The Yugos Are Coming

"If you show promise, they invest in you a lot," Zoran Jovanovic, the 7-foot center on the Red Star varsity, says. "It isn't like the attitude in the States, where they know that 10 players like you will be coming along every year. They'll work with you here."

Jovanovic, 25, spent three years in the U.S. with Dale Brown at LSU. A knee injury before his sophomore season and a car accident before his junior year stifled his college career, but he still was able to develop impressions of American basketball. He arrived in Baton Rouge beset by insecurities. He didn't know how good he was. His main exposure to the U.S. game had been highlight films on television. Everyone was slamming, jamming, doing spectacular move after spectacular move. How could he compete with that? He returned home feeling that he could.

"You watch the highlight films and you think that every move is going to be a highlight," he says. "You get there, though, and you realize there are only two or three highlights in any one game. Your respect goes a different way. You realize how fundamentally good the players are, especially the black players. You surprise them, though. They give you credit for nothing. Nobody in the States gives the rest of the world credit for anything in basketball. You surprise them."

Jovanovic says he makes a pleasant day-to-day living with Red Star. He does not make enough money to save for the future, but then again, in this inflation-ravaged country, not that many people do. The key to Yugoslav contracts is perks. Do all right and you'll have a free one-bedroom apartment. Do better and you'll have a three-bedroom apartment. How well you drive to the basket sometimes determines how well you drive home to the apartment. Jovanovic drives all right both ways. He has no complaints.

"This is a good game for us to play in Yugoslavia," he says. "We're a tall people. We're blessed for basketball."

The tourist finishes his trip in Zadar, a fishing town of 30,000 people on the coast. Zadar has an old 8,000-seat gym, a team in the first division and a reputation as the Town of Basketball. Zadar also has Kresimir Cosic.

He is a large man with a slight facial resemblance to Andre the Giant, the professional wrestler. In the history of Yugoslav basketball, he is an important figure. He was the center and star on the national team that won the world title in 1970. He was the first prominent Yugoslav player to go to the States to play, cursing out referees in Serbo-Croatian and firing hook shots from every angle for Brigham Young between 1969 and 1973. He was, in many ways, the start of it all.

"I went to Brigham Young, I didn't know two words of English," he says. "I was not worried. Why worry? I am from an area where a man tells his wife he is going out for a pack of matches and doesn't return from Argentina till 40 years later with a new wife and two children. I was not afraid to travel."

He started playing when there was no gymnasium in the town. He was in a little seafood restaurant when a group of local sportsmen decided, on the spur of the moment, that a gymnasium must be built. Yes, we will build a gym. We will start tomorrow. How do we build a gym? Who knows? Nobody had ever built a gym. Plans were drawn up on the restaurant table. Just like that. Construction was begun in the morning. He was playing in the gym—there is a slight problem with pillars obscuring some of the sight lines around the court because of the impromptu architectural drawings—by the beginning of the next season.

Everything was learned from the beginning. It was as if the light bulb were being reinvented. There were not many films and textbooks from the U.S. Everything was an experiment.