A few kilometers away from the Belgrade Arena where Olimpia will face Partizan today for the fifteenth time in their history, in front of 20,000 spectators, stands a much smaller sports hall but with a much more important name: Hala Radivoj Korac. The sports hall which, compared to the main arena of the Serbian capital, stands on the opposite side of the Sava river hosts the matches of a historic club, OKK Belgrade. Boris Stankovic and Asa Nikolic played and coached at OKK, so the club’s roots coincide with those of basketball in the former Yugoslavia. Of that team Korac was the reference player between the end of the 50s and the 60s together with Trajko Rajkovic who would wear the shirts of Livorno and Venezia in Italy (Bogdan Tanjevic also played as a very young man in the OKK together with Korac and Rajkovic). Rajkovic won a top scorer in Italy immediately before being replaced by Radivoj Korac. Both, as happened in those days, arrived in Italy (Korac played in Padua but before that he had spent a year in Liège in Belgium) around the age of 30. They had previously led OKK to four Slavic titles. Korac won six medals with the national team including the 1968 Olympic silver. Shortly afterwards he lost his life in a car accident. In 1979 in Ljubljana, at the age of 33, Rajkovic also passed away due to a heart attack.
Having died macabrely at a very young age in circumstances similar to those in which Drazen Petrovic lost his life in 1993, Korac has become a sort of icon of Serbian basketball, a myth, but it’s not just the James Dean effect. Korac was truly an incredible player, a 1.95m power forward who won the title of top scorer seven times in Yugoslavia. He still holds the record for points in an international cup match with 99 points, in 1964, when OKK buried Alvik Stockholm under 98 points in the European Cup on the way to the semi-final, which they lost with Real Madrid. For this reason, when he arrived in Padua he was called “Mister 99 Points”. About ten years ago they made a film in Serbia to tell its myth, the title was “More than a Game”. What makes this story even more fascinating is the fact that Radivoj Korac played in Belgrade but is originally from Sombor, the same place where three-time NBA MVP Nikola Jokic comes from.
Due to its history and its basketball culture, Belgrade is inevitably full of stories that characterize it. The old Pionir, the first indoor facility in the city, is today named after Professor Asa Nikolic who coached in Padua and then in Varese which he led in the three consecutive play-offs against Olimpia between 1971 and 1973. Then Nikolic was inaugurated the coaching debut of the then 31-year-old Zeljko Obradovic. It happened in the 1991/92 season which ended with Partizan’s European title. At the Final Four in Istanbul, the Bianconeri from Belgrade beat Olimpia then led by Mike D’Antoni. It’s easy to see how the stories of great clubs and great characters intertwine with each other.
Olimpia trained in the Mega Basket gym, a company that in the last ten has produced NBA players as much as and more than one of the highest level American colleges, such as Duke, Kansas or Kentucky, including Nikola Jokic. At the entrance there ‘is a “Draft Wall” celebrating all of the club’s selected players. Along one of the short sides there are blow-ups of the club’s NBA players including Clippers center Ivica Zubac and Miami Heat forward Nikola Jovic. The other side is dedicated to Dejan Milojevic, the former player who, having become a coach, lost his life at the beginning of the year while working for the Golden State Warriors due to a heart attack.
