Winner

SVETISLAV PEŠIĆ, CELEBRATED BASKETBALL EXPERT AND SERBIAN NATIONAL TEAM COACH
The Life of a Coach Is No Fairytale
That is how he wanted to entitle his autobiography. Not only to explain what success is, but also how to achieve it. How victories could become illusions, and how defeats could be a cure. We still did not really understand what has changed in the essence of the epoch, we are still searching for ourselves and important elements of our identity, our real measures. At this moment, optimism is not sufficient, decisions are important. The courage to perceive and confront, to call things by their real name. The final outcome does not depend only on him and his team, he says, but also on many other circumstances. He guarantees about himself and his maximum in everything else: ”A battle of life and death!”

By: Dejan Bulajić
Photo: Private Archive

Different are the roads we walk. Some are shortcuts, some detours hiding road signs, for some we need guides and who knows what else, but they all have in common a multitude of traces, a network of steps and crossed fates, resembling one another. Only on rare ones it is possible to see traces of same steps, which paved their own path, different from all others, specific, leading towards an objective only incidentally shared with others. Svetislav Pešić (Novi Sad, 1949) is still paving such a road.
– Dreams are perhaps an answer to many questions. Yes… dreams. Without them it is difficult to put yourself in motion or, what’s even worse, we accept going after somebody else’s traces. I didn’t want that. At the time I began playing basketball, football was the most popular sport, as it is also today. Handball was also popular, we played it in schools. Basketball was marginal, but since the great triumph in 1970, when Yugoslavia became world champion, things started changing and more boys were becoming interested in it. I quickly fell in love with it and saw myself in basketball. My charismatic coach Zvonimir Minčić also contributed to it. Youth is abundant, full of strength and we can gain a lot from it, if we use it in the right way.

Does youth, just like its objectives, change in time?
Priorities change, especially related to the environment we live in. There have always been people who believe you can reach the top quickly. There are even more today. I have always explained that there is no shortcut to success. There is a sequence of steps. You cannot make the third step if you haven’t made the first two. Besides, young generations today do not accept authority. They are more aware than previous generations and ask for explanations about what is requested from them. Also, as it was in the past, the young want people they can trust and learn from. That is why we, older ones, must know how to listen to them, no matter whether we agree with them or not. The level of healthy communication is the basis of everything we try to achieve with them, because developing young people’s character is not an express restaurant.

Everything is changing, from character to habits. Sport is changing as well?
Of course. Sport has become a business, with priorities and objectives. Today many speak about those who, for some reason, sometimes don’t play for their country. They are judged, crucified, and I would like to ask such judges what they are doing for their country? Of course, I don’t think this is right, I am just indicating that circumstances in sports have changed. The individualism of an athlete is elevated, while the power of a coach is reduced. The influence of managers, parents, media is growing stronger. There are players who find more important what the media will say about them than what the coach will say, because the media can kill you or make you a superman. For managers, it is more important that their player plays well than the winning of their team, because he is the one who provides good contracts. Not to speak about social networks. They can make slaves out of players. These are all reasons why the player’s responsibility is greater today, and the pressure much bigger. In our time, we had less possibilities, but we were much more careless.

SEARCHING FOR A NEW SYSTEM

Contemporary parents of talented children?
That is a worrying story. Many parents forget that nothing can be done forcedly or in a hurry, and that can become a great burden, both for the athlete and for them, which often ends very badly. It is not good for talented children to blindly trust their parents, because they don’t become themselves and don’t turn their talent into supreme quality. However, besides parents, the influence of schools on the development of children is reduced. They certainly have an educational role according to principles set by educational systems, but their disciplinal function is almost entirely lost. The role of a coach is losing its importance in the eyes of people around children, from parents to managers, which is not good. Many coaches also depend on managers’ services, and only a few have preserved the authority of experts who set their own conditions.

The actual moment of Serbian basketball?
First of all, it is important to stop comparing it with the time of Yugoslav basketball. Everything was different then. It was a country with a population of 20 million, with the strongest league in Europe, with a myriad of talents, with well-organized clubs. Everything is different now. We are still searching for our identity on organization level, for the identification of talents and their selection, an applicable methodology of trainings in the time we live in. We should add the competition system, inadequate for the further development of basketball. Serbian basketball is facing enormous challenges. Our potentials are now evidently smaller, but its popularity is still setting high objectives. A question arises: how do you change it into new quality? I see no other way but to forget the past and search for a new system of organization. How to discover talents earlier, how to develop and keep them, in which environment, which way. It should be our number one challenge. It is also important for clubs to forget the club-self-centeredness, not to look after their own interests only, but the entire basketball picture. I know that many people today make a living in basketball. In the past people used to live for it, now they live from it. Their responsibility should be much bigger today.

Does working with the national team invoke optimism in you?
The question is how important optimism is at this moment. Decisions are important. Knowing what you want and how much you can do. Whether I will give my best is not an issue at all. However, the final outcome does not depend only on me and my team. It depends on many other circumstances. We are aware of the time we live in, how it reflects on sports results and how ungrateful it is to forecast anything. You can only guarantee for yourself, and regarding everything else… as our people would say: ”A battle of life and death”.

FROM RULES TO PHILOSOPHY

Your book My Game, My Path was recently published?
It was an entirely new experience for me. I have already had offers, especially in Germany, to have my autobiography published, and I believe that they would do it correctly, but I wanted to deal with my private life and my rich life experience alone, without hurrying and deadlines, calmly and responsibly. At the beginning, I wanted the title of the book to be Life of a Coach Is No Fairytale. My objective was to show the life of a coach, the social environment that created me, tell the story about my family, school, conditions that make a human inside of us. It is not a literary work, and it was not my intention to create one. I have written a lot while I was building my career, and the abundance of those texts shows me today how much I changed during the years, depending on the circumstances I was in. I know that those were my basketball rules back then, while today it is my basketball philosophy, matured through everything I have achieved in my career. I wrote a book I wanted to write. More or less everything is known about me and my results. But I wanted to write how to reach those results, what obstacles you find in the way, what you have to do in order to win and how to overcome the burden of defeat.

Really, how much did defeats help you build such a successful career?
Victories are a gift. Nothing recuperates better than them, they elevate your self-esteem, determine the faith in what you do. Furthermore, victories mean a lot to the team, they boost the mood and self-respect. However, if victories end only on results, and don’t show advancement in all other segments of teamwork, they can become an illusion. That is why defeats can be useful, if you interpret them in the right way. Defeats force serious people to think about what they are doing, to search for reasons of failure, to analyze. However, we should observe the present competitive conditions realistically. We live in a time when everything is subject to final success – victory, titles, trophies. Everything on the path to them has a relative value, both victories and defeats. Some victories are more valuable, some defeats more difficult, or the other way round. In any case, both victories and defeats teach you to survive in this requesting job, in which you never depend only on yourself and your own work.

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The One and Only
Svetislav Pešić (Novi Sad, 1949) lived in Pirot since the age of three until graduating from middle school. That is where he began his career as player (1964–1967), followed by ”Partizan” in Belgrade (1967–1971), and ”Bosna” in Sarajevo (1971–1979). He has been coaching since 1982...
He is the only coach who won European and world gold in all FIBA competitions in all categories. He is the only coach who was European champion with two national teams (Germany and Yugoslavia). He is the only coach winner of gold medal with the German national team. He is the only active coach who was club champion of Europe both as player and as coach (”Bosna” and ”Barcelona”). He was coach of the year in Germany (1992, 1996, 1998), in Spain (2019), in Europe (2003), selector of the best team of Europe in 1998 (Euro Stars Game).
He is winner of several high awards and recognitions in Serbia (Yugoslavia), Germany, Spain… He is member of FIBA Hall of Fame, 2021.

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Player’s Successes
Some of the successes of Svetislav Pešić as player include winning the Championship of Yugoslavia (1978), Cup of Yugoslavia (1978) and Cup of European Champions (1979). He achieved them all while playing in ”Bosna” from Sarajevo.

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Coach Achievements
During his career up to now, Svetislav Pešić was coach of ten big European clubs: ”Bosna” from Sarajevo, ”Alba” from Berlin, ”Barcelona”, ”Girona”, ”Bayern”, ”Zvezda”, ”Cologne”, ”Lottomatica” from Rome, ”Valencia”, ”Dinamo” from Moscow.
He was coach of the national teams of Germany, Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro), now Serbia. He won the World Championship in 2002 and European Championship in 2001 with the Yugoslav national team, and European Championship in 1993 with the German national team.
He won Euroleague 2003, FIBA Eurocup 2007, Cup of Radivoj Korać 1995, eight national championships and six national cups with the clubs he trained.