He Loves L.A. : Divac Has Gone Hollywood, but He Hasn’t Forgotten His Roots

Remember when he arrived?

He was more curiosity than anything in that fall of 1989, although big-time disappointment didn’t rank far behind among his teammates. They were envious of other clubs that were fortunate enough to get one of the tough-minded Eastern European imports, such as Sarunas Marciulionis or Drazen Petrovic.

The Lakers started with modest goals, something along the lines of “Come to training camp in shape,” and even that proved too much for several years.

An inability to speak English was the least of his problems. Avoiding the wrath of Magic Johnson--now there was a concern! Meanwhile, he went steady with cigarettes.

He lived the American Dream and world tragedy as one. He went from making the equivalent of $12,000 one season, and facing an army hitch, to training in Hawaii the next, living in Marina del Rey and working his way toward a contract that in 1993-94 paid him more than $12,000 a quarter. He had a tutor named Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and a teammate named Magic . . . and he would go home at night after a game, turn on the TV, see countrymen dying in the streets and hope he didn’t recognize any faces.

All that when he was 21.

“I could say now it was nothing,” Vlade Divac said of his path. “But it wasn’t.”

Of course it was something. It was more than most people could realize, this transition that has included the birth of two sons in the United States and the death of his country and a close friend, this change from a Yugoslav hero so beloved that his wedding was televised nationally, to Western capitalist pig. Few athletes in any sport have prospered and endured as much at the same time.

He has had five seasons as a Laker center with a sixth, as a power forward, starting a week from today. Vlade has gone Hollywood--”All the way,” teammate James Worthy said, grinning--and he is far from the stranger in a strange land anymore, but the transformation does run out of gas.

America, its culture so different from the Yugoslavia he grew up in, hasn’t changed Vlade.

“I think he has stayed the same as before,” his father said. “He didn’t change that much.”

Milenko Divac pauses.

“He treats people the same as before,” he concludes. “He likes people. It doesn’t matter which position these people are or which position Vlade is.”

Added Marc Fleisher, who met Divac in early 1989 and has been his agent practically ever since: “I don’t think he has changed dramatically, other than he is obviously able to take advantage of some of the perks that money affords him. When I first met him, he had one pair of pants, one pair of shoes and no sneakers. I don’t even believe he had workout shorts with him when he came over. I lent him a tie and a shirt to wear at the draft.

“He obviously lives a very comfortable lifestyle now. But I think he is still the same person. His values are the same. He is a father now, and that has changed him a little bit, but that would have happened to anyone, not just someone from another country.”

The changes in Divac, those who know him best say, have been outward. He still has the same boyish, infectious personality that Forum fans first took as innocence, that got him several roles in fast-food and razor commercials and TV sitcoms--Vlade, meet Al Bundy--despite a struggle with the language. It’s just that he now also has a six-year, $22.8-million contract that will pay $3.33 million this season, among the highest salaries in the league, a beautiful house in a gated community of Pacific Palisades, a BMW and a Toyota Land Cruiser.

There has been one other change since he and wife Ana came to Los Angeles.

He has found a new hometown.

“I’m a Yugoslavian who loves America--my kids are Americans, you know,” Divac said boastfully. “They’re always going to be half and half because they were born here and, I hope, live here, but they will always have a background of Yugoslavian. I’m still a Serbian, but with an American lifestyle.

“U.S. is closer to me than any country in Europe, except Serbia. After six years, I feel U.S. is like my second country. L.A. is like my real town. I have a city where I was born (Prijepolje). . . . Besides that city and the city where I was playing when I grew up and had a big apartment (Kraljevo), I feel that my home is here. When I go to Europe, I am homesick, but I am homesick for L.A.”

Divac and his family return every summer to Prijepolje to see his parents, who still live in the house where he grew up. Now, however, it is about 30 miles from the front lines of the 30-month-old civil war in what has become the independent country of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Ana’s parents are about 250 miles from the fighting.

This is also what has changed about Vlade: the people around him.

Take Petrovic. He and Divac were very close, teammates since their teen years on the Yugoslavian junior national team and talking almost every day when they first came to the United States, one with the Lakers and the other with the Portland Trail Blazers. It didn’t matter then that the big man was Serbian and the shooting guard Croatian. Then the war came, and a fence went up.

“He never called me back,” Divac said. “When I asked him, he told me it was because I am Serb.”

Divac tried to talk when they saw each other, even if only to say hello, but Petrovic turned his head. It was one-sided because Divac has remained apolitical about the conflict, but friends had become enemies on the other side. It hurt.

“They spent, like, 10 years together, staying in the same room all the time,” Ana Divac said. “They were, like, calling each other on the phone when they would have a good game in America. They were friends. Of course it hurt him.”

Divac thought he could get his friend back eventually. Then Petrovic, who had been traded to the New Jersey Nets, was killed in a car crash in Germany in the summer of 1993. Vlade got the news while watching television on vacation in Hawaii and cried.

“I thought when the war was over, we would have a chance to sit down and talk about it,” he says now. “Now, I no have the chance to do that.”

The climate with Dino Radja of the Boston Celtics and Toni Kukoc of the Chicago Bulls is better. Both are Croats, but don’t adhere to the hard-line stance Petrovic took.

“We are friends,” said Radja, the closer of the two with Divac. “There is no reason I shouldn’t be.”

Kukoc, meanwhile, says his relationship with Divac is “not bad. It’s not the same like it was before, and I don’t know really the reason why it is like that. Maybe because of the situation in our country. But that’s the way it is.”

That’s what gets Divac, how difficult it is to remain neutral.

He went to a church-organized fund-raiser last season in Milwaukee, which has one of the largest Serbian communities in the United States, because the money was earmarked for children of all ethnic backgrounds in his homeland. His appearance helped pull in about $7,000 in 2 1/2 hours, but some people later complained that he shouldn’t have helped either side.

Then there are the occasional letters, sent via the Forum, telling him what a bad person he is for being a Serb.

He says he handles those outside pressures well, and his play supports such a claim. Last season was his best yet. He led the Lakers in scoring (14.2) and rebounding (10.8) and, of all things, evolved into a team leader. Even Johnson, his “big brother” and part-time taskmaster, was proud.

“He’s more comfortable with the country, he’s more comfortable with L.A. as a city, and he’s more comfortable with himself as an NBA player,” Johnson said. “Guys have more respect for him now. Before, you could hit him and be over him and to the basket. That’s what guys would do. They would hit him with a sharp elbow and Vlade would go away. Now, you hit him with a sharp elbow and he probably will even hit you back. Either that or he’d take it out on you on the court.”

Which, at last, makes Vlade Divac, the person everyone always liked, the basketball player everyone wanted him to be. Now there’s a change. Years later, he has arrived all over again.