Dream Team (eBook)

THE INSPECTOR OF MEAT Pros in the Olympics? It Was His Idea, and Don't Let Anyone Tell You Different He first came to the United States in January 1974, dispatched by his boss to study up on American basketball. He didn't speak the language, didn't know the customs, and settled into the basketball hotbed of Billings, Montana, because that's where he could secure free lodging with a Yugoslavian family. This stranger in a strange land was named Boris Stankovic. He was six months from his forty-ninth birthday and he had come on behalf of FIBA. At the time not more than a dozen Americans knew what it stood for (Fdration Internationale de Basketball), where it was headquartered (at the time in an apartment in Munich, later in Geneva), and what the hell it did (governed amateur basketball in all parts of the world except the United States). 'You cannot know basketball if you do not know basketball in the United States,' Stankovic was told by R. William Jones, who as secretary-general ran FIBA with a bow tie, a lit cigar, and a dictator's fist. So Stankovic came and was instantly seduced by the college games he saw live--UCLA's redheaded phenomenon, Bill Walton, was his favorite player--and the NBA games he saw on television. For much of his early adult life, Stankovic had been a meat inspector in Belgrade. 'My job was to look over the meat and cheese and, as you do here, put a stamp on it,' said Stankovic when I interviewed him in Istanbul in the summer of 2010. He is retired now but comes to many events as the minence grise of international basketball. Stankovic had earned a degree in veterinary medicine in 1945 from the University of Belgrade. 'It was natural in our country that veterinarians looked after the meat and cheese, because it has to do with animals, no?' The type of meat Stankovic most liked to inspect, though, was the cured leather on a basketball. Even as he was arising at five in the morning to take up his meat stamp and lace up his white apron, basketball is what moved his spirit. He was an earthbound, fundamentally sound low-post forward who played thirty-six games for the Yugoslavian national team. One of his proudest moments was playing for his country in the first world championship organized by FIBA, which took place in Argentina in 1950. 'We finished ninth,' says Stankovic, chuckling, 'and there were nine teams.' One of his enduring regrets was that he never participated in the Olympics as a player. The Yugoslavs were a tall, tough, and lean people, hardened by wars civil and foreign. In the Balkan area of Yugoslavia where Stankovic was born, the people measure eras not by 'war and peace' but by 'war and non-war.' When Boris was nineteen, he and his father, Vassilje, a lawyer who fought for Serbian nationalism, were imprisoned by an invading Russian army. After two months Boris was released, but Vassilje was executed by firing squad and buried in a common grave, even today, Stankovic does not know where. Stankovic was put on a blacklist that later kept him from becoming a medical doctor, his desired profession, and forced him to veterinary school, his way of staying in the field of medicine. Like most of his countrymen from that generation, he identified with the Serbian rebels who had squirmed under foreign rule for five centuries. 'They lived in groups and learned to cooperate, to work with each other,' Stankovic said. 'We grew up with that in our blood. We Serbians have never had much success in the individual sports, but our team sports are very, very strong. We have a proficiency in and an aptitude for sports that require a lot of teamwork.' Stankovic's knowledge of the game and...