BOGDAN TANJEVIC_31 Masterminds of European Basketball

Aito Garcia
Reneses
Bogdan
Tanjevic
National coach
in four countries
Bogdan ‘Bosha’ Tanjevic has his own
place in European basketball history
for many reasons.
His career ended in 2017 after a spell
as the coach of Montenegro, which after
Yugoslavia, Italy and Turkey made it four
countries for whom he guided the national team.
And there was plenty of success: he won the FIBA
EuroBasket with Italy in 1999 and took the EuroBasket
silver medal in 1981 with Yugoslavia. He also
reached the title game with Turkey at the 2010 FIBA
Basketball World Cup.
Tanjevic was also a club champion in five countries:
Yugoslavia, Italy, France, Serbia & Montenegro,
and Turkey. Moreover, he won the European
crown at the club level with KK Bosna Sarajevo in
1979 and, if that is not enough, a gold medal at the
FIBA U18 European Championship in 1974. During
his coaching career he took 13 titles, but perhaps
his main achievements were developing the many
players who became stars under his tutelage.
Tanjevic was born on February 13, 1947 in Pljevlja,
Montenegro, and enjoyed a good playing career. His
best years came at OKK Belgrade, where he played
alongside the legendary Radivoj Korac. At OKK, he
was coached by Borislav Stankovic, the future FIBA
secretary general. Tanjevic played at the first FIBA
U18 European Championship in 1964 and was also
there two years later with Kresimir Cosic, Ljubodrag
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Vladimir Stankovic
Simonovic, Dragan Kapicic, Damir Solman, Aljosa
Zorga and Mihajlo Manovic. Coach Ranko Zeravica
gathered some serious talent, and four years later,
the core of this group was the 1970 world champion.
Tanjevic is of Montenegrin origin, but he is truly
a citizen of the world. At age 4, his father, who was
an officer in the Yugoslav army, moved to Sarajevo,
where a young Bogdan grew up and started playing
basketball at his local club, Zeljeznicar. In 1966, he
moved to Belgrade to study literature, and among
his classmates were Danilo Kis and Mirko Kovac, who
would later become two of the great Yugoslav writers.
In five seasons, Tanjevic played 127 league games
with OKK, averaging 5.3 points. He also married Jasna
Selimovic, a Sarajevo native who was a great player
and a member of the national team. When his friends
joked that she was a better player than him, he laughingly
replied, “That’s not very difficult...”
The building of the great Bosna
The key moment in Tanjevic’s career came at the
end of the 1970-71 season. Tanjevic was only 24 years
old when some friends offered him the coaching job
at KK Bosna, the second team of Sarajevo, which was
in the second division at the time, just like Zeljeznicar,
his boyhood club. He was told there was a group of
young and enthusiastic talents who were willing
to work hard to build a great Bosna team, and they
only needed an ambitious coach. Tanjevic accepted.
Maybe he already knew that his future was not on the
court, but alongside it.
The first thing Tanjevic did was convince his friend
Svetislav Pesic, a guard at Partizan, to go with him to
Sarajevo. There, they found a young team led by Zarko
Varajic, a forward who stood out thanks to his scoring
skills. Bosna and Zeljeznicar finished the season with
identical records and, on April 28, 1972, they played
a tiebreaker in front of 7,000 fans at Skenderia gym.
Bosna won 65-59 and made it to the Yugoslav first
division. That was Tanjevic’s first success as a coach.
For the 1972-73 season, the only goal was staying
in the top league. In order to accomplish that, Tanjevic
convinced Mirza Delibasic and his parents to choose
Bosna and Sarajevo instead of Partizan and Belgrade.
Delibasic was already considered a great talent and
had been a European cadet and junior champion
with Yugoslavia. His signing was the key to Tanjevic’s
project. In only his first season, Delibasic was already
Bosna’s top scorer with 411 points in 26 games (15.8
ppg.), ahead of Varajic and Pesic. Bosna finished 10th
with a 10-10 record, and managed to stay in the first
division.
The following season the team climbed to fourth
with young big man Ratko Radovanovic as the only
new face. I remember the first time I saw Radovanovic;
his was a thin body that showed more bone
than muscle, but Tanjevic knew: “This kid will be a
great player, even an international,” he said.
As always, he got that right. Young players were
almost an obsession for Tanjevic throughout his career.
He was a coach who liked to work for the long
term. He needed time to accomplish his goals and he
always looked for an atmosphere where presidents
and directors had the patience to reap the fruits of
hard work.
In the 1974-75 campaign, Tanjevic had his military
service and his place was occupied, for one season,
by Luka Stancic. Bosna made its debut in the Korac
Cup and placed second in the quarterfinals group behind
FC Barcelona, having defeated the Catalan club
in Sarajevo 81-73. The following season, Bosna was
third in its domestic league and in 1976-77 finished
with the same record as Jugoplastika Split, 23-3. The
title was decided in Belgrade, in a dramatic tiebreaker
that featured a buzzer-beater by Damir Solman for a
98-96 Split victory.
Finally, in 1977-78, Bosna managed to win the
league title with a 23-3 record. That same season, the
team lost the Korac Cup final to Partizan in another
unforgettable game played in Banja Luka. Partizan
won after overtime, 117-110 (101-101), behind 48
points from Drazen Dalipagic and 33 from Dragan
Kicanovic, while Delibasic had 32 for Bosna, Varajic 22
and Radovanovic 20.
During the fall of 1978, Bosna started its adventure
in the EuroLeague, and after finishing second in
the final group of six teams (7-3), just like Varese, their
title game in Grenoble took place on April 5, 1979. In
an offensive festival, Bosna won 96-93, thanks to 45
points by Varajic, which is still the single-game record
Bogdan Tanjevic
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Vladimir Stankovic
in a title game in the competition. Delibasic added 30
and Radovanovic 10. In only seven years, Bosna had
gone from the Yugoslav second division to the top of
Europe. It was Tanjevic’s greatest work.
National team coach
The Yugoslav federation, with its style of making
natural changes on the national team bench, started
getting Tanjevic ready for the job. He started as the junior
coach and took the team to a European gold medal
in 1974 with a good generation of players, including
Branko Skroce, Rajko Zizic, Mihovil Nakic, Andro Knego
and Radovanovic. At EuroBasket 1977 in Belgium,
Tanjevic was the senior team’s assistant coach for
„Professor“ Aleksandar Nikolic, but he would have to
wait until 1981 to become the head coach and immediately
led the team to a EuroBasket silver medal in
Prague, losing to the USSR 67-84 in the final.
Before the 1982 FIBA Basketball World Cup in
Colombia, Tanjevic decided to sign with Juventus
Caserta without getting permission from the Yugoslav
federation, which he needed since he wanted
to share the two jobs. The federation didn’t agree to
that, dismissed Tanjevic, and named Ranko Zeravica
as a temporary substitute.
Due to language reasons, in Italy Bosha Tanjevic
became ‘Boscia’ and he stayed with Caserta for four
years, reaching the finals in the Italian League and
the Korac Cup in 1986. He introduced Nando Gentile
to the basketball world and brought Oscar Schmidt
to Europe. After discovering him in the 1979 Intercontinental
Cup in Sao Paulo, Tanjevic had promised
himself that, given the opportunity, he would sign this
super scorer. And he did.
The following stop, for eight years, was Trieste.
Tanjevic got there when the club was in the second
division and even dropped into the third division, but
president Beppe Stefanel had blind faith in Tanjevic.
Little by little, he built a great team with good Italian
players like Gentile, Davide Cantarello and Alessandro
De Pol, complementing them with two young talents:
Dejan Bodiroga and Gregor Fucka. Tanjevic‘s tenure
at Trieste came to an end in 1994, when he led the
team to the Korac Cup final before losing to a powerful
PAOK Thessaloniki team led by Walter Berry and
Branislav Prelevic, and coached by Dusan Ivkovic.
When sponsor Bepi Stefanel left the club in 1994
and switched his support to Milan, he took Tanjevic
and his core players – Gentile, De Pol, Cantarello,
Fucka and Bodiroga – with him. Together with Milan
holdovers Flavio Portaluppi and Paolo Alberti, the
team reached the 1995 Korac Cup finals, but fell to
ALBA Berlin in two games. The next season, Tanjevic
led Milan to the Italian League and national cup double,
but again his team lost in the Korac Cup final, this
time to Efes Pilsen of Turkey, led by Petar Naumoski.
One of the few unfulfilled wishes of Tanjevic’s career
was winning the Korac Cup, the trophy that bore the
name of his former OKK teammate. He tried with four
clubs, but fell short with Bosna (1978), Caserta (1986),
Trieste (1994) and Milan (1995, 1996).
During his stay in Italy, Tanjevic set a trend by
calling the great Aleksandar Nikolic for advice and
counsel, something that later would be copied, successfully,
by Boza Maljkovic at Jugoplastika and Zeljko
Obradovic at Partizan.
European champion, World runner-up
After one year in Limoges, France, starting in 1997
he took charge of the Italian national team and, at the
1999 EuroBasket in Paris, he guided the team to the
gold medal by defeating Spain in the final 64-56.
In the second half of the 2000-01 season, he
joined Buducnost Podgorica and won the Yugoslav
League and domestic cup, and the following season
he surprised everyone by taking the French League
for ASVEL Villeurbanne with a young big man from
Croatia named Nikola Vujcic, who was on loan from
Maccabi Tel Aviv, as the big revelation. After a season
in Virtus Bologna, in 2003 Tanjevic started his Turkish
adventure that would last until 2014. He was national
team coach, coordinator and counselor. At the 2010
World Cup, he took Turkey to a silver medal, the
biggest success ever in Turkish basketball. Between
2007 and 2010 he also coached Fenerbahce and won
two domestic league crowns, and all those achievements
were recognized with his 2019 induction into
the FIBA Hall of Fame.
Bogdan Tanjevic is a very smart and polite man,
eloquent and with a great sense of humor. One of his
most famous sentences is on the definition of talent:
“It’s like a shorter leg, you can see it at once.” He
speaks with authority and trusts what he says. As a
coach he is temperamental, pragmatic and willing to
adapt his philosophy to the players he has available at
the moment. He likes to polish talents and give young
players a chance. When he signed Bodiroga at age 19,
for instance, he was the youngest foreign player in the
Italian League.
Tanjevic is also “Yugo-nostalgic” and says that he
doesn’t have a country anymore because his Yugoslavia
“died in 1991.“ He is a holder of Italian and Turkish
passports, as well as one from Bosnia and Herzegovina,
and he could have a Montenegrin one by birth,
too. But his country was the former Yugoslavia.
His true passport, however, is basketball. It
opened every door in front of him and put him in the
history books of this game. He belongs to a restricted
club with Alexander Gomelskiy, Aleksandar Nikolic,
Dusan Ivkovic, David Blatt and Zeljko Obradovic of
having won European titles with both a club and a national
team. Nobody else, however, has coached four
national teams. He also coached four teams in the EuroLeague:
Buducnost, ASVEL, Virtus and Fenerbahce.
He won five national championships in five different
countries.
Bogdan Tanjevic, quite a character.
Bogdan Tanjevic
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