COLUMN, KOVACEVIC: The greatest Serbian coach has left. A man who did not ask for money to buy, but time to create players…

Today, the greatest Serbian basketball coach of all time has left us. Respect to Aca Nikolić, Ranko Žeravica, Duda Ivković, Svetislav Pešić, Željko Obradović… but Duško Vujošević is the man who won the most domestic titles from the bench and who, more importantly, created the most players who won medals in the jerseys of the national teams of Yugoslavia, FR Yugoslavia, Serbia and Montenegro, and Serbia.

Dule is the one who made Divac, Đorđević, Paspalj, Danilović, Obradović, Rebrača, Krstić, Šćepanović, Tomašević, Vujanić, Bogdanović, Veličković, Rašić, Kecman, Perović, Peković, Milutinov… but he never had the opportunity to stand on the winning podium with them.

Vujošević won all those numerous trophies in his career with Partizan, but none with the national team. And that is probably the greatest injustice in the history of our basketball. Because Dule is responsible for everything that our national team, whatever it was called in the last few decades, has won in the last 35 years.

In times when everything was viewed and calculated in banknotes, he was a visionary, a man who did not ask for money to buy players, but time to make them. To dedicate it to the children he taught basketball, from whom he created masters and grandmasters, national team players (not only for Serbia but also for Montenegro, Slovenia, Macedonia, France, Latvia), European and world champions.

But even more importantly – from whom he made men, proud and upright!

The words by which generations of basketball lovers will remember him, as well as those who wanted to become someone and something in basketball, will echo forever…

– One can make a mistake in what kind of player someone is, and even more easily in the assessment of what kind of player someone will become. But one must not make a mistake in what kind of person they are. If you have an excellent player who is a bad person, he will eat the rest of the team like cancer. You don’t need such a person.

Simply, there must be people there who are ready not only to endure, but to correct someone else’s mistake. When someone has made a mistake, even when he has made a mistake in the sense of some egoism and selfishness, the other player should not criticize him, but return with a sprint and dive for that ball as if he had made the mistake himself. That is when the machine turns on – the legendary Dule used to say.

Whoever knew how to hear and understand, became a player. If not a player – a man for sure.

Bishop Grigorije said goodbye to him today, saying that “another man who did not like to lie has left.”

That is how Dule was toward everyone, from the basketball players he coached, to his family and his own son, to the regime of Aleksandar Vučić, which targeted him for years as a great enemy.

– I told my son, whom I love more than anyone, when he was in the seventh grade to train, to be part of a group, but not to delude himself. There was crying, he cried all night. Since I live with dogs, a son, and a wife, everyone was angry with me then, no one talked to me, but a man must be honest – Vujošević said in one of the rare interviews in which he mentioned his family.

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His son Luka listened to him. He did not delude himself that he would become a player. He followed in his father’s footsteps, became a coach, and at the beginning of March this year signed his first contract with, who else but – BC Partizan.

Besides basketball and Partizan, Duško Vujošević loved art, literature, painting, film. He was a collector of art paintings, which he exhibited in 2009 in a Gallery at Kosančićev Venac. A rare breed in today’s instant times.

Anecdotes about how he asked players to read books and watch film classics remain to be retold.

“I read a book, then a film, and then he gave me another one to watch, ‘The Deer Hunter.’ In the end, there is that scene when he aims at a deer with a sniper and has to decide whether to shoot or not, and he moves the sight away. Vujošević asked me what happens at the end of the film, whether the hunter kills the deer or not, and I had no idea because I hadn’t watched it,” the captain of the Serbian national team, Bogdan Bogdanović, later recounted.

He answered Dule that he had watched the film and that the hunter kills the deer in the end, and finished by running countless sprints up and down the stairs of the “Pionir” Hall.

Dule punished him. Not because he didn’t watch the film. But because he lied.

Dule was a second father to his players. A strict but fair father. He was known to grab the aforementioned Bogdanović by the throat, even though he loved him the most. And those “lessons of love” by Dule will be eternally remembered by both those who were on the court and those who cheered from the stands.

In the end, perhaps he is best described by one more memory, a short and touching story by Bishop Grigorije about their accidental encounter on a plane on the Belgrade-Tivat line, when the General (as the die-hard “Grobari,” Partizan fans, called him), otherwise a great leftist and Yugoslav by orientation, told him:

“You know, Grigorije, I do not believe, but that does not mean I am proud of it or that I would not like to believe in God.”

Thanks and glory to him for everything.

For basketball and for the truth…