101 Greats of European Basketball

Bulgarian legend
In the second edition of the U18 European Championship,
played in Italy in 1966, a lot of future stars
emerged: Dino Meneghin, Marino Zanatta and
Giulio Iellini of Italy; Kresimir Cosic, Damir Solman,
Ljubodrag Simonovic and Aljosa Zorga of Yugoslavia,
who would become the 1970 world champion;
Zdenek Dousa of Czechoslovakia and Aleksandar
Boloshev of Russia. However, the top scorer of the
competition was from Bulgaria.
His name was Atanas Golomeev, who was born in
Sofia on July 5, 1947. He averaged 17.6 points, including
34 points against France and 32 against Spain. Only
two years later, at 19 years old, he made his debut in the
senior EuroBasket in Naples and his 5.5-point average
didn’t hint at a future scoring champ. However, at the
1971 EuroBasket in Germany, Golomeev was already
averaging 18.6 points. And by the 1973 EuroBasket in
Barcelona, he was the top scorer, with 22.3 points per
game, above Wayne Brabender, Sergei Belov, Tal Brody,
Jiri Zidek, Kresimir Cosic and Modestas Paulauskas.
Golomeev also made the all-tournament team with
Nino Buscató and Brabender of Spain, Belov of the USSR
and Cosic of Yugoslavia. As a man of habit, Golomeev
also became the top scorer at the 1975 EuroBasket in
Belgrade, with 23.1 points, again ahead of many superstars.
In 1977, at EuroBasket in Belgium, Golomeev
again scored a high average (20.1) in what was his last
big competition.
I was lucky to follow him live in Belgrade and Belgium
and I have no doubts that he was one of the finest
centers of his era. And, mind you, he was playing
against Cosic, Meneghin, Zidek, Clifford Luyk, Vladimir
Andreev, Vinko Jelovac, Vladimir Tkachenko, Alexander
Belostenny and others. It’s funny that Golomeev
was shorter, standing at 2.02 meters, more of a power
forward than a center. But thanks to his physique and
especially the needs of his teams, he normally played
at the center position. He had good rebounding skills
and a sixth sense of knowing where the ball would fall,
making up for his lack of centimeters.
This was a brief history of the appearances in
EuroBasket of one of the best Bulgarian players ever.
However, his complete story, both personal and professional,
qualify him to belong in this series dedicated to
the best players of the past.
It all started with the Universiada World University
Summer Games played in 1961 in Sofia. Atanas Golomeev,
“Nasko” to his friends, received by chance some
free tickets to go see the basketball tournament. As
he said, he fell in love with the game by watching the
attractive Brazilian players and the better Bulgarian
players like Ljubomir Panov and Viktor Radev. The man
who discovered Golomeev’s talent in 1964 at the Todro
Minkov school was Ventsi Yanev. Nasko was a natural
born talent for many sports. He was a goalkeeper on
the school football team, in athletics he did the high
jump and discus. He was also a good swimmer, but Yanev
saw clearly that Golomeev had been born for basketball.
He took Golomeev to the Spartak school and
then he signed for CSKA Sofia at 18 years old, while in
the military service.
Explosion in ... Canada
At 20 years old, Golomeev already stood out, but
who knows how his career would have evolved if his
father had not been sent to Montreal, Canada as a rep-
101 greats of european basketball
Atanas Golomeev
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