At the beginning of the nineties, European players in the NBA basketball championship were still rare, viewed with skepticism and surrounded by prejudices: they are too “soft”, tender, it was said, they defend little and come from a lesser, less athletic and spectacular basketball . Thirty years later, non-US players in the NBA are over 20 percent of the total: there are 58 Europeans alone, several teams are built around them and two in particular — Nikola Jokic and Giannis Antetokounmpo — have been elected best players in the league four times in the past five years.
It was one player in particular who marked a turning point for the Europeans in the US basketball league. Drazen Petrovic, a Croatian from Šibenik, was signed by the Portland Trail Blazers in 1984 but remained for a few more years to play in Europe. In 1989 he arrived in the NBA together with another player of the last and very strong Yugoslav national team, the Serbian Vlade Divac. Unlike Divac, who at the Lakers quickly earned a place on the team alongside Magic Johnson, Petrovic took time to establish himself and he didn’t do it with his first team, but with the second, the New Jersey Nets, starting 1990.
Although late, in the seasons in New Jersey Petrovic led the Nets to the playoffs, averaged over 20 points per season and had famous comparisons on the pitch with the best players of the time, including Reggie Miller and Michael Jordan, who still remember him today for his great competitiveness: Miller even describes him as “his nemesis”, that is, the worst opponent ever met. He became the second non-American player to be included in the best season quintets of the championship, and the first European to become a true idol for the fans, who wore his shirts and bought his action figure.
At the age of 29, he had his best season in the NBA, but there wasn’t another to be seen. Just when he was at the peak of his career, and close to who knows how many other goals, he died in a car accident while returning from a Croatian national team match. He died without realizing it: he was sleeping when, at 5 in the morning on June 7, 1993, the car in which he was traveling hit a truck at high speed near Ingolstadt, in Bavaria.
(Ken Levine/Getty Images)
Petrovic had had a particular story. He had grown up in the shadow of his older brother Aleksandar — known to everyone as “Aza” — who initially seemed like the true champion in the family and who was already known throughout the country as a fifteen-year-old for how he played basketball. Petrovic, in addition to being five years younger, was born with a hip deformity that caused him to walk irregularly and not at all athletic. But he was obsessed with basketball. In Šibenik, as the younger brother of the famous Aza, he had the keys to the gym and every day he went there to shoot hoops: first at 6 in the morning, and after school until the evening, preferably alone.
«He was ugly to see as a child. He didn’t have a shot: they called him “stone man”, because he threw the so-called bricks into baskets. But he focused his whole life on basketball. At ten, twelve years old he was already training 7-8 hours a day, every single day. He was a monomaniac person, catatonic in a certain sense: he never talked about anything else, only about basketball »Sergio Tavcar, the Tele Capodistria commentator from Trieste who was able to follow him from the early years of his career, recalled several times.
With that way of training he developed unique characteristics, as a pure individualist, but who still managed to fit within a team. On the pitch he knew how to move as he wanted, he had total control of the ball, quick and highly precise shooting mechanisms, even from distance, and he knew how to provide assists to his teammates, often in an acrobatic and spectacular way. In addition to his obsession with basketball, the Croatian school also greatly influenced his style, which still today does not provide for a real role specialization, but teaches everyone to play in every position.
Petrovic began to obtain his first important victories with the Yugoslav national team, where he formed the strongest and most successful group in the sporting history of the country. Together with Divac, and other younger ones such as Dino Radja and Toni Kukoc, he won two European Championships, a World Championship and two Olympic medals, one silver and one bronze. Yugoslavia at the time was also the team that put the United States in the most difficulty, and precisely those difficulties contributed to the formation of the so-called American “Dream Team” for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics.
In 1984 Petrovic moved to Zagreb to play for Cibona, where with his brother Aza he formed one of the strongest couples in the history of local, if not European, basketball. He averaged over 40 points per game and many still remember when he scored 112 at Olimpija Ljubljana in the Yugoslav league. In Zagreb he won among other things two European Cups and from there he became famous throughout European basketball.
With the four million dollars with which Real Madrid signed him in 1988 he became to all intents and purposes the most paid and admired player in Europe, as well as the first to drive a Porsche in Croatia, at the time still part of Yugoslavia. But he only stayed in Madrid for a year, because after the European Championships he won at home in 1989, he decided to try to establish himself in the NBA as well, something a European player had never achieved until then.
In Portland, however, it didn’t start well, not so much for the differences between local and European basketball. The coach at the time didn’t take him much into consideration and found himself in the team with five players in the same role as him, all already experienced and of the highest level, such as Danny Ainge and Clyde Drexler. He didn’t like Portland, either, and for two years he ceased to be the Petrovic he had known before.
In 1990, however, he was traded to the New Jersey Nets. There he began to play more and over time he became a permanent starter. He became one of the best shooters he scored 40 points against the Cleveland Cavaliers in the first round of the 1993 playoffs, setting the individual playoff scoring record in Nets history.
The Nets were then eliminated by Cleveland in that round, and so Petrovic returned to Europe to play a Euro qualifying match against Poland. Croatia was still the team that a year earlier had introduced the world to a hitherto unknown country, which had recently become independent from Yugoslavia, reaching the final of the Olympic tournament against the US Dream Team. Poland were a very close opponent even without Petrovic, but he was the captain and he wanted to be there.
Croatia won that game, which was played in Wroclaw, and then the team went to Frankfurt to fly back to Zagreb. Petrovic, however, decided to return to the car with his girlfriend at the time and a friend of the latter. Arrived near Monaco, the driving girlfriend did not react in time to a slowdown that she found herself in front of her immediately after a bump and ended up on a truck at high speed. Petrovic was asleep, his seat belts weren’t fastened and he didn’t notice anything. They tried to revive him on the spot but the wounds were too serious and he died shortly thereafter.
The crash site near Ingolstadt
At the news of his death, his teammates, the many fans and an entire country were completely shocked. Her mother, Biserka, attempted to commit suicide by jumping from the balcony of the house as soon as she learned about it, but she was stopped just in time.
More than 100,000 people attended the funeral in Zagreb, including his historic teammates, but not Divac. Although the latter had been one of his closest friends, the relationship between the two was completely severed due to the war between the Serbs and the Croats. After the victory of the World Cup in Argentina in 1990, in fact, Divac had been seen snatching a Croatian flag from a fan who took to the field. That episode made him disliked by the Croatians and led to the break with Petrovic, as Divac himself recounted in a famous ESPN documentary, Once Brothers.
From the days after Petrovic’s death, family and friends remember one particular episode. While his mother and brother were visiting his grave at the Mirogoj cemetery in Zagreb, an old man who was holding his nephew’s hand approached and said to his mother, “Don’t be sad. You gave him life, but he doesn’t belong only to you, he belongs to everyone.’
Since Petrovic and Divac’s first seasons in the NBA, many other Europeans have managed to establish themselves in the league, to the point of making it a normality. For example, Croatian Toni Kukoc became a member of Michael Jordan’s famous Chicago Bulls, with whom he won three NBA titles. And in 1998 Dirk Nowitzki arrived from Germany, who for results and longevity is considered the best European in the history of the championship. He played in Dallas for twenty-one years, winning the 2011 title as a protagonist. These days another European, Slav like Petrovic, is close to a similar goal. Nikola Jokic, elected MVP twice, is fighting for the title with the Denver Nuggets, who had never even made it to the Finals before him.
– Read also: The match that heralded war in Yugoslavia
2023-06-07 09:29:42
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