Tatiana Biskupičová, Zdeno Chára’s wife, in her own words

Tatiana Biskupičová has been married to Zdeno Chára since 2007 and ran the family home through most of his 24 seasons in the NHL. When the former Boston Bruins captain retired in 2022, he offered to do more around the house.

“I wanted to help at home, but my wife brushed me off straight away,” Chára told a business conference in Bratislava this June. “There’s no need, she said. We’ve been without you all this time and managed fine.”

He was smiling as he told it, the Slovak sports daily Denník Šport reported. It was his example of how “completely lost” he felt once hockey stopped planning his days.

Biskupičová comes from Trenčín, Chára’s home town, and they met as secondary-school students. She followed him to North America after university and later worked at a bank in Ottawa. The couple live in Boston with their daughter, Elliz, 17, and 10-year-old twins, Ben and Zack.

How Tatiana and Zdeno met

Two months after Boston won the 2011 Stanley Cup, she gave a long interview to the Slovak magazine Šarm. “We met in a museum during secondary school,” she said. Her class and his were on the same excursion. “I noticed him straight away because he was very tall, so I asked him how tall he was.”

A year later they ran into each other by chance, and she recognised him by his height. He went on to reach 6ft 9in (2.06m), the tallest player in NHL history. Her own height has never been published.

After Chára left for junior hockey in Canada in 1996, “at first we only wrote to each other,” she said.

A year in New York with no work permit

Once she had finished her economics degree in Bratislava, she joined him in New York, a year before the Islanders traded him to Ottawa. “I supported him as much as I could, although it was very hard for me.”

Back in Slovakia she had worked alongside her studies and was always busy. In New York she had no work permit, knew almost nobody and spent whole days alone at home, because Chára was always travelling. “Every day I cooked, baked, cleaned and went running twice a day.”

She thought about going home, but knew a job in Slovakia would no longer be easy to find, and she tried to look at it from his side as well.

“I always tried to look at it this way: right now the two of us are sad, but if I leave, how sad will Zdenko be on his own?”

So she planned her days around his. When he was home, she said, “I did absolutely nothing except spend time with him, so that when he left again I’d have an awful lot to do”.

Work and study in Ottawa

The trade to the Ottawa Senators in June 2001 gave her hope, because Canada’s rules on work permits differ from those in the US. She did not work in the first season. In the second she found a job tutoring maths at a secondary school and started studying for a Canadian equivalent of her Slovak degree, and later that season her work permit came through. “Then it was a different story.”

She finished those economics studies and worked at a bank in Ottawa, the Slovak daily SME reported when the couple married. A 2019 profile on the US site Heavy named the bank as TD Bank and her job as financial planner, the title that still appears beside her name in search results.

Settling in Boston

The move to Boston in 2006 was hard at first. Asked in NESN’s 2020 documentary Chara at 1,000 whether they had ever felt they had made a mistake, she replied: “Oh, yes, that first year was difficult.”

They married on 14 July 2007 in Nemšová, near Trenčín. Elliz, born in Boston on 27 April 2009, is named after a character in an old English film. At home the couple spoke only Slovak with her and left English to nursery and school. On trips back to Slovakia, Biskupičová said, Elliz “comes completely alive” because she understands everyone.

Game 7 in Vancouver

For the deciding game of the 2011 Stanley Cup Final in Vancouver on 15 June, the Bruins offered players’ families a private plane, and the people on it, she said, were the only Boston fans in the arena. When Boston scored first, “it went so quiet you could hear a fly”. The wives jumped out of their seats, caught the looks from the home fans and sat back down.

In that Final, she said, the team that scored first had won every game. So at the first intermission the wives met in a corridor and agreed to repeat the first period exactly:

• anyone who had been to the toilet before the game had to go again
• anyone who had not been had to hold on until the end
• anyone who had been drinking had to stick to the same drink
• anyone who had not eaten was not allowed to start

Boston won 4-0. “When I saw him, I had no words.” On the ice he hugged her and said: “Tak, zlatko, máme to” (Well, darling, we’ve got it).

Back in Boston, about half an hour after she got home, the door opened and Chára walked in with the Cup, set it on the living-room table and said: “Tak, zlatko, máme ho doma” (Well, darling, we’ve got it home).

That July, in Slovakia, he ate rice pudding out of the Cup. She told Šarm it was his favourite dish and that she made it only to a recipe from Vierka, a friend in Ottawa.

Three children and two seasons apart

Ben and Zack were born on 6 March 2016. In December 2020 Chára left the Bruins for the Washington Capitals, and his wife and children stayed in Boston. NHL.com reported after that season that living apart from them had been the hardest part for him.

He played one last season, with the New York Islanders, and retired in September 2022. “The past two years I’ve been away constantly. It was weighing on me way too much.”

“It’s a 24/7 job,” he said of raising their three children, as CBS Boston reported. It was not easy, he added, “when your husband is away playing games, at practices or doing summer workouts, to drive kids to different activities, making sure everything for school is done, or cooking your amazing meals”.

Eleven years earlier, with Chára newly signed to a seven-year contract, she had told Šarm that Elliz would be nine when it ended and settled in a school system that is hard to leave. “Time will tell where we’ll live,” she said. At his retirement news conference, Chára gave his answer: “My family and I are proud to call Boston our home.”

Since he retired

Chára has found other things to fill his days. He has taken a Harvard programme on the business of sports, media and entertainment, and since September 2025 he has worked for the Bruins as a hockey operations adviser and mentor.

Near the end of his Hockey Hall of Fame speech in Toronto on 10 November 2025, after his parents and sister, he thanked his wife, who was in the audience with their children. She had let him chase his career, he said, “for so many years while I selfishly rested before the next workout, next game or after long, long travels”.

“You were the one doing everything at home. You are the reason I’m standing here tonight. This honour is more yours than mine. I was the one physically playing the sport I love, but you were the heart and soul of our family, the one who kept everything moving forward.”

Two months later, on 15 January 2026, the Bruins retired his No. 33. Chára motioned for his family to pull the ropes and stood back to watch. “I think that’s the biggest award for me, to see my children, my family doing it instead of me,” he said, according to NHL.com.

Trenčín, the town they both come from, hosted his farewell on 21 August 2026, a charity game billed as Zee’s Final Shift. Ben and Zack joined him on the ice. Before it started, the Slovak news agency TASR reported, he honoured his mother, his wife, his daughter and his sister on the ice.

Tatiana Biskupičová fact file

Quotes from Slovak sources are our translations.