DEJAN BODIROGA - 101 Greats of European Basketball

Dejan
Bodiroga
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‘White Magic’
In October of 1989, in the first issue of ‘Kos’ (“Basket”)
magazine in the former Yugoslavia, we published the
rosters of all the teams that played the next-to-last
Yugoslav League championship, in a country which
that summer had won its fourth EuroBasket title in
Zagreb. In KK Zadar, you could find names like Darko
Pahlic, Petar Popovic (father of Marko), Stipe Sarlija,
Aleksandar Trifunovic, Arijan Komazec, Ivica Obad,
Sven Usic... and the coach was Slavko Trninic.
Apart from the players with a jersey number, on the
“new arrivals” column for that team, the name of Dejan
Bodiroga (born March 2, 1973) appeared. In parentheses,
you found the following – (16, 197) – his age and his height.
Another piece of info there indicated that he was coming
from Servo Mihalj of Zrenjanin. That was probably the first
time I ever heard – or better, read – the Bodiroga name,
which is pretty rare in the former Yugoslavia. I had no
idea how a kid from Zrenjanin, 70 kilometers away from
Belgrade, ended up in Zadar on the Dalmatian coast of
Croatia, and not in Belgrade or Novi Sad, the two big cities
close to his hometown. One or two years later, when everybody
already talked about a great talent called Dejan
Bodiroga, we found out that the great Kresimir Cosic, then
Zadar’s sports director, had seen Bodiroga in a cadets
competition and saw right away that he would be a great
talent. He went to Klek, a town next to Zrenjanin, where
the Bodiroga family – which had Herzegovinian origins,
an important detail which will be explained below – lived.
Cosic talked to his parents and, thanks to his authority
as the great player and beloved person that he was, convinced
them to allow Dejan to sign for Zadar.
From Klek to glory
The town of Klek has some 3,000 inhabitants, most
of them Serbians of Herzegovinian origins who arrived
from the Vojvodina region in a massive colonization after
World War II. The origin of the family was from a town
with the same name, Bodiroga, close to Trebinje, today
in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Klek is probably the most famous
town in Serbia and the former Yugoslavia because
it produced 13 international players in several sports,
especially volleyball, who together with 12 more coming
from Zrenjanin who competed in Olympic Games, turned
this land into an eternal source of great sportsmen. For
instance, the brothers Vladimir and Nikola Grbic, Olympic
champs in Sydney 2000 with the Yugoslav volleyball
team, are neighbors of the Bodiroga family. Their father,
Ceda Grbic, won the first medal (bronze) for Yugoslavia
in the European championship of 1975 in Belgrade.
“I read some reports from the Italian press in that
tournament and in one article I found a comparison
that seemed way out of line: someone wrote that this
Yugoslav kid, Dejan Bodiroga, was the ‘white Magic
Johnson’,” coach Bogdan Tanjevic said. “I didn’t believe
that but, curious as I am, in the preseason I took the
chance to visit a tournament close to Trieste, where I
used to live, to go see Zadar. The big star of the team
was Komazec, but I soon noticed that the boss of that
team was the young kid, Dejan Bodiroga.”
Tanjevic would become, after Cosic, the most important
person in the career of Dejan Bodiroga. In the
1990-91 season, the last full one of the former Yugoslavia,
Bodiroga was already a protagonist on the first
team of Zadar. However, political issues influenced his
career. Even though Bodiroga had no personal issues in
Zadar, as a Serbian in Croatia on the brink of a horrible
war, staying was not an option. Cosic, his protector and
101 greats of european basketball
Dejan Bodiroga
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Vladimir Stankovic
mentor, together with Dejan’s elder brother, Zeljko, and
Nedeljko Ostarcevic – a former Zadar player already
living in the United States – went to Trieste to try to
convince Bogdan Tanjevic to sign Dejan.
“They put a lot of pressure on me, but I was a bit skeptical
because regulations only allowed for two foreigners
then, and normally you would sign Americans,” Tanjevic
recalled. “I asked, ‘How can I sign an 18-year-old kid as a
foreigner?’ Then, my good friend Cosic told me, ‘Don’t be
a Bosnian fool. Sign him and you won’t ever regret it.’ But
there was an added problem, his documentation. Dejan
was under contract and Zadar would not release him. Despite
all that, I decided to sign him. He spent one season
practicing with Stefanel Trieste without playing, but after
just two practices I realized what a diamond I had.”
Three finals lost
The debut of “White Magic,” a player standing 2.05
meters tall but with the ability to play all five positions, was
finally ready at the start of the 1992-93 season. Tanjevic
believes that of his four years in Italy, Bodiroga played his
best that first season. “He was an unbelievably mature
player for his age. He was a very generous man, always
worried about the team. He had no selfishness in him. I
remember he never took his first shot before minute 7 of
any game, because first he wanted to see how the team
was doing. Against Reggio Calabria, with a great Michael
Young, who would later lead Limoges to the EuroLeague
title, Bodiroga scored 51 points. Against the veteran but
still great player Michael Ray Richardson, he scored 38
points on 10 of 10 field goals. He was a very mature player,
versatile, who could score, pass, pull rebounds, guard...
It was a privilege to have him on my team.”
In the next three seasons in Trieste, Bodiroga lost three
Korac Cup finals. First in 1994 against PAOK Thessaloniki,
second against ALBA Berlin in 1995 and third against Efes
Pilsen in 1996. The reward arrived at the end of the 1995-
96 season with the triumph of Stefanel, which had moved
from Trieste to Milan, in the Italian League and Italian Cup.
The double crown was a prize for four years of hard work,
but it also marked a moment for change.
Bodiroga was almost guaranteed to be in the plans
of Yugoslav national team head coach Dusan Ivkovic for
the Barcelona 1992 Olympics. However, international
sanctions didn’t allow the team to take part in those
games. He would have to wait for three years for his official
debut on the national team. And he did it in style:
a gold medal at the 1995 EuroBasket in Athens with
12 points and 5 rebounds on average. The following
year, at the Atlanta Olympics, he won the silver medal
and confirmed to me there that the rumor was true: he
would join Real Madrid, coached by Zeljko Obradovic.
Even though he played really well and was chosen
MVP of the Spanish League in the 1997-98 season, the
results of the team those two years were rather poor.
There was, however, a Saporta Cup win, 78-64 against
Mash Verona in Nicosia, Cyprus, with 19 points by Alberto
Herreros and 17 points plus 9 rebounds from Bodiroga.
It was his first European trophy at the club level.
Cousin of Aca and Drazen Petrovic
On the eve of a game between Caja San Fernando
and Real Madrid, I published a story in the Spanish
newspaper El Mundo Deportivo that surprised many
people. Serbian Dejan Bodiroga and Croatian Aleksandar
Petrovic, then the coach at Caja San Fernando, were
close cousins. Of course, Aleksandar is the brother of
the late Drazen Petrovic, an icon of European basketball
history, which made Bodiroga a cousin of an all-time
great. The genealogical tree didn’t leave any doubts: De-
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jan’s grandmother, Gospava, was a Petrovic when single
and the grandfather of Aca and Drazen was her brother
in a big family. Jole, the father of Aca and Drazen, was a
policeman in the former Yugoslavia who was assigned
to Sibenik, where he met his future wife, Biserka, while
Vaso Bodiroga, Dejan’s father, moved to Vojvodina. It
was a curious story of two cousins, Drazen and Dejan,
both superstars who played in Real Madrid. While in Real
Madrid, Bodiroga won his second straight gold medal,
at the 1997 EuroBasket in Barcelona. The following year,
in the Athens World Cup, Yugoslavia was champion and
he was chosen MVP at 25 years old. His national coach
in Atlanta, Barcelona and Athens was Zeljko Obradovic,
who was his coach at Real Madrid, as well. After two years
with Benetton Treviso, Obradovic joined Panathinaikos
Athens in the summer of 1999. The first thing he asked
was to sign Dejan Bodiroga. Before coming together
again at Panathinaikos, they also coincided at the Sydney
Olympics, where Yugoslavia fell in the quarterfinals
to Canada, led by a great Steve Nash.
A three-time European champion
Together again, Obradovic and Bodiroga started the
golden decade of Panathinaikos. The 2000 Final Four
was played in Thessaloniki and Panathinaikos made it
there without problems. In the semis, it defeated Efes
81-71 with 22 points by Bodiroga. In the title game, the
victim was Maccabi Tel Aviv by 73-67, with great games
by Zeljko Rebraca (20 points, 8 boards), Oded Kattash (17
points) and Bodiroga (9 points, 4 rebounds). In the spring
of 2001, the year of the “two EuroLeagues”, Maccabi
won the SuproLeague Final Four in Paris against Panathinaikos,
81-67, despite Bodiroga’s great game of 27 points
and 8 rebounds. That same summer, at the Istanbul EuroBasket,
he was champion again with Yugoslavia, this
time under the command of Svetislav Pesic, the fourth
important man in his career. In the first Final Four of the
modern EuroLeague, played in Bologna in 2002, the big
favorite was Ettore Messina’s Kinder Bologna, not only for
playing at home, but also because it had a great team with
players like Manu Ginobili, Marko Jaric, Alessandro Frosini,
Andersen, Rashard Griffith, Alessandro Abbio, Sani
Becirovic, Antoine Rigaudeau... However, after defeating
Maccabi in the semifinal by 83-75, Panathinaikos rolled
into the championship and surprised Kinder by 89-83
with a great Bodiroga, who scored 21 points and pulled 7
rebounds. Of course, he was named MVP.
Just as Obradovic had done when he joined Panathinaikos,
Svetislav Pesic did one thing just after arriving as
head coach at FC Barcelona: he asked for Dejan Bodiroga
to be in the team for his new project. In August of 2002, at
the World Cup in Indianapolis, Pesic coached Yugoslavia’s
star-studded team with Bodiroga, Jaric, Vlade Divac, Peja
Stojakovic, Igor Rakocevic, Milan Gurovic, Dejan Tomasevic,
Milos Vujanic... and won the gold medal. In Barcelona,
Pesic and Bodiroga had the challenge to turn a dream – to
make Barcelona, finally, a EuroLeague champ – into reality.
And they did. At the Final Four, played at Palau Sant Jordi
in Barcelona, the hosts first defeated CSKA Moscow by
76-71. In the title game, they downed Benetton Treviso
76-65 with 20 points by Bodiroga, who was chosen as
Final Four MVP for the second year in a row.
He was a versatile player with a lot of talent. But he
was also a sportsman who set an example and was
always polite to his rivals, referees, fans and the press.
As a player, Dejan Bodiroga owns a prominent place in
the memory of all basketball lovers.
Dejan Bodiroga
101 greats of european basketball
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