The news of Drazen Dalipagic’s death reaches me and the first memory that comes to mind takes place in the pavilion of the Real Madrid sports city. We had finished training and, out of routine or because practice had been too little for him, the Yugoslav stayed a while longer shooting baskets, especially from his favorite place: the left corner of the attack. Before going to the locker room, I stay watching him, a real privilege when it comes to one of the best shooters in the history of basketball. The launches were repeated with astonishing similarity. His shooting mechanics were elegant, fluid, without any suspicion of effort. Seeing him with his height taking the ball from so high up, you understood the difficulty that his marking entailed, between difficult and impossible. The face, as always hieratic, of a serious man with a mustache. And most importantly, its success, beyond the reach of the majority. I told myself that as soon as I missed a shot I was going to take a shower. I stayed cold waiting.
Surely there will have been people who have been surprised that Dalipagic is a former Madrid player. It is not surprising, since his passage left little trace. He came backed by his tremendous record, where he accumulated medals in European, World Cup and Olympic Games, and also by Mirza Delibasic, a teammate in the Yugoslav team and who Lolo Sainz was sure to ask for his opinion. It seemed like a good move in the face of the great goal of winning the European Cup again. But it didn’t work. In sports, the collective or individual goals were not met, surely burdened by the rule that only allowed one foreigner in the national competition. This meant few games to play and being left out of the collective dynamic each weekend. Nor was his emotional mark deep, far from it. Since comparisons are made by the devil, it is also likely that he was harmed by the charisma of Mirza Delibasic, who arrived in Madrid a season earlier and who had us all, teammates, rivals and fans, in love.
Delibasic and Dalipagic were two superlative talents who, as my mother would say, were not alike in the whites of their eyes. Mirza was an artist, he played in tails, he seemed to float on the court, he attracted the spotlight, he made everyone happy in form and substance. He made himself loved. Dalipagic was something else, almost the opposite. Always serious, it seemed that he neither suffered nor enjoyed on the court, where he made no concessions to anything other than finding a place where he could receive the ball in good conditions to attack the basket. His prodigious doll took care of the rest. Delibasic was playing mus three months after arriving, an example of a meteoric integration process. Dalipagic always seemed like a newcomer, professionally respectful to the maximum of his colleagues, but without ceasing to be a strange element who, with the same discretion as he came, left a few months later.
This setback was no longer an exception in his brilliant career, which lasted a few more years, both in Italian clubs and in the national team. By the way, he was very close to doing us a job in the semifinal of the Los Angeles Olympic Games. In the midst of a generational change and with another Drazen (Petrovic) about to explode as a player, Dalipagic was in charge. As the good leader’s manual says, it had a spectacular staging that we couldn’t stop. The ordeal lasted until Díaz Miguel ordered a blessed area that ended up obfuscating the Yugoslavs, while Rattle Margall plugged them in, which was a pleasure.
One of the many ways to classify players is to divide them into creators and executors. Dalipagic was a textbook enforcer, a sniper, a tireless scorer, a record-accumulating machine. Close or far, with or without the bounce, any position in the attack was good for him to find enough space to achieve his objective. He didn’t understand nerves, game endings, sticky marking. Feelings are a nuisance for snipers. They charge, aim and score. Without further ado. What Dalipagic did throughout his career.
