowlands to Madison Square Garden runs through the Lincoln Tunnel. But on this day, driving underground was out of the question. Huge trucks were parked at both ends of the tunnel, sealing out traffic and possible terrorists. The Devils detoured eight miles north to the George Washington Bridge, where they joined an armed convoy of trucks heading toward midtown Manhattan.

With the city on edge, many of the Devils were jittery about the trip. Bobby Holik wouldn’t have had it any other way. As the bus crept through the city and passed a victim support center at Pier 94, Holik saw grieving families filing missing persons reports. He watched mothers and wives place photocopied faces of their loved ones on a makeshift wailing wall.

Holik has a granite chin that looks like the type the Soviets used to paint on propaganda posters, and it clenched in anger as the bus continued its crawl to the Garden. He’d been glued to his television for the better part of a week, taking in tragic tales of heroic cops and firefighters. “It gave me chills,” he says. “I have never been prouder to be an American.” So if his president wanted him to play hockey in New York City, he would do it without complaint.

Europeans now make up almost a third of NHL rosters. Nearly one out of every 10 NHL players is from the Czech Republic. But none has adopted this country more completely than Jaroslav Holik’s son. Jaromir Jagr plays near the Pentagon, but he goes to Prague in the off-season to run his sports bar. Dominik Hasek openly broods about raising his children here. Even new-generation sharpshooters such as Patrik Elias and Petr Sykora of the Devils speak Czech around teammates. (“I talk to them about that,” says Holik. “It’s just rude.”)

Holik, on the other hand, devours all the knowledge about America that he can. He knows its role in World War II. He’s smart enough about Vietnam to chill with friends who spent the ’60s wearing love beads. Take him on the road, and he’d rather visit the Smithsonian in Washington than stay in his hotel room watching Adam Sandler.

One of Holik’s Jersey buddies is the man who gave “Born in the USA” its back beat: Max Weinberg. Though the E Street Band drummer is a regular at Devils games, the men became friendly through their wives, who jump horses. Holik tells himself he must read more about the Civil War because our race relations confound him. Ten seasons of listening to talk radio stuck in New Jersey traffic have armed him with enough one-liners to debate a congressman. Holik has answers to everything except where his American journey will take him next.

As free agency looms, Holik can make tens of American millions on his reputation as the fiercest face-off man in the NHL. He didn’t get here as a tourist. That scar on his head declares his willingness to wage war on a hockey rink.

Holik’s Connecticut-born wife, Renee, sums up the calculating toughness that Jaroslav passed on to his son: “Bobby has a way of getting people angry, and it’s not your average anger. He really gets under people’s skin. There’s only so much other players can take. One day, I’m afraid he’s going to provoke someone to the breaking point.”

His stats show he’s a needling player without being a goon. Just two major penalties were called on him last year; if you subtract them from his 97-minute total, he averages a minute in the box per game, scarcely enough time to let his antagonists catch their breath. He hits to break the spirit, not bones, and when he explains his style -- “It’s only through contact that you can put others in their place” -- he sounds more like a headmaster than an enforcer.

“I know I come across as arrogant,” he adds with a hint of apology. “But the only moments I regret are the ones where I hesitate on the ice. The moment you start analyzing the game, it passes you by.”

His approach to life is more reflective. Go back to his scar where it frames his eyes, and let it take you to the part of Holik that can’t pass a museum without lingering, that compels him to read three newspapers a day. There’s precious little Holik doesn’t have an opinion on: Drugs. AIDS. Bill Clinton. Claude Monet. GM Lou Lamoriello’s failure to beef up his A-line after the Devils fell to the Avalanche in their second straight Stanley Cup Finals last June.

If he’s not the best center in the league, he’s certainly the one most likely to unseat Tucker Carlson on Crossfire. His opinions, like the money he’s made and the two Stanley Cup rings he owns, are a vindication of Jaroslav’s American vision. And the thread that runs through it all is his unyielding and romantic dedication to this nation’s work ethic.

Don’t snicker. It’s why he keeps Tom Brokaw’s best-seller, The Greatest Generation, by his bedside. (Holik is awed by the way the U.S. rebuilt Europe after WWII.) It’s why he’s the Devils’ most resilient player, missing just two games from injury in five years. (He’s sat out five more due to suspension.) And it’s why he makes his home away from hockey in one of the last outposts of the American frontier.

***

It’s hard to get much farther from Jihlava than Jackson Hole, Wyo. This valley of wealth is Aspen for the cowboy set, where 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’ respite from the world’s problems. (Holik went Republican in his first vote as a U.S. citizen last year.) Not too far away, Ted Turner counts his AOL billions.

But on this late summer morning, Holik takes his dogs on a jog in the crisp mountain air. It brings him back to the days when he used to spend summers visiting his grandfathers in the Czech countryside. Here, though, the backdrop is the Teton Mountains, which took his breath away the instant he first laid eyes on them in 1994 -- he’d never seen anything so broad or high. So Holik spends as much time as he can exploring them, taking breakneck jogs with his golden retriever, Butch, and his Labrador, Gogo.

“You have to understand,” he says, his long legs galloping up the mountain near his home. “I come from a place where everything was controlled under the Soviets. Out here, you have your plot of land. People do what they want.”

He’s found his stardom in suburban New Jersey. But he’s found his America in this place with diamond-carved ski slopes, whitewater rivers and John Wayne cowboy trails. One afternoon walking through Grand Teton National Park, he stops and asks: “Did you know barbed wire revolutionized the West? It’s true, farmers didn’t have to spend all their time building wooden fences.” Uh, no Bobby, I didn’t know that. But he doesn’t hear. He’s off on another story about American ingenuity.

In the Jackson Hole stables where he and Renee keep their five horses, Bobby looks like every other gentleman cowboy as he feeds carrots to their shimmering silver German Holsteiner, Big Capitol. He watches his golden-haired daughter, Hannah Marie, 4, ride a pony. The tiniest spread around here runs to seven figures, but the Holiks, who have been making due with modest rentals, are in the market. They want a real home in the event a long-simmering feud with the Devils leads him to look across the river -- whether it’s the Hudson or the Mississippi -- for a team willing to top the four-year, $26 million deal that Lamoriello balked at giving him last August.

Holik measures his place in the game as keenly as he measures history. In 1996, with a year to go on his contract, he let the Devils know that he was irked about being typecast as a blocker on their infamous crash line. He held out in the preseason, convincing them to give him more elite match-ups. That led to his emergence as a shooter, climaxing in a brilliant 1997-98 season, when he led the team in scoring with 65 points and played in all 82 games. He was rewarded with a three-year contract. He was also asked to emphasize his defense, so his goal production fell by half. Still, he didn’t complain.

But last summer, wanting “to have my dedication to my team acknowledged,” he asked for arbitration, only to hear a lawyer describe him as a center in decline -- not worthy of the $4.7 million-a-year extension that he was seeking. Without showy scoring stats to fall back on, he left his hearing with an $800,000 raise, to $3.5 million for one year. “It was a great experience,” he says, trying to sound clinical but biting off his words. “I think everyone should go through it once.” Earlier this season, when the Devils broke the bank to nearly double Martin Brodeur’s salary to $8 million, Holik started hardening his tough talk. “I always sacrifice myself for the team,” he says. “Now I have to do my part for me.”

If it’s time to take his All-American road show to another city, he’ll have his pick of Kodak stops. Washington? Love the museums and memorials. Philly? Home of the Liberty Bell. Don’t forget NYC.

Holik was only too happy to suit up to play the Rangers in Madison Square Garden back on Sept. 19. He had just bought an American-made pickup truck because the president had asked the country to spend money to lift the economy. He had collected a stack of magazines for posterity, so that his daughter would know what these days were about. He had displayed an American flag outside his home.

But there was no better way to show his pride than to play. He took the president’s call to normalcy seriously, felt it was important to skate -- as always -- without fear. On this night, Bobby Holik was playing for a team larger than the Devils. Instead of reading about American history, the eager student was weaving himself into a strand of its next chapter.

This article appears in the January 7 issue of ESPN The Magazine.