Martin Havlat Pictures - About This Site

In April of 2003, my Toronto Maple Leafs were eliminated from the playoffs by the Philadelphia Flyers. I don't quite remember how it happened, but somehow I ended up watching the subsequent series between the Flyers and the Senators. It must have been a fit of masochism; there couldn't have possibly been two teams I hated more in the playoffs at that time.

...But a weird thing happened. The more I watched the Senators, the more I liked them. They weren't the Leafs, but they weren't the boring team I remembered them being. ...I could talk about how I was dazzled by Hossa's puck control and Schaefer's tenacity in the corners and Redden's non-panicked defense, but all of that is irrelevant to this site.

The truth is, I became completely smitten with Martin Havlat.

After that, I began collecting pictures of him. Obsessively. There are some really great shots and there are photos of the back of his head. Whatever, if it's a picture of him, I've collected it and probably put it online here.

I wasn't planning to share the collection when I first started doing this, so I didn't take notes on where I got pictures from or who took them. Everything I've found since probably about November of 2003 is correctly credited, but things from before that are kind of hit or miss. I'm trying to go back and fix everything, but it's tedious and not exactly rewarding (as compared to finding new pictures), so I'm not doing a particularly smashing job at it.

If there's something of yours here and you would like credit for it (or would prefer that it wasn't here at all), please send me an email to let me know. I won't bite, promise. This site is just for fun; life's too short to get bent out of shape over pictures on the internet. Well, for me, anyway, since I didn't take any of them.

And, as a side note, relax--I'm not a real stalker. I don't even live anywhere near Ottawa.

This should go without saying, but I have no affiliation with the NHL, NHLPA, Ottawa Senators, Martin Havlát, or anyone else of any consequence. I just like to look at pictures of pretty boys. Is that so wrong?

Update 8/12/04: I am currently facing a moral dilemma. Actually, I am facing two of them. The first is in regards to copyright, and the second is in regards to privacy.

I recently read Brad Templeton's 10 Big Myths about Copyright Explained, and while none of the information contained within comes as a surprise to me, seeing it in such concentrated form does bring the point home much more strongly. Basically this entire site is in copyright violation, except for two pictures for which I have the explicit consent of their photographers to use on my site. Everything else I have simply taken, and in some cases even edited to remove people who were also in the photo.

I can defend myself, or at least rationalize my actions: I am not making any money from this; I give as much credit as I can find, including the name of the photographer and the website from which I took the picture; I am acting as a different sort of resource than most places I take the photos and information from. There are hundreds of fan sites out there for all sorts of public figures, and I am doing nothing different than any of them.

In a way, I guess I feel that in the case of a photograph that's distributed by Getty or Reuters or any other news service, the actual photographer has already been paid, so I'm not taking anything from them. Jana Chytilova is a wonderful freelance photographer who takes beautiful pictures of the Senators both on and off the ice. She only has them up on that site for a limited time, sometimes just a matter of days. On one hand I would really like to save and share them for other people to see, but on the other I recognize that she is a freelance photographer and taking her photos--even with nothing but the best intentions--directly affects her and her livelyhood, so I do not do that. I appreciate that she shares her photos at all, and I would be incredibly disappointed if she were to stop.

My other dilemma is the issue of privacy. I've come across photos of Martin Havlat with his girlfriend, and photos that plainly show his license plate. The Czech press is a lot more generous (?) with these things than North American press is, and it makes me uncomfortable. I enjoy learning trivial details about him as much as anyone else does, but I feel sort of strange about being the one to spread those details. My rudimentary ability to read Czech has also allowed me to skim an interview or two and get the idea that Marty would like to keep his private life private, and I've pretty much decided to go along with that.

I still sense that this site may be generally considered an invasion of privacy, and while that isn't my intention, I do understand how strange it might be to come across (right after flattering and embarrassing, even for a public figure). I'm not really certain what to do about that; I don't think if someone emailed me claiming to be Martin Havlat I would necessarily believe him. But hey, Marty, feel free to try!

What does any of this mean? Not a lot, I suppose. I'm not going to take the site down today, and probably not tomorrow, and probably not next month. But I guess one day I could, and this is my explanation in advance.