101 Greats of European Basketball

I
Dusko Ivanovic
Montenegro’s
Holy Hand
At the end of the 1982-83 season, the
list of the top scorers in the powerful
Yugoslav League was: Dusko Ivanovic
of Buducnost Podgorica, 603 points
(27.4 ppg.); Drazen Petrovic of Sibenka,
561 points (25.5 ppg.); and Peter Vilfan
of Olimpija Ljubljana, 535 points (25.4 ppg.). Granted,
Petrovic was barely 18 years old, but he was already
a star in the making and that same summer he made
his debut with the Yugoslavia national team at the
1983 EuroBasket in Limoges and Nantes.
Dusko Ivanovic, born in Bijelo Polje, Montenegro, on
September 1, 1957, was almost 26 years old and was one
of the players who stood out in the league. However, he
was stuck with the reputation of being “a good player, but
only for smaller teams.” Nothing could be more wrong,
but he was not the only player who wore that label.
The story of Dusko Ivanovic the player starts at the
end of the 1960s in his native Bijelo Polje. Just a few meters
from where he lived with his parents and his older
brother Dragan there was a basketball court. But the key
moment occurred when some plastic backboards were
installed to replace the old wooden ones. Following in
the footsteps of Dragan, who was a couple of years older,
little Dusko started to shoot the ball into the basket.
From the very first practices in the street to his first
basketball lessons at local club Jedinstvo, the best attribute
of the young Dusko was his shot. He had a great
touch and it didn’t go unnoticed. He was only 16 years
when he made his debut in the first team for coach Bratko
Ilic, who realized the great talent he had and took a leap of
faith with him. At age 17, Dusko was already in the starting
five; at 18 he was already on the radar of many big teams
in Yugoslavia. At 19 years old, Ivanovic decided to try his
luck with Crvena Zvezda, but during the preseason, at
Zlatibor mountain, Dusko decided to leave the team:
“I didn’t like the atmosphere in that team,” Ivanovic recalled
much later. “There was no camaraderie. Everyone
did his own thing and I wasn’t very well received. I decided
to move to Podgorica, so I could study law, even though
coach Bratislav Djordjevic tried to convince me to stay.”
Ivanovic signed for Buducnost, where he played with
his brother Dragan, who had just come back from OKK
Belgrade. The beginning was not easy, as coach Nikola
Sekulovic didn’t trust young Dusko much. One day, a
confident Dusko approached his coach. “I proposed a
deal to him. He would put me on the court for 30 minutes
during a game. If I didn’t play well, I would leave.”
Said and done. In the game against Mornar Bar, in
the second division, Dusko scored 35 points and never
left the starting five during the following nine seasons.
That was the career-starter for this great shooter, one
of the best in the former Yugoslavia.
Scoring lawyer
When Buducnost reached the Yugoslav first division,
in his first season with the elite, Ivanovic finished
with an average of 24.1 points. In his second season,
the one mentioned at the start of this post, he was the
best scorer in the league with 27.4 points. The following
four years he posted 22.6 points, 10.4 points (a season
in which he didn’t play much due to military service),
26.8 points and, in his last wearing the Buducnost jersey,
27.8 points per game.
101 greats of european basketball