A 10-year-old pickup game, an unexpected photo shoot and the growing legacy of Nikola Jokic

LITTLETON, Colo. — The thick-bearded priest lowers himself into a defensive stance, inviting the shaky ball-handler in front of him to confess all of his basketball sins.

Radovan Petrovic is the spiritual leader at St. John the Baptist, the first and only Serbian Orthodox Church in Colorado. But on Wednesday nights he is the defensive stalwart at this full-court pickup game inside a picturesque Denver neighborhood called Grant Ranch.

Advertisement

Fail to box out and Petrovic will bulldoze his way to an offensive rebound. Try to get too slick with a crossover and he’ll turn a wayward dribble into a fast break the other way. Jog back slowly on defense and he’ll burst by you in pursuit of an outlet pass.

Legend even has it that at various points during the life of this pickup game of Serbian immigrants — a midweek communion of basketball, cold beer and endless laughs that began 10 years ago — the priest hasn’t been afraid to mix it up.

“I told him to elbow you on the first possession,” says Slobodan Radisa, one of the game’s original members. “You’re lucky.”

“No, I wouldn’t do that,” the priest contends, though his sly smile gives reason for doubt.

Petrovic may not have thrown a shot my way when I cashed in my invite to this cutthroat game of Serbian — and a couple of colorful Croatian — expatriates, but that did nothing to hide his competitive zeal for basketball, a game that has bonded this group for much of their time in the United States. It’s no wonder Nikola Jokic has spent a couple of his exceedingly rare free Sunday mornings listening to some of Petrovic’s sermons at the small church in Lakewood.

“They come here occasionally, and we appreciate that,” Petrovic said of Jokic and his close-knit circle attending St. John the Baptist. “We are all proud of Nikola and his success and how he plays. He is an inspiration to all of us.”

When Jokic agreed to a five-year, $148 million contract in the opening minutes of free agency, a deal that will keep him in Denver through at least 2023, I set to find out what this life-changing contract and Jokic himself mean to the Serbian people, particularly those now making their home in a city that has closely watched the once chubby, unheralded big man blossom into one of basketball’s emerging stars.

Advertisement

The endeavor led to the church with the hoop and the golden bell outside. It winded into an Eastern European market buried in a strip mall, where it became easy to appreciate how hard it must have been for Jokic to give up a certain culinary staple this summer. And it traveled, fittingly, to a pickup basketball game with a rich cast of characters, including Boris Pezic, the cable technician from Croatia whose deep Denver roots go back to his high school days at Thomas Jefferson High School, when he played against a rising star at George Washington High named Chauncey Billups.

“He was a man while the rest of us were boys,” Pezic says.

What I found at this intersection of faith, hoops and community of roughly 1,000 Serbians in the greater Denver area is a lens through which Jokic is seen as more than a basketball player. For some, he’s become something of a bridge between the country they left behind but still cherish and the version of an American dream they are pursuing.

“My son’s name is Nikola,” says Jeff Mitrovic, an executive at a hospitality company in Denver. “The name Nikola is important to Serbs because of St. Nicholas, a very important saint in the Orthodox Church. Most people have no idea. They say, ‘Is that a girl’s name? What does it mean?’ For me, having somebody like that with the same name here in Denver, now all of my son’s friends know how to say his name. They say, ‘Oh, you’re just like Nikola Jokic. We get it.’ It’s kind of cool that way. It brings recognition to what Serbians are about.”

So who is 8-year-old Nikola Mitrovic’s favorite player?

“He loves basketball and he really loves Nikola Jokic,” the chuckling father says, “but his favorite player is Steph Curry.”

Michael Malone began his own quest to discover deeper truths about his young, goofy and uber-talented center a little more than a year ago, just after Jokic’s breakout second season in the NBA.

Advertisement

Malone’s father, Brendan, is a basketball lifer who has always been his son’s biggest coaching inspiration. And the lesson from Malone’s father that has always resonated most is that a coach, even if he becomes a Beethoven of X’s and O’s, is nothing without the relationships he builds with his players, bonds that can’t just be cultivated within the framework of games and practices.

Michael Malone, with that lesson in mind, landed in Belgrade in the summer of 2017, a pit stop on the way to Jokic’s hometown of Sombor, where he spent time in the place that raised an unlikely basketball star. The Nuggets coach laughs now at how much the reception he received caught him by surprise.

During his first trip to Serbia (he went back again this summer), Malone was walking through Kalemegdan, a park built around a historical fort that features some of the city’s very first basketball courts. It’s where some of the country’s top clubs, like Partizan, were founded near the end of World War II. Malone was touring the area with Ognjen Stojakovic, a player development coach for the Nuggets who is from Belgrade.

“And all of a sudden this couple comes up to me with their baby and says, ‘Will you take a picture with our baby? We love the Nuggets; we love Nikola; we love you,’ ” Malone recalls. “I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is crazy.’ That happens quite frequently anytime I’m there. That speaks to their love of the game of basketball, but it also speaks to their love of Nikola. They only know me because of Nikola, and I understand that. They don’t recognize me because I’m Pat Riley. They recognize me because I’m Nikola’s coach.”

That Malone’s face is typically live on televisions in Serbia only at 3 a.m. has done little to limit his visibility. When he arrived in Belgrade last summer, Malone had barely passed through customs when he turned a corner and had a TV camera shoved into his face. Jokic had just decided, after a long NBA season with little rest, that he would not be competing for Serbia in EuroBasket 2017. The reporter wanted answers from Malone, who was quickly whisked away by Jokic’s older brothers.

“Them being so passionate about the game can work both ways,” Malone said. “They love him, but they also want him to play for their country. It all stems from a rich basketball tradition in that part of the world.”

When Slobodan Radisa was seeking asylum in the United States as a 24-year-old refugee two decades ago, after his father had been killed during the Balkans crisis, he was asked at the embassy where he wanted to go.

Advertisement

“I just said Detroit because of the Detroit Pistons,” Radisa says, puffing on a cigarette as night falls on the pickup game.

The Bad Boys of Detroit did indeed get the occasional air time in the former Yugoslavia, and Radisa, the one who playfully suggested that the priest welcome me to the game with an elbow, reveled in the physical way Bill Laimbeer, Rick Mahorn and that bunch played.

Radisa is thankful he instead ended up in Colorado, where it took him all of one day to find basketball. He met Pezic, the pickup game’s resident trash talker, on the first day he arrived. Pezic took Radisa straight to a basketball court in the neighborhood, and a friendship was born. The two have now been co-workers at Comcast for almost 20 years. Their elementary-school-aged children are friends. And every Wednesday night, their families arrive at the park after the games to socialize and share stories.

The friendships that began in the game have led to barbecues and ski trips. These guys have been a part of each other’s weddings. “We need another bachelor party!” Pezic says.

But it’s basketball that remains at the center.

“This game has been really important,” says Aleks Sargic, who moved from Serbia to Colorado as a 19-year-old in 2002 and worked two jobs to put himself through school to become a software engineer. “There are very few Wednesdays where we don’t find a way to play. There are different schedules, but all of us find a way to come down and play. We are very competitive, by nature, all of us. If this were a weaker game, we probably wouldn’t keep it going.”

For those who landed in Colorado from Serbia or Croatia or Bosnia — most of the game’s members came sometime between the mid-1990s and early 2000s — basketball brought quick familiarity. When Sargic grew up, the game’s rivalries were born in every neighborhood. Every apartment building would field its own team, he said, and each had its own court, though some were more well-constructed than others.

Advertisement

“On some,” Sargic says, “the rim in sloping down so much on one end that you may be able to dunk. Then you’re running uphill the other way.”

Milan Jankovic is a civil engineer who came to Colorado about 14 years ago with his wife and his infant son, Milos. A couple of years after his arrival, a Serbian connection brought him to the Pepsi Center. His wife was friends with the wife of Sasha Pavlovic, a Serbian-born forward who was then playing with the Cleveland Cavaliers. Pavlovic gave Stankovich and his family free tickets, and young Milos, who was then 3 or 4 years old, was mesmerized by the game.

“He’s been to so many games since then,” Milan says.

Milos is now 6-foot-6 and is entering his freshman year at Dakota Ridge High School. For years, he watched from the sideline at the pickup game as his dad and others played. But beneath an orange-tinted sunset last month, with his father at home still smarting from a painful run-in with a stingray earlier this summer, Milos reached the big game. It’s not hard to see a few flashes of his favorite player in this lengthy high school kid. His jump shot is true. He uses his long arms to probe passing angles and snatch rebounds.

“I hope he can be like Jokic. We like that kind of style, especially the passing aspect,” says Milan, who began coaching Milos during youth three-on-three leagues. “My son is really into that, but I’ve taught him another thing, and that’s that he must score. Here in America, the game is scoring.”

The first thing you see when you pull up to the church is the golden bell and the basketball hoop.

The bell is rung occasionally on Sunday mornings during the two-hour service. The hoop gets busy afterward when the kids are finally able to stretch their legs.

But on this particular Sunday, the children have opted for Nerf-gun fights over jump shots, the common areas of the church, so reverent minutes earlier, are quickly filled with shouts and shrieks and laughs that ping-pong around the walls.

Advertisement

This is the gathering place for many in the the city’s Serbian community. It’s a place of worship, yes. But it also a place to visit, play, eat and share stories about home.

“The Serbian Orthodox Church, it is center to the identity of the Serbian people,” says Dan Njegomir, who has researched the presence of Serbians in Colorado dating to the late 19th century. “It’s the only consistent force that has kept our identity alive through centuries of oppression. We’ve been conquered in some regions for the better two-thirds of the millennium, which has a big impact on our people. There wasn’t much standing between us and losing our identity besides the Serbian Orthodox Church. It’s a spiritual force, but it’s also an identity force. First and foremost, we’re Christians. But our church has also served to preserve our identity and our culture and our traditions. It’s so center to our being. It’s a hub of activity. To be Serbian is to be Serbian Orthodox. That plays a fundamental role in any community where there are Serbs.”

The conversations at the church cover all topics, and food is a favorite. While visiting the church, I’m told about a place called East Europe Market, a small shop on Colorado Boulevard. The sign on the bottom reads “Bulgarian Specialties,” but it’s easy to find treats that are a staple to any Balkan nation. Behind the glass counter up front are bureks, flaky pastries that are filled with anything from cheese and spinach to ground beef. These are a favorite for Jokic, and he recently told a Serbian reporter that he had given up eating them this summer. After devouring a couple inside the market, I decided that if Jokic can pass up on these, he’ll be easily able to handle anything that comes his way in the Western Conference this season.

The church is also where you find out about the game. Most are members of both, though some at Grant Ranch reluctantly admit they tend to be a part of the Easter and Christmas crowd at St. John. Faith and basketball are intertwined, each part of the fabric of life for a small but proud group of Serbians who have made a new start in Colorado.

This is a community its members hope Jokic will embrace now that his roots are set to be firmly planted in Denver for the foreseeable future.

“How cool would it be if he came to watch our game?” Sargic ponders.

Either way, this group built on a decade of Wednesday night basketball bonding will keep cheering on the 23-year-old who carries so much hope for a hoops-crazed nation. When winter comes, the pickup game doesn’t stop. It simply moves inside, to various indoor courts the group pays to secure. When those games end, the socializing moves to a bar, where they watch more basketball over beer and chicken wings. This group doesn’t have to stay up until 3 a.m. to watch Jokic. He’s right down the road, and they feel grateful for that.

Advertisement

“Everybody here will ask us where we’re from, and we’ll say Serbia,” Jankovich says. “Now we can say, ‘It’s where Nikola Jokic is from,’ and they’ll understand. It feels good for us to have that connection.”

All this adoration creates a fascinating contradiction within a 23-year-old who often finds himself wondering what all the fuss is about.

Jokic spends his offseasons back home in Sombor, partly because it is far away from the attention that finds him in Belgrade. It’s Sombor where he can work out in anonymity with his brothers, his godfather and Nuggets strength coaches Felipe Eichenberger and Carlos Daniel, who have made alternating trips to Serbia to work with Jokic.

It’s also where he can visit the stables and attend to his two horses, Dreamcatcher and Bella Marguerite. He introduced teammate Gary Harris to the duo earlier this month, when Harris joined Jokic in Belgrade for the city’s first Basketball Without Borders event.

“That’s his hobby; it’s a peace of mind where he goes and nobody bothers him,” brother Nemanja says. “It’s something that he likes, and everyone has something like that.”

Malone got a closer look at Jokic’s hobby than he bargained for during his most recent visit to Sombor. It’s a well-documented tale that, on the day Malone arrived in Serbia last summer, Dreamcatcher won his first race, leading to a night of celebratory toasts led by Nemanja and Strajinha. But Malone got a more personal race-horsing experience this time around.

“We go to the track and I’m thinking I’m just going to watch the trainer work the horse out,” Malone says. “The next thing you know the trainer stops the horse, gets out of the carriage and says, ‘OK, Coach, you get in.’ I’m from New York City. I’ve never ridden a horse before. So I go around the first time and Nikola and his trainer are both yelling, ‘Coach, slow down! You’re going too fast!’ I come around the second lap and they’re yelling, ‘Coach, you’re going too fast!’ I was just having fun with it.

Advertisement

“That’s his getaway, man. He loves it.”

But for all the joy Jokic finds in watching the rhythmic gallops of his horses — he’s no longer a jockey himself — he can’t hide the love he has for his people. You see it in Chicago, when he has to be finally pulled into the locker room after taking countless selfies and signing autographs for the large Serbian population there that comes to see him play.

So the fact that there are grown men wearing his jersey during a pickup game in Denver or others skipping sleep to watch him back home, none of that is lost on Jokic.

“I know they are watching me. They stop me in the streets to tell me they watch me and they’re following me,” Jokic says. “They are waking up and watching our games. It’s a good feeling to know people support you in that way.”

(Top photo: Players in the pickup game try to squeeze every ounce of sunlight they can before convening for postgame beers and laughs. Photo by Nick Kosmider, The Athletic. 

ncG1vNJzZmismJqutbTLnquim16YvK57k3BvaXBmZH9xfZdoZ3FnYmx8onmQaWSynZGnerC4w2anopubqr1us8CmnGaZnmLCr7HXqZycrJWZerG0zq2mZquYpLy1ecCnm2asmJp6qL7OsKCnn12hsqitwrJkqJ5do7asu8uaZKOnm56wcA%3D%3D