Andrzej Fonfara

With his brothers Andrzej Fonfara played street hockey in Katowice where they made and repaired their own equipment. Fonfara began his ice hockey career when he was 13-years-old and went on to be one of the best players ever to come from Poland. With GKS Katowice he won four Polish Championships (1962, 1965, 1968, 1970), in addition to finishing as a runner-up twice (1967, 1969). In 1965 and 1968 he was both the player of the year and the league’s top scorer. During his domestic career he played in 567 matches and scored 402 goals.

During the 1960s Fonfara was a mainstay in the Polish national team, playing in 102 games where he scored 54 goals. From 1959 to 1969 he competed in seven editions of the World Cup and played in eight matches at the 1964 Innsbruck Olympics. By 1976 he had retired and went to work as manager of a warehouse. He returned to the sport in 1986 to coach junior hockey in addition to working at Górnik Katowice. In 2018 he was amongst the first set of inductees into the GKS Katowice Hall of Fame.