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Basketball binds former Yugoslavia
TREVISO, Italy -- Funny how closely Yugoslav political history and basketball annals in that snakebit part of the world track each other. The Nazis attacked Belgrade on April 6, 1941. Bosna Sarajevo won Yugoslavia's first European club championship on April 6, 1979. The first shots in the war in Bosnia were fired on -- you guessed it -- April 6, 1992. So why wouldn't we reach one more milepost for hoops in the Balkans on another day marinated in historical meaning? Let the record reflect that date as June 28. Last Thursday was the day Slobodan Milosevic was spirited off to the Hague hoosegow. It was the 612th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo Polje that the Serb strongman exploited in his rise to power. It was the 87th anniversary of the Austrian archduke's assassination in Sarajevo that touched off World War I. And it was the eve of the arrival of 50 kids, ages 12 to 14, drawn equally from the five successor states of the former Yugoslavia, who gathered here for Basketball Without Borders, a collaborative effort of the United Nations, the NBA and FIBA. The plan: Take the kids, assign them to teams regardless of nationality, and have them bunk in with their new mates. Nine pros from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Slovenia and the Serbian and Montenegrin leftovers of Yugoslavia came, too -- to teach the game, yes, but also to teach lessons in leadership and tolerance and how to stand up to peer pressure. Among the counselor-coaches were Vlade Divac of the Sacramento Kings and Toni Kukoc of the Atlanta Hawks, two men who have had bouts with peer pressure that no one should have to endure. Together, Divac, a Serb, and Kukoc, a Croat, had won for a united Yugoslavia a world junior title in 1987, a world senior crown in 1990, and -- in their last stand together, just as months of tensions were to erupt in a shooting war -- the European championship that was to be their shared country's last hoops honor. Some 200,000 people died in the civil wars of the intervening decade; another three million lost their homes. International courts of justice are still trying to sort out exactly what happened, and peacekeepers are on the ground to ensure that nothing like it ever occurs again. A typical Croat needs no ruling from the Hague to hold a grudge against a Serb, and most Serbs feel the same way about their former countrymen. Not so long ago, if they had wanted to maintain their friendship, neither Divac nor Kukoc could do so publicly without being held accountable back home. In 1996 it was all so fresh that Kukoc ruled out ever again playing basketball with the Serbs who had once been his friends and teammates. "Too much has happened," Kukoc told me back then. "Too many people have been killed." Cut to last Saturday morning. When Kim Bohuny of the NBA took roll in the breakfast room at the players' hotel, she came up one short. The notoriously late-sleeping Divac was missing. She dispatched Los Angeles Clippers assistant coach Igor Kokoskov, who was a volunteer here, to rouse him. Kukoc, who still knows Divac as well as any option in Phil Jackson's triangle offense, watched the scene with bemusement. "Nothing's changed," he said. "I know what his excuse will be. 'I didn't hear the phone ring.' Or, 'No one knocked on my door.' It's typical Vlade -- the guy I remember from 10 years ago when we were roommates." To Kukoc, Divac was still recognizably Divac. And to Divac, Damjan, a 14-year-old from Zagreb, was just a kid, not a Croatian kid -- and last weekend Divac was his coach, playfully palming his head during a drill. Even as religion, ethnic background and alphabets divided the denizens of the old Yugoslavia, basketball has always bound them together. During breaks in the negotiations that led to the Dayton Accords, at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, the delegates would adjourn to Packy's, the base's sports bar. There the Croatian representatives convened when Kukoc's Chicago Bulls were playing, and the Serbs did the same when Divac and his Los Angeles Lakers were on the satellite. Last weekend's event so impressed U.N. secretary general Kofi Annan's special advisor on sport for development and peace, former Swiss president Adolf Ogi, that the United Nations may again team up with the NBA and FIBA. Next season the NBA is likely to count two Greeks and two Turks on its rosters, and Greece and Turkey are two more longtime antagonists whose citizens share a basketball jones. To be sure, the weekend revealed that there's still work to be done. Asked where he was from, one Basketball Without Borders camper said "Republika Srpska" and another offered up "Sarajevo." When both say "Bosnia and Herzegovina," we'll know the lessons taught here will have taken. But in the camp final on Monday, moments after the Pacers team of real-life Indiana forward Zan Tabak beat the Divac-coached Kings, two Bosnian guards on the victorious side -- Milan, a Serb from Banja Luka, and Nenad, a Muslim from Zenica -- wrapped each other in an uncontrived, unforced hug. All eyes are on the U.N. court in Holland, where the world is trying to come to terms with the Balkans' past. But it was another U.N. court that last weekend tried to set right that region's future course. All props to Divac and Kukoc, once estranged by circumstances far beyond their control, for setting so good an example by coming here. Sports Illustrated senior writer Alexander Wolff is author of Big Game, Small World: A Basketball Adventure, which will be published in January 2002 by Warner Books. Send comments to thehooplife@aol.com.
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