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The Obradovic secrets

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Vladimir StankovicVeteran sportswriter and Euroleague.net collaborator Vladimir Stankovic has been following the best basketball on the continent longer than almost anyone journalist, writing for decades about the sport in major publications in both Serbia and Spain. For the new 2010-11 season, he offers a blog that honors the history of European basketball - even while history keeps being made!

My entry this week is not a historic tale per se, but the man I will take about is historic alright. His name is Zelimir "Zeljko" Obradovic. He became a Euroleague champion for a record eighth time in his 19-year coaching career last week, after winning the 2011 Turkish Airlines Euroleague Final Four in Barcelona with clear superiority over Montepaschi Siena, in the semifinals, and Maccabi Electra, in the title game. Aside from his eight European crowns with four different teams, Obradovic has also won two Saporta Cups, which was the second-highest European competition some years ago. First, he won it with Real Madrid in 1997 against Mash Verona by 78-64 with a team featuring Dejan Bodiroga, Alberto Herreros and Joe Arlauckas just to name a few. In 1999, he won it again with Benetton Treviso against Pamesa Valencia by 64-60. The Benetton team featured Riccardo Pittis, Marcelo Nicola, Denis Marconato and Zeljko Rebraca among others. If European basketball awarded rings for the titles, Obradovic would have run out of fingers by now!

I admit that today's entry is a difficult challenge because almost everything is already known about Obradovic. I have known him for more than 30 years since his start as a player and, of course, as a coach. I have witnessed live nine out of his ten triumphs in Europe but despite all that, I cannot say that I know all his secrets, all the magic that surrounds him and that has turned him into the winningest coach in European ball, above legends like Aleksandar Gomelskiy, Pedro Ferrandiz and Aleksandar Nikolic.

Junior World championships of 1979

The name of Zeljko Obradovic appeared for the international audience for the first time in August, 1979. He was 19 years old and he had already been playing two seasons for the first team of Borac in his native Cacak, a town in the middle of Serbia about 150 kilometers Southwest of Belgrade. He entered, as point guard, a very good Yugoslav national team with Zoran Cutura, Goran Grbovic, Zoran Radovic, Emir Mutapcic, Milenko Savovic, Zarko Djurisic and Sabahudin Bilalovic. Yugoslavia finished fourth, as the best European team, after the USA, Brazil and Argentina. During the fall of the 1979-80 season, his Borac team, coached by the famous Professor Aleksandar Nikolic, played the Korac Cup. During the period between 1978 and 1980, the first connection between the famous coach and his future pupil took place. But before Professor Nikolic, two other men were key in the life of Zeljko Obradovic. Their names were Radmilo Misovic and Dragan Kicanovic, two great players from Cacak. Many things are known about the latter, he was a natural-born champion, a genius with a winning character like Obradovic, but Misovic is a legend only for the people of Cacak and those who remember the Yugoslav League of the late sixties and early seventies. Misovic was a great shooter, a scoring machine, and he was the best scorer of the then-strong Yugoslav League. But because of his mentality and way of living, when having to decide between his friends and fishing in the Morava River or the glory and the money of playing for Partizan or Crvena Zvezda, he chose the former. In the 1971-72 season, Borac had signed Kicanovic, a young super-talent formed in Zeleznicar, the other club...

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