BORISLAV STANKOVIC_31 Masterminds of European Basketball

Good coach,
great director
Borislav
Stankovic
I
am guessing that a few people might be a little
surprised by this inclusion: Borislav “Bora”
Stankovic, FIBA Secretary General Emeritus, a
coach?
The surprise might even be a little bigger if I
tell you that he won three Yugoslav Leagues and
a national cup with OKK Belgrade, plus one Italian
League with Orasonda Cantu. And that in doing so
he became the first foreign coach to win the title in
Italy.
In total, over 13 seasons, he coached 241 games
in the Yugoslav League with Zeleznicar Belgrade,
Partizan Belgrade and, of course, OKK. Add to that
the cup games and the EuroLeague. In Italy, he
coached 66 games plus the cup and EuroLeague. So
he amassed more than 300 games as a coach, even
though his work at FIBA would later overwhelm his
accomplishments on the bench.
Already as a player, Borislav – known as Bora to
almost everybody – showed his talent for coaching.
At Partizan, he was a player-coach, and when
he was not one of the starters at Crvena Zvezda,
he went to Zeleznicar to be, again, player-coach.
However, his true coaching career started in 1953
when he was signed by OKK. When the first foreign
coaches taught courses in Yugoslavia, Bora
was one of the best pupils. He took notes on
everything said by Veselin Temkov of Bulgaria,
Istvan Kamaras and Ferenc Nemeth of Hungary,
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Vladimir Stankovic
and Henri Hell of France. He also passed the pertinent
physical education courses organized by Bora
Jovanovic, the former Yugoslavia national team
coach. And at OKK Belgrade he started to build a
great team.
Korac
Bora showed great vision in choosing players. He
took some talents from other teams, like Miodrag
Nikolic from Radnicki and Trajko Rajkovic from Zeleznicar.
However, the key development was the arrival of
Radivoj Korac, after the coach of the junior team, Dragan
Glisic, one day told Stankovic:
“Listen, Bora. I have a great kid on the team. We
won a game in which we scored 56 points... and he
scored them all! His name is Korac, Radivoj Korac.”
Bora didn’t have to be told twice. He called Korac
to the first team, and in the first round of the 1958
season – played on outdoor courts between April and
October – OKK Belgrade rolled to a 105-67 victory
against defending champ Union Olimpija Ljubljana
with 25 points by the young Korac. A star was born.
At the end of the season, OKK was the Yugoslav
champion with 16 wins from 18 games, and Korac was
the top scorer with 633 points (37.2 points per game).
Bora won his second league title a couple of years
later with a 14-4 record, and Korac was again the top
scorer with a mammoth 39.2 points per game! That
same year, OKK won the double by beating Olimpija
Ljubljana in the Yugoslav Cup final.
While coaching at OKK, Bora was also working as
a veterinarian and at the same time had become Secretary
General of the Yugoslav Basketball Federation.
Due to those many duties, and an ultimatum from
some of the federation directors, Bora decided to
leave the OKK bench to his friend Aleksandar Nikolic,
who won the 1963 league. But for the 1964 season, he
returned to coaching with OKK and won his third title
with a 15-3 record. Of course, Korac was still scoring
like mad, with 33.8 points on average.
Stankovic first met FIBA Secretary General William
Jones at the 1950 FIBA Basketball World Cup in Buenos
Aires. With time, their relationship grew tighter as
Jones had seen in Stankovic a smart man, who spoke
many languages, was skilled, hard-working, and held
in high regard on both sides of a Europe that was
divided by two ideologies. Stankovic was one of the
founders of the first EuroLeague, in 1958. In its second
edition, he participated as a coach. He guided OKK to
the semifinals but was eliminated by Akademik Sofia
by a difference of 7 points. The second attempt, in the
1960-61 season, didn’t end well as OKK was eliminated
by Antwerp because they refused to play the game
in Belgrade. The Belgian team was already in Belgrade
when news arrived of the mysterious death of Patrice
Lumumba, the prime minister of the Democratic Republic
of Congo, a former colony of Belgium, causing
disturbances around the city’s Belgian embassy. The
Belgrade police could not guarantee the safety of the
visitors and Antwerp won by an official 0-2.
Neither was Bora lucky in his third attempt, during
the 1964-65 season, because the obstacle in the
semis was mighty Real Madrid, with an “endless”
second game in which OKK Belgrade used a modified
clock to try to come back from a 23-point deficit. OKK
won 113-96 behind 56 points from Korac, but it was
not enough. On January 14, 1965, incidentally, OKK
defeated Alvik of Sweden in the eighthfinals 155-57
behind 99 points from Korac!
Italy
OKK Belgrade’s good results caught the attention
of Gianni Corsolini, the general manager at Orasonda
Cantu. He offered Stankovic $1,000 a month, housing
and a car. Compared to what Bora was making
in Belgrade, that was a fortune, but he didn’t say yes
because of the money. He wanted to show, especially
to himself, that he was a good coach and that he could
do it away from home. It was a big challenge, but also
a good opportunity. Arnaldo Taurisano, his assistant
in Cantu, told me:
“Bora was a revelation for us all. He was smart,
polite, specific and liked discussion. He arrived not
speaking a single word of Italian, but in three months
he talked just like us. He was not a great demonstrator,
but he was a great manager of player personality. He
was a master at putting everyone where they shined
best. He was always nervous and suffered through
Borislav Stankovic
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Vladimir Stankovic
each game, but he knew how to be focused and give
good advice during timeouts.”
Bora built a competitive team, but with very few
players. He played with three big men: Alberto Melati,
Alberto De Simone and Bob Burgess, his great signing.
The previous season Burgess had played for Real
Madrid, who wanted to naturalize him as a Spanish
player, but he rejected it. Stankovic used his excellent
relationship with Robert Busnel, the French coach
who was at the helm in Real Madrid, to sign Burgess.
He arrived with an ankle injury, but recovered and
played great.
Ahead of him were three guards, including the
young Carlo Recalcati, who was the team’s top scorer
with 18.4 points. Cantu won the league with an 18-
4 record. In the EuroLeague, the team reached the
quarterfinals, but finished third in the group behind
Zbrojovka Brno and Standard Liege. The top trophy
simply avoided Bora’s hands, but it wasn’t much later
that he would be the one handing out this very trophy
to the champions.
Stankovic says his coaching philosophy was “very
simple.” A few years ago, I visited him in Belgrade and
he discussed this philosophy:
“From my playing days, I knew that we are not
all the same, we don’t share the same features and
skills and, therefore, we cannot do the same things. A
coach must study his players and find a role for everyone
and adapt his own philosophy to the possibilities,
and not the other way around, which is insisting on
others applying the coach’s ideas even if they cannot
make them happen. That’s why my idea was that on
offense, the most talented player should always be
the one to shoot. When I saw Korac, I never doubted
he would be our best player, our offensive weapon.”
Game of His Life
During that visit I paid to him in the Belgrade neighborhood
of Banovo Brdo, I saw the manuscript of his
autobiography, which bears the title “The Game of
My Life”. He was working with the prestigious Serbian
journalist Aleksandar Miletic to produce a book, written
in first person, with many details of his private life,
70 years of basketball, and the path he walked from
his beginnings as a player to becoming the top director
of world basketball.
Readers of the book, which was later published in
2017, will discover that before basketball, Bora played
tennis and table-tennis, that his mother was Czech,
that his given name comes from a great Serbian
writer with the same name, that during World War
II he lost 14 family members, and that communists
executed his father, among many, many other things.
It is emotional, dramatic, precise and contains many
previously unknown details.
His story is, at the same time, the story of Yugoslav,
European and world basketball. In 1991, Stankovic
was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball
Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts, as
a contributor to the sport, and in 2007, he entered the
FIBA Hall of Fame.
Bora Stankovic, a unique man and part of basketball’s
heritage.
Borislav Stankovic
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