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Rating: Well, you know, I was a child, memories get mixed up.
But on Saturday afternoons, back then, you’d watch Tv Koper Capodistria.
And there was that guy, who did the commentaries, with a strange accent. And he said strange things.
And the whole thing, the commentaries, the matches, were a window into a world both near and very distant.
There were these teams, and these names, that you couldn’t make sense of. And the jerseys, the shoes, everything that in the years to come would become the subject of marketing, even in those years you could see that in that place they were different, poorer, uglier.
There’s one thing I’ll never forget.
In those years, it still happened, even here, that someone dunked and the backboard shattered into a thousand pieces.
And one time it happened. One Saturday afternoon, on Koper Capodistria.
And when it happened here, in Italy, the race was on to catch the photo of the moment it broke. Or the video.
Not there. The commentator was furious. He said it wasn’t possible. It wasn’t allowed. Someone who breaks a backboard is someone who acts like a fool. He should never play again. And he went on for half an hour, because they didn’t change it right away, you had to wait for the glazier, maybe he came from Belgrade, things like that.
And then, how did they play?
Here, with us, there were the Americans. Style, technique, elegance.
There, only Slavs, not yet Serbs or Croats or Macedonians.
Elegance zero. None, whatsoever. Tactics? None. Give me the ball, I shoot.
Actually, I remember, with my brother, we would say to each other: how do you recognize if someone is Yugoslav?
Answer, easy: you tie their hands behind their back, lock them in the locker room, give them a basketball. If they shoot, they are Yugoslav.
If they score, they are Drazen Petrovic.
Because in that whole world, in that strange, distant, and very close world, without elegance, without tactics, without anything, there was one thing you couldn’t help but notice.
A total hothead of galactic proportions. Someone who - as a matter of course - played only for himself.
Others, all the others, bothered him. They were like an annoying appetizer before a king's feast. And the feast was him.
Someone who, when he scored, away, made sure the audience understood that he knew they couldn’t stand him. And for this, he was so happy. And all that about thirty times a game.
Someone who - if he was there - you wouldn’t watch the game to look at the jerseys, or to hear the strange accent of the commentator, or to hope a backboard would break and the culprit be shot on the spot.
No, you watched this damned hothead, only this damned hothead, who if he hadn’t gone, today he would be fifty years old.
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