Dražen Petrović

• 1. Introduction

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  Dražen Petrović scored 112 points in a single basketball game. Not in a pickup game, not in a fantasy league. In a real, professional match, against a club fielding youth players, on the 5th of October 1985, Petrović stood in Zagreb and simply would not stop scoring. He shot 40 of 60 from the field, ten of 20 from three-point range, and went a perfect 22 of 22 from the free-throw line. When he passed the previous Yugoslav League single-game record of 74 points, he had reportedly announced beforehand that he would leave the game once he surpassed it. He did not leave the game. He scored 112. The questions this documentary sets out to answer are not just about that number. They are about a boy from a small city on the Croatian coast who became a star in Yugoslavia, then Spain, then the NBA, and who died at 28 with much of his story still unwritten.

• 2. Roots in Šibenik

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  Šibenik sits on the Dalmatian coast, and it was there, on the 22nd of October 1964, that Dražen Petrović was born. His father, Jovan, known as Jole, worked as a police officer; his mother, Biserka, was a librarian. The family was mixed: Jole came from a Serb family near Trebinje in Bosnia and Herzegovina, while Biserka was from a traditional Croat Catholic family in Bilice, near Šibenik. Dražen was the second child. His older brother Aleksandar, who would eventually become one of the top point guards in the former Yugoslavia, was the one who first picked up a basketball. Basketball ran deeper in the family than that: the Petrović brothers were second cousins to Serbian player Dejan Bodiroga. At 13, Dražen joined the youth program of the local club Šibenka. By 15, he was on the first team, and Šibenka had just earned a place in the Yugoslav national first division. His scoring averages from those early seasons tell the story of a player accelerating rapidly: from fewer than one point per game in 1979-80, to 24.5 per game in 1982-83, a total of 1,202 points across 91 games in the Yugoslav first division.

• 3. The European Scoring Machine

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  On the 6th of December 1984, now playing for Cibona Zagreb, Petrović scored 44 points against Real Madrid in the FIBA European Champions Cup. He scored 29 of those 44 in the second half alone. When the two clubs met again in the 1985 EuroLeague Final, he added 36 more. Cibona won 87-78, taking the club's first European Champions Cup title. That was just the beginning of his Cibona years. The 112-point game against Union Olimpija Ljubljana came about partly because Olimpija's general manager had been late submitting a player registration letter to the Basketball Federation of Yugoslavia, leaving the club to field under-16 and under-17 youth players. Cibona's roster for that game was also mixed with youth players, but it included the 21-year-old Petrović, who broke the league record set in 1962 by Radivoj Korać. Petrović was one of only five Cibona players to score that day. The same 1985-86 season, he recorded 47 points and 25 assists in a single EuroLeague game against Simac Milano on the 11th of December 1985; on the 16th of January 1986, he had 49 points and 20 assists against Real Madrid; and on the 22nd of January, he made ten three-pointers against Limoges, including seven in a row in the first half. Cibona won the EuroLeague again in 1986, defeating Žalgiris Kaunas, a club that featured Arvydas Sabonis. Across his four seasons with Cibona, Petrović averaged 36.9 points per game in Yugoslav League play.

• 4. Spain and the Detour

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  Yugoslav sporting law at the time barred players from moving abroad professionally until the age of 28. Petrović was only 23 when he signed with Real Madrid in 1988, for around four million US dollars in net income. The NBA's Portland Trail Blazers had already selected him in the third round of the 1986 draft, but the legal and financial mechanics of getting him out of Yugoslavia required, by the account of his sports agent José Antonio Arízaga, bribing multiple individuals to work around the law. The season in Spain was both brief and brilliant: Petrović was the top scorer in the Spanish ACB League's regular season, and he still holds the ACB Finals records for most points in a single game, with 42, and most three-pointers in a single game, with 8. He helped Real Madrid win the 1989 Copa del Rey de Baloncesto. On the 14th of March 1989, in the European Cup Winners' Cup Final against Snaidero Caserta, he scored 62 points, matching a previous career best. When the season ended, the Trail Blazers bought out his Real Madrid contract for up to 1.5 million US dollars, and Petrović flew to Portland.

• 5. Frustration in Portland

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  Portland had Clyde Drexler, an All-Star, and Terry Porter, and little room for a European player still unknown to most American fans. In his first NBA season, Petrović averaged 7.4 points in just 12 minutes per game. When veteran guard Danny Ainge joined the team the following year, Petrović's playing time fell to 7 minutes a game. He had said before arriving in Portland that limited playing time was the only thing that could stop him. When it arrived, he did not stay quiet about it. He told reporters: "I have nothing to say to Adelman any more and vice versa. Eighteen months have passed by, too long. I have to leave to prove how much I am worth. Never in my life did I sit on the bench and I don't intend to do that in Portland." Thirty-eight games into his second season, with 20 of those games bringing him no playing time at all, a three-way trade with the Denver Nuggets sent him to the New Jersey Nets. Portland received Walter Davis, from Denver, and a first-round draft pick.

• 6. New Jersey and Transformation

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  On the 23rd of January 1991, Petrović joined the New Jersey Nets, a team that had not reached the playoffs since 1986. His new teammates included rookie Derrick Coleman, the first overall pick in the 1990 draft. Petrović was immediately given 20.5 minutes per game, and over his 43 remaining games with New Jersey that season he averaged 12.6 points, one of the league's best points-per-minute ratios. The following year he was a full starter, and he did not miss a single game. On the 13th of March 1992, he scored 39 points while shooting 65% from the field against the Boston Celtics. The Nets made the playoffs, recording 14 more wins than the previous season. On the 23rd of April 1992, in Game 1 of the first round against the Cleveland Cavaliers, Petrović scored a playoff career-high 40 points. His scoring average climbed to 22.3 points per game in the 1992-93 season, 11th best in the league. On the 4th of February 1993, he played 53 minutes and scored 35 points in overtime against the Seattle SuperSonics. He shot 45% from three-point range in each of his two full seasons with New Jersey, and his career three-point percentage of .4374 ranks fourth in NBA history. The American media honored him with selection to the All-NBA Third Team, though he did not receive an All-Star Game invitation. His teammate later recalled that Petrović was always first to arrive and last to leave practice.

• 7. National Team and Silver Medals

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  While Petrović was struggling for minutes in Portland, the summer between those two frustrating seasons produced one of his greatest accomplishments. In Buenos Aires, at the 1990 FIBA World Championship, Yugoslavia beat the Soviet Union for the gold medal. Petrović had first represented Yugoslavia's senior team at the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, where the side won bronze. At the 1986 FIBA World Championship, he was named MVP after Yugoslavia finished third, following a last-minute thriller against the Soviet Union in the semi-finals. At the 1987 EuroBasket in Yugoslavia, he returned with bronze. Then came the 1988 Summer Olympics, where Yugoslavia lost again to the Soviet Union and took silver. The 1989 EuroBasket in Zagreb brought Yugoslavia all the way, defeating Greece in the championship game, with Petrović as tournament MVP and second-leading scorer. When Croatia became independent and its own team took the floor at the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona, Petrović was the leader. That Croatian squad beat the post-Soviet team in the semi-finals on clutch free throws by Petrović. In the gold medal game against the American Dream Team, Croatia held a 25-23 lead after ten minutes, capped by a Franjo Arapović dunk and a subsequent free throw. The Americans ultimately won 117-85. Petrović led Croatia with 24 points. His final game for Croatia came on the 31st of May 1993, against Estonia, when he scored 48 points.

• 8. Death and What Remained

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  On the 7th of June 1993, at approximately 5:20 p.m., Petrović died on the Autobahn 9 near Denkendorf, close to Ingolstadt in Bavaria. He had been in Wrocław for a Croatian national team qualifying tournament and decided to drive to Zagreb rather than fly. A truck broke through the highway median while trying to avoid a collision in its own lane. The Volkswagen Golf carrying Petrović crashed into the truck. He was 28. The driver, Klara Szalantzy, sustained serious injuries; a second passenger, a Turkish basketball player named Edebal, who would never play basketball again after the crash, later said Szalantzy had been driving at 180 kilometres per hour, which was legal on the Autobahn. Petrović was buried on the 12th of June 1993, with a Catholic funeral Mass celebrated by Auxiliary Bishop Marko Culej of Zagreb. Before Game 1 of the 1993 NBA Finals, held two days after his death, the NBA held a moment of silence. The Nets retired his number 3 jersey on the 11th of November 1993. On the 29th of April 1995, a statue was erected in front of the Olympic Museum in Lausanne, making him only the second athlete to receive that honor. On the 9th of July 2001, after defeating Patrick Rafter to win Wimbledon, Goran Ivanišević wore Petrović's Nets jersey to celebrate in Split before a crowd of 100,000. Petrović was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2002, and into the FIBA Hall of Fame in 2007. In 2013, players at the FIBA EuroBasket voted him the best European basketball player in history. The memorial center in Zagreb, opened to the public at the end of December 2006 and housing 1,000 memorabilia items, keeps his No. 3 jersey and the watch that stopped when he died.