"Brothers on the Eve of War"

    Of all the constituent republics of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Bosnia and Herzegovina was considered—and indeed was—the country’s greatest melting pot of ethnicities. It was a place where Bosniaks and Serbs, Croats, Muslims, Orthodox Christians and Catholics lived together in harmony. They built their homes without restrictions, and in schools, children were Yugoslavs first and foremost, many of them the product of mixed marriages. The words of the great Mirza Delibašić—“I married twice, once to a Serb woman and the second time to a Croat woman. Both my wives were Christians, and I was a Muslim”—perfectly capture what made Yugoslavia’s last stronghold of multiculturalism so distinctive.

But that spring of 1991, the sky remained perpetually overcast, as if it knew what the future held and had grown sombre in anticipation. People turned their eyes northward, toward the border with Croatia, where the sound of cannons pounding the Krajina region could be heard. The spark ignited by Zvonimir Boban’s kick at Maksimir a year earlier was about to become a fire that would grow ever more ferocious.

Yugoslavia was collapsing. It was now painfully obvious, and its downfall would drag with it all the achievements and glorious moments the country had enjoyed as a unified state—including, of course, its sporting triumphs, particularly in basketball. These were the triumphs that had carried the tricolour flag with its star to the summit of Europe and the world.

By Antreas Tsemperlidis

Under these circumstances, no one at the KSJ, the Yugoslav Basketball Federation, was thinking about—or would naturally have taken the initiative to organise—something that had been discussed in the Federation’s offices back when life was running smoothly: an exhibition game featuring teams made up of the league’s finest players. Everyone avoided the hot potato. No one was willing to risk bringing thousands of people together in an enclosed arena, where extremists might infiltrate the crowd with the sole intention of provoking violence. The central government, barely clinging to life in Belgrade, would never have approved such an event.

Yet, as so often happens in situations like these, the solution came through individual initiative: the romanticism of people who refused to believe that the end of the sport that had once made them proud would be written not within the four lines of a basketball court, but in the dim light behind the closed doors of an office. It was the management of Bosna Sarajevo, together with Irfan Kreho, publisher of the newspaper Večernje Novine, who decided to organise, independently and with their own funding, the first All-Star Game in the history of Yugoslav basketball.  When it came to choosing the venue, there was no disagreement over the sole candidate. The game would take place where the crumbling unity of Yugoslavia was still a tangible reality, at least for a little while longer: in Sarajevo, at Skenderija.

Then came the task of selecting the players—the 24 participants who would represent the finest possible example of a system and a basketball school that recognised neither borders nor ethnic or religious divisions, but only the talent that had led the Plavi, the Yugoslav national team, to triumph after triumph. In an effort to promote unity, the two teams were assembled from players representing every corner of Yugoslavia and its leading clubs: three-time European champions POP 84, Partizan, Cibona, Red Star Belgrade, Zadar, Olimpija Ljubljana and, naturally, Bosna. And so, on the evening of Tuesday, 7 May 1991, Skenderija was packed with 7,000 people. Their emotions were mixed: joy at what they were about to witness, and melancholy over what lay ahead in their lives. There was a sorrowful awareness that they were about to become witnesses to a farewell performance. On one side stood Željko Pavličević’s Whites, led by the finest basketball player on European courts at the time: the “Golden Boy of Split”, Toni Kukoč. Alongside him lined up Partizan’s twin prodigies, Đorđević and Danilović; his Jugoplastika teammate Zoran Sretenović; Arijan Komazec, with his deadly shooting touch; and, ready for the battles in the paint, Jan Tabak and Miroslav Pecarski. There were also Ivo Nakić and Zoran Jovanović, Čutura, Saša Radunović, and Bosna’s 2.17-metre centre, Sejo Bukva.

Duško Vujošević’s Reds were every bit as formidable. Žarko Paspalj stood out as the team’s primary offensive weapon, while the “computer”, Jure Zdovc, took charge of running the offence. The sharpshooters Danko Cvjetićanin and Velimir Perasović were joined by local heroes Zdravko Radulović and Samir Avdić. Zoran Savić and Radislav Ćurčić formed a human wall beneath the basket, alongside Ivica Marić, Mario Primorac and veteran Andro Knego. And finally, making one of his last appearances as an active player—without even suspecting it himself—was Željko Obradović. At the organisers’ request, the All-Star Game followed the American format: four 12-minute quarters, with three-point and slam-dunk contests held during the half-time interval.

Two of European basketball’s finest shooters reached the final of the three-point contest: Cvjetićanin and Komazec. Arijan emerged victorious after a remarkable barrage of successful shots secured him first place and the cash prize of 30,000 dinars. The real battle, however, and the most spectacular one, took place in the slam-dunk contest between Kukoč and a young player with a leap that seemed to reach the heavens, a prospect from Zadar’s youth academy: 18-year-old Zoran Bačalja. No one expected that this audacious youngster, standing just 1.85 metres tall, would give the “Pink Panther” such a challenge. With the swagger of streetball and wearing Michael Jordan’s number 23 jersey, Bačalja delivered spectacular dunks, forcing Kukoč to draw on every advantage his height and reach could offer. Kukoč responded by dunking twice from the free-throw line, matching the fearlessness and apparent disregard for danger displayed by the 18-year-old. But the judging panel was divided, and a heated confrontation among its members was needed before Toni was eventually declared the winner.

The injustice of April’s Paris Final Four, when the MVP award went to Kukoč rather than Savić, was repeated—this time at Bačalja’s expense. Yet the Skenderija crowd delivered its own verdict in a poetic recognition of his effort, giving Zoran Bačalja a prolonged standing ovation.

And what about the game itself?

It was an exhibition of offensive basketball, embellished with the virtuosity that defined the Yugoslav game. With only a few exceptions, the cream of the Plavi had gathered on the Skenderija court: players who had won European gold medals and continental trophies, men who had played together for years. Their game had become almost automatic since the days when they were first learning the fundamentals of basketball.

Kukoč’s basketball genius unfolded in all its magnificence. He finished with 22 points, eight rebounds and just as many assists, coming within a whisker of a triple-double. He moved between positions on the court with a natural ease that only the most complete player in the history of European basketball could possess. The Whites emerged victorious, winning by a final score of 125–114. And when the final whistle sounded, the 24 Yugoslav basketball players still hurried towards centre court and embraced one another, joining hands like brothers. At that very moment, others were bent over maps, drawing new borders and erecting invisible barriers that would forever divide the only homeland any of them had ever known.

A month and a half later, during EuroBasket in Rome, Jure Zdovc was forced by Slovenia’s provisional government to withdraw from the Yugoslav squad. Skenderija already seemed so very far away. The arena itself would suffer devastating damage during the Siege of Sarajevo, the longest siege in Europe since the Second World War. The game of 7 May 1991 became the sporting testament of this blessed yet cursed generation, a moment when talent and brotherhood stood against ethnic hatred, before the country once known as Yugoslavia was drowned in an endless sea of blood. It was the night Yugoslav basketball spoke one last time in a common language—not Serbo-Croatian, but a language everyone understood, from Skopje to Ljubljana: the language that stood above hatred.

The last night on which the talent of the united Plavi was laid bare, in its entirety, upon the basketball court...

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