The Yugos Are Coming

The Yugoslavs beat everyone in Ljubljana, winning their first world championship. The win might not have meant much in the U.S., where basketball authorities went through the old we-didn't-send-our-best-team-and-the-NBA-would-kill-these-guys routine, but in Yugoslavia it was a fair approximation of the U.S. Olympic hockey team's deeds in Lake Placid in 1980. Basketball became a growth sport.

"There were celebrations in the streets, people honking their horns," Vlada Stankovic, a former sportswriter for the national daily Borba, says. "The next day, there were hoops hanging from poles and buildings everywhere. Not the regulation hoops, but—how do you say?—wastebaskets. Anything round. People cut out the bottoms and hung the hoops. People wanted to play basketball."

The game fits the Yugoslav character. That is a common explanation of its popularity. What are the sports in which Yugoslavia succeeds most? Water polo. Team handball. Basketball. Team games. The game fits the Yugoslav size. Another explanation. Basketball is a game for tall people. (Stop the presses! We might have found something here!) Yugoslavs are a tall people, especially the ones who live along the Dalmatian coast, where the weather is warm and basketball can be played outdoors for most of the year. The game also features creativity and improvisation—more Yugoslav qualities.

"You would look at our early teams and see only offense," Rade Petrovic says. "We love offense. Run and shoot. Do you know how guards come down the floor and hold up four fingers to indicate a play that is going to be run? No Yugoslavian guard held up four fingers. There was no number four play. Run and shoot."

Even the lack of money was a curious asset for a Communist country that was able only to toy with the ideas of capitalism for a long time. While the big club teams in other European countries were able to recruit the allotted two Americans per season and convince a couple more American-born players to change citizenship, the Yugoslavs had no money to do this. They played their own players. They developed their own players.

"You bring in the Americans and your job is to pass to the Americans," one coach says. "If you are lucky, you can wait around for a rebound and get a shot. What good is that? If you have no Americans, then you take your own shots."

The result has been a highly developed feeder system for national talent. If American college recruiters are beginning to look as far away as junior high schools for future players, they are only doing what the Yugoslavs have been doing for a while. Working through the club system of European basketball, a kid can begin playing with Partizan or Red Star or any of the other clubs as a nine-year-old and move his way through the age-group teams until he reaches the varsity as an adult. The good player—the tall player, particularly—will be treated as a resource. He can be playing, or even starting, at the top level as young as 17 or 18.

"We measure our kids every two or three months," Novic Cicic says while coaching an 11-year-old Partizan all-star team at nine o'clock on a Tuesday night. "We work with them very hard on technique. We want them to learn those fundamentals early."

His practice, in a Belgrade elementary school gym, is an illustration. The 11-year-olds shoot layups with either hand, practice crossover dribbles and run through the same drills that would be found at most U.S. colleges. And here the guards hold up four fingers. Cicic is a former Partizan player and has played all over the world. This is a new generation of coaching sophistication.

The good players, even this young, can play 100 organized games a year. "People think we should be upset about the NBA taking our players," Rade Petrovic says. "We are not. For us, the NBA is not a danger. For each player who leaves there will be 5,000 with the ball in a gym somewhere, working harder, saying, I will play in the NBA."