101 Greats of European Basketball

‘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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