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Steve
Doszpot - Candidate for Brindabella
A Long journey from
Budapest to Canberra
By Graham Cooke
– Canberra Times November 21, 1999
Budapest 1984: the small
hours of a freezing December night, but Steve Doszpot is out of
bed and at the window. A sound has torn him from sleep, a sound
buried deep in his past which will be with him for the rest of his
life.
“It’s just a train,”
he says, but in his mind he has travelled back more than 28 years
– to a few October days in this same city which, as a seven year
old, he could scarcely comprehend except to know that strange and
dramatic events were taking place. Hungary was in revolt against
communism.
A few days of euphoria
were ended by Soviet tanks sent in to crush the uprising. For Doszpot
it was the beginning of a long journey that would eventually lead
to Canberra.
“My Father had originally
been interned around the time I was born, in 1948, because he was
a Catholic youth leader,” he said. “I think my parents both realised
he would be targeted again after the revolution. He didn’t want
to leave, but in the end he did what he believed was right for himself
and his family.
 Escape
was not easy. The border with Austria was quickly closed, but there
were still opportunities of getting into Yugoslavia. A few days
after Christmas, Doszpot his father, Stephen, mother Anna, and two
younger siblings 4 year old Anna and 18 month old Gus, and grandmother
Barbara, set out across the snow.
“We travelled by sleigh
until we approached the border, then we had to walk,” he says. “It
was bitterly cold, the snow was drifting and we could not carry
anything. We were taking a terrible risk. I have no doubt that had
we been caught my father would have been executed.”
They made it intoYugoslavia,
which, while being a communist state, was not part of the Soviet
sphere of influence. After seven months in several refugee camps,
the decision was made to come to Australia.
The family settled in
Leichhardt where two more children, William and Mary were born.
It was the era of the Beatles, Hair, Make Love Not War, tolerance,
freedom and happiness, Doszpot recalls.
Considering what followed,
his association with soccer came late. At 16 he began playing for
Apia Leichhardt, and then for one of the leading soccer clubs in
the country, St George Budapest.
“There were nine internationals
in the first team, and we used to train with them,” he says. “I
remember I launched a lucky and successful tackle on one of them,
Manfred Schaffer, who went on to represent Australia in the 1974
World Cup. I don’t think he ever forgave me for it.”
Meanwhile, he was beginning
a working career as a salesman, and was posted to Canberra.
“ I didn’t want to go
at first, but when my wife, Maureen, and I moved here in 1974 we
fell in love with the place,” he says.
Life in Canberra was
full and busy. He was a founding-director of the first ACT entry
in the National Soccer League, Canberra City, and continued a life
long flirtation with sports journalism with reports for 2CC. In
1989 he branched out on his own, founding, Canberra Strategic Marketing,
and a sports consultancy with soccer coach Tom Sermanni.
Soccer is currently playing
the dominant role in his life. He is president of Soccer Canberra,
deputy chairman of the Canberra Cosmos National Soccer League club
and is event director for the section of the Olympic football tournament
which will take place in the ACT in September 2000.
In 1997 Doszpot returned
again to Hungary. He found a country free at last of the shackles
of communism. Hungarians were learning to live again, and the sweet
taste of freedom was on everyone’s lips.
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