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Vlade Divac Revisits Friendhip With Drazen Petrovic


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Seventeen years after, Divac looks back at his friendship with Petrovic as they won a World Championship, the destruction of their relationship through the Croatian War of Independence, and an unexpected goodbye before they could patch up their differences.

 

He’ll never be old to us, which is a minor comfort. We in New Jersey will always remember Drazen Petrovic as the gamma ray burst that hit the local gym and lifted it from its foundation.

 

And then he left us far too soon, before we could fully appreciate what he could have made of himself, his team and the league he already had turned on its ear.

 

Vlade Divac’s memories of his friend are more complex, more endearing, more poignant. In his mind’s eye he still sees the lodestar that he and every kid in the Balkans came to idolize in the 1980s, the joie de vivre that gave Yugoslavian basketball its global identity, and the brother he would lose when war permanently severed the ties that bound them as tightly as teammates could ever be.

 

“In the years that have passed, it’s a situation I can see from different angles,” Divac said in a conversation from Belgrade last week. “I realize now how much pressure he had from home, and in some ways I can understand it — political pressure, media, neighbors. He got it from Croatia, I got it from Serbia.

 

“But on the other hand, I’ll never understand the hate on both sides, and the distance it created in our relationship.”

Dave D'Alessandro

 

Trailer

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_FTjCe1C7Y

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