The last game of basketball Dražen Petrović ever played was undramatic. It was a Sunday in June 1993, and the 6ft 5in shooting guard walked off the court for the final time, his Croatia team having narrowly lost a European Championship qualifier against Slovenia in Wrocław, Poland. Still, Petrović – the team’s icon, then riding high in the US NBA – had managed to net 30 points.
The rest of the Croatian team said goodbye to “Petro” and flew back to Zagreb via Frankfurt. Petrović had decided to skip the last leg of the journey and travel to the Croatian capital by car with his new girlfriend. He didn’t make it back alive.
In the early evening of Monday, June 7, on a rainy autobahn near Ingolstadt, Germany, a small red Volkswagen Golf barrelled south towards Munich. In the northbound lanes, a tanker truck from the Netherlands had swerved to avoid a car that had cut in front of it and crashed through the median barrier. It came to a stop across three southbound lanes.
The lorry driver leaped out, frantically waving at the oncoming traffic. Klara Szalantzy, doing an estimated 112mph in the Golf, saw him too late. She braked, lost control, hit the guardrail and then the Volkswagen smashed into the truck’s right side.
Petrović had been asleep in the passenger seat. Wearing no seatbelt, he was killed instantly. His gold watch, broken in the impact, was stuck forever at the time of his death – 5.20pm.
“Impossible…” read the headline in the Croatian daily, Večernji list. “God, why have you taken him away?,” the Croatian sports daily, Sportske novosti asked on its front page.
When news of the tragedy broke, Croatia’s president Franjo Tuđman was in China on a diplomatic visit. “[Petrović] will always be known as a man who engaged in the nobility of [sports] and who took care of the reputation of his homeland abroad,” he said, in a public statement that missed the mood of a suddenly stricken nation.
“Dražen is the biggest sports star we’ve ever had here in Croatia,” film director Danilo Šerbedžija explains in the lobby of the Hotel Dubrovnik in central Zagreb. It’s quite a statement given that the country has produced great footballers like Luka Modrić and Davor Šuker and appeared in the 2018 World Cup final.
Warming to his theme, Šerbedžija remembers: “On the court, Dražen was a killer, a fantastic player. But in his private life, he was childish and kind of innocent. He always had a smile on his face and was a practical joker.”
The Croatian director gets emotional when talking about Petrović’s death. He still remembers hearing the news. “I couldn’t believe it. I was lying in bed, and I started crying,” he said. “Then I went out onto the street, and everybody was crying. I later went to the funeral in Zagreb, but I couldn’t see the grave because there were so many people. Dražen died when he was at the top of his career. He was yet to give his best years.”
With Ljubo Zdjelarević, Šerbedžija is co-director of Dražen, a biopic that stars Domagoj Nižić as the tragic star. After a record-breaking run in Croatian and Serbian cinemas, the film is now streaming on Netflix.
Dražen recently attracted a huge cinema audience in Croatia – more than 50,000 viewers in its first two weeks back in October – making it the most successful cinema opening for a Croatian film in the last decade. The film is currently streaming on Netflix, ranking #1 in Croatia and Serbia and #2 in Slovenia. Its makers are now hoping the film’s universal theme of triumph over adversity can secure a streaming deal that covers western Europe and the USA, where Petrović was emerging as a recognised talent when his life was snuffed out.
“Dražen really had to work hard to become a great player,” said Zdjelarević. “His sporting biography is a very inspirational story, where hard work and success intertwine”.
Petrović grew up in Šibenik, a city in northern Dalmatia on the Adriatic coast, the son of a Serb father and Croat mother. His elder brother Aleksandar was an emerging basketball talent, but by his early teens Dražen was taller and better, training seven hours a day, often alone.
At 15, Petrović had broken into the senior team of local side BC Šibenka. In April 1983, the then 18-year-old played a central role in the playoff final series of the Yugoslavian First Basketball League.
Everything came down to the third game against Sarajevo club KK Bosna. In the dying seconds, referee Ilija Matijević awarded two free throws to Petrović. He netted both, to secure an 83-82 win for Šibenka. The celebrations didn’t last long though.
Less than 24 hours later, the Yugoslav Basketball Federation stripped Šibenka of the championship title. There was, allegedly, a referee error regarding the Petrović foul. That was the official story anyway.
In April 2023, on the 40th anniversary of the game, Matijević revealed that Yugoslav authorities had taken the title back from Šibenka: “The situation in [Yugoslavia] was already unstable, especially after the death of President Tito,” the 84-year-old explained. “Sarajevo was [about to host] the Winter Olympics in 1984, so they needed a club from [the Bosnian capital] to show themselves to be successful.”
A rematch was thus arranged at a neutral venue, in Novi Sad: the capital city of Vojvodina, an autonomous province in Serbia. But Petrović told the Yugoslav press he wouldn’t travel.
His teammates backed him. Without a ball being thrown, KK Bosna were declared champions of Yugoslavia. Šibenik, meanwhile, waited a full season to return the winning trophy.
During that season, Petrović completed his military service in the Yugoslav army. In 1984, he joined Zagreb’s KK Cibona, winning both the Yugoslav championship and the national cup in his first season. In October 1985, Petrović scored a record 112 points for Cibona against Slovenian team KK Union Olimpija and ended the season by leading Cibona to their first European Champions Cup, scoring 36 points against Real Madrid in the final. He was dubbed “the Mozart of Basketball”.
In October 1988, the Spanish giants signed Petrović for an estimated $4m, adding him to an all-star lineup that included Fernando Martín – Spain’s greatest ever basketball player, who would also die in a car crash, aged 27, in December 1989. Petrović spent just one season at the Whites, where he played 47 games, and won the King’s Cup and the Saporta Cup. In the final of the latter. Petrović scored a remarkable 62 points as Real beat Italian club Snaidero Caserta 117-113 after overtime.
Petrović was also standing out at national level. At the FIBA World Championship held in Madrid in July 1986, Yugoslavia finished third and Petrović received the tournament’s Most Valuable Player (MVP) award. In August 1990, Yugoslavia became world champions for the third time, beating the Soviet Union 92-75 in Buenos Aires.
“This is without doubt the best generation ever of Yugoslavian basketball players,” coach Dušan Ivković told the Washington Post after the historic victory. It was an accurate assessment. His team had several Balkan NBA superstars, including Vlade Divac (LA Lakers) Žarko Paspalj (San Antonio Spurs), and, of course, Petrović, who had just signed with the Portland Trail Blazers. “I remember watching those games as an 18-year-old kid, it was beautiful,” Šerbedžija explained.
The following June, the FIBA European Championship was held in Rome. The favourites, Yugoslavia, won the competition, beating the hosts, Italy, 88–73 in the final. It was the last tournament Yugoslavia participated in as a unified six-republic federation.
That Easter, a Croatian police officer, Josip Jović, was shot dead by Serb paramilitaries, becoming the first recorded victim of the 1991-95 Croatian War of Independence. The same month Yugoslavia were declared European champions, Slovenia and Croatia made declarations of independence, effectively terminating the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
In the summer of 1992, Croatia, then a newly independent wartorn country, competed at the Olympic Games in Barcelona. In the final of the men’s basketball, Croatia was beaten 117-85 by the legendary US “Dream Team”, featuring legends like Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson and Larry Bird. “Dražen was the only one who took that game seriously and believed it could be won,” said Šerbedžija.
Yet Petrović struggled to make an impact in Portland, a team dominated by the great Clyde Drexler and where in his limited appearances he was asked to stand, wait for a pass and shoot rather than showing off one of his greatest strengths – his ability to move with the ball.
A move to the rising New Jersey Nets, where he formed a formidable combination with Kenny Anderson and Derrick Coleman, suited him much better. In what would be his final season, he took the Nets to the playoffs while averaging NBA career-highs in minutes (38.0), points (22.3), and assists (3.5).
“There were other star players in that New Jersey Nets team, like, say, Kenny Anderson and Derrick Coleman, but Dražen was number one,” said Ljubo Zdjelarević: “He was also a trailblazer of European basketball. Today, look at other [Balkan] players like Luka Dončić at Dallas Mavericks or Nikola Jokić at Denver Nuggets, well Dražen was the first.”
Petrović’s final game was in Cleveland on May 9, where the Nets dropped their first-round series 3-2. Less than a month later, he was dead.
At a press conference, Nets general manager Willis Reed told reporters: “To me, it’s like losing a son,” before breaking down. Coach Chuck Daly, widely regarded as unflappable, was similarly devastated. One journalist said he “had the pale look of somebody who had been hit so hard in the stomach, the wind was knocked out
of him.”
Dražen concludes in the moments leading up to the fateful crash; the directors electing not to depict it. Szalantzy, a Hungarian basketball player and model, spent a week in hospital following the tragedy, but her injuries left no lasting damage. A third passenger, Hilal Edebal – a German-born basketball player then playing for the women’s Turkish national team – suffered a severe brain injury that caused amnesia.
“I interviewed Edebal over email. She has no memory of the crash,” said Zdjelarević. “Today, she lives in Germany. But after the accident, she never spoke with Klara ever again.” He says that Szalantzy, who later married German football legend Oliver Bierhoff, did not respond to emails and other messages.
Today, outside Dražen Petrović Basketball Hall, in central Zagreb, there is a statue of the greatest sports star Croatia has ever produced. Petrović is buried in Mirogoj cemetery in the Croatian capital, one of the most beautiful cemeteries in Europe.
“My mother’s grave is pretty close to Dražen’s grave,” Šerbedžija concluded: “So every time I go to put flowers on her grave, I take a candle for Dražen also.”
JP O’Malley is a freelance journalist whose work has been featured in publications including the Spectator, the Economist and the Daily Beast
