Shonzilla, a pattern-seeking animal

Here’s a wonderful and emotionally gripping tale about the highlight of Yugoslavian basketball, the downfall of Yugoslavia and one very close friendship retold through the story of Vlade Divac and late Dražen Petrović who were “Once Brothers” which is also the title of the documentary.

Dražen was surely the best player in Europe at the time and many consider him all time best. I remember his games, he was amazing. I surely haven’t seen anyone in Europe play that good and I’m a basketball fan for almost 30 years. Really, a Mozart of basketball, as the film puts it. Those were the times when basketball was more about creativity, elegance and technique and less about raw strength, body mass and fat contracts. After accepting the challenge of playing in the NBA for the Portland Blazers, he struggled because he wasn’t given enough play time to show his amazing talent and skills, and he apparently had to go through another hardening phase. His friend Vlade Divac, an amazing player himself was 3.5 years his junior, considered Dražen the idol in his youth. Vlade went to LA Lakers the same year as Dražen and, even he knew no word of English, managed to integrate more quickly, get more attention and more minutes on the court. More than anything else, this documentary tells the story about their unique relationship and unique times they went through together and away from each other. In a way, it explains how normal people, just as these two amazing athletes, were estranged one from another by circumstances beyond their control.

Because of all the tensions that troubled everyone in ex-Yugoslavia from the times of its painful breakup, this is one of the heartbreaking stories that was waiting to be told until this documentary was finally made.

If you want to learn more about Yugoslavia, puzzling relationship between Serbs and Croats, the most powerful national basketball team at the time, if you’re ready to have your heart touched, or if you need to see a very nice documentary - this is the one to watch.

This story is of special importance to me. I was born and grew up in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. My father is Serb, mother Croatian. I have relatives in Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia - all over the place. I have distant ancestors from Montenegro even Greece. You could say that the Yugoslavia and the Balkans flow in my veins. Up until the Yugoslav Wars (looks really scary seeing a plural here) I was spending my summer vacations with my wider family in our family house on the Adriatic coast near Split, place where other basketball stars like Toni Kukoč and Toni Rađa come from. I was playing and training basketball at KK Partizan, European Champion in 1992 and the team where Vlade Divac grew to be such a great player. You can try to imagine in how many ways this documentary resonates with me.

So if you want to see the entire film, you’ll find he first of six parts embedded above, while you can also watch here the remaining parts two, three, four, five, and six by watching them in a pop out window.

Enjoy!

p.s. Kudos to ESPN “30 for 30” documentary series for making and NBA Entertainment for producing this documentary and, last but not least, to Vlade for pulling this out. Also thanks to Belgraded blog for being an early reminder about this documentary.

Unless you’re a basketball geek, Serbian or Spanish, the chance is high that you may have missed a terrific game that was played last night at the FIBA World Championship 2010 in Istanbul, Turkey. An exciting quarter-finals match between Serbia and the current world champion Spain was played.

Here’s a spoiler: they won’t defend the title. After that Football World Cup 2010 priceless moment, this game me another one. Pity I wasn’t in company’s Barcelona office to share it with my Spanish colleagues. ;-)

In case you’re not that much into basketball, just skip to 12m29 and scream with me! :-)

p.s. The clip wrongly states it was a eight-finals match. That one Serbia won against Croatia, and Spain against Greece.

The World Cup fever is spreading across the Globe… well at least among the participating countries, like in this commercial for Havaianas (a Brazilian brand for flip-flops).

If your Portuguese is rusty, here’s the translation:

Boy: „Italy won the championship 4 times, Germany 3, for Brazil I can’t even remember how many times, and Uruguay 2 times… It’s hard to decide!“

Girl (saying him to hurry up): „Wear this red ones, they match the color of your shirt, look how cute they are! That’s it, let’s go!“

I would pick the same ones. :-)

Thanks to Tijana for digging this out.

Something for my Serbian and ex-Yugoslav readers - Rambo Amadeus strikes back!

In this new video and the latest hit “Urbano, samo urbano” Rambo’s casual style dissects the nation’s mindset and lays some nice rhymes on top of relaxed jazzy tune.

via RamboAmadeusSMC)

Trading Kosovo for Nikes

This appears to be one of the top impressions from yesterday’s protest in Belgrade. The protest called “Kosovo is Serbia” was triggered by the declaration of independence of Kosovo that took place on Sunday, February 17. Here’s an example of partizan journalism where the worst in people gets caught on tape disk.

Someone duly noted that “it didn’t happen if it wasn’t on the tube” so here you go!

I know that this paints an ugly picture of Serbia, the country where I was born and live, and I’m very unhappy about it. Sights like this and everything making it happen is what drives educated, intelligent, and/or capable people to emigrate and become engineers, doctors, athletes in some other society, contributing to it instead of their homeland. When your country is constantly pushing the best 10% out of it, you can figure out what will fill the vacuum.

Unforunately, for all of you who do not speaking Serbian it wouldn’t help sending video clips of intelligent people (still in Serbia) who are (verbally) opposing the now futile and mindless manipulated attempts to “bring back Kosovo”.

As it goes in any mass protest, a small group, which counted a couple of hundreds among 100-200 thousand protesters), abused the opportunity to:

• convert agression into destruction; esentially unesponsibly present their unstoppable and mindless rage as “patriotism”, since what they’re really looking for is a reason for spill their agression towards anyone else by members of their tribe. I’m sorry to see that symbols of US presence (embassy, McDonald’s and the like) are becoming a favourite target in Serbia, just at it was/is in Afghanistan, Lybia, Somalia… (fill in the gaps)
• steal something; like these two f*cking b*tches who probably idolize (war) criminals and look up their moral attitude (or lack thereof). What’s both tragical and comical, what these really did is trade something they didn’t really have in the first place (i.e. Kosovo) for something concrete (like Nike shoes).

Any of these two types does not really give a damn about Kosovo, nor Serbia, nor Belgrade, you and me, and any consequence that might/will follow. What results is that tax payers will pay for all the damage, while the Serbian national has been thoroughly shaken by this event. Unfortunately, the experience continues to prove that many Serbians will continue to ignore the events of yesterday, NATO bombing in 1999, Yugoslavian break-up and war, Srebrenica genocide or anything before which does not suit their false national pride.

Hopefully most of similar small groups have been indentified (and/or some of them filmed like these …) and will eventually be prosecuted. Unfortunately (I’m using it too often lately), I know who is supposed to put perpetrators in jail - they’re not seeing much interest in doing just that since they have daydreamed of even greater outburst of Serbian rage so that they can continue manipulating with the mindless bunch. For you not in the know - those are prime minister Vojislav Koštunica (a.k.a. Milošević 2.0) and radical leader Tomislav Nikolić.

I can’t help but wonder: 

When will the (next) revolution come?