He Likes Lakers’ Kind of Action

We all know where you get basketball players. The blacktop playgrounds of the big cities of the East, the cornfields of Indiana, the sun-soaked streets of Florida, college gyms from Illinois to Kansas to Texas and the suburbs of Southern California.

We all know what you get out of the Balkan states of Yugoslavia and southern Europe. Guys who blow up Nazi munitions trains, assassins who start World Wars by killing archdukes, guys who, when they say “Shoot!” don’t mean baskets. The tinderbox of Europe.

You get a Larry Bird out of French Lick, Ind., but out of Belgrade, Yugoslavia, you get a Marshal Tito.

Or so the stereotype goes. The reality of it is, when the Lakers got Vlade Divac out of the villages of Yugoslavia, they didn’t have to disarm him first or go get him by tank. He came quietly enough.

He came with a basketball and a pretty good perimeter shot. He could set a good pick. And he was 7 feet 1. Pro scouts don’t need to know much more than that. If you’re over 7 feet tall and have enough reach to steal pies off a second-story window and are agile enough to get out of the key in three seconds, it doesn’t matter that you can’t speak enough English to order breakfast at McDonald’s or that you tend to fall to the floor at every loud noise outside the building.

Where he came from, drive-by shootings were done by tanks and 88-millimeter cannons so that when people complained about crime in the streets of America, Divac could look at them pityingly, as if to say, “You think you got crime in the streets? I could show you crime in the streets!”

Yugoslavia is not a country, it’s a battlefield. Woodrow Wilson tried to put three religions and seven nationalities in bed together there and was surprised when it didn’t work.

Vlade Divac grew up in this ticking bomb of a land. But, instead of a gun, he picked up a basketball. “I was taller than the other kids, so it seemed natural,” he explains.

Since he grew up an hour outside Sarajevo, basketball probably saved him from being a casualty instead of a celebrity. A 7-1 target would be hard for a sniper to miss.

A famous national coach, Milovan Bogosevic, took an interest in the 7-footer--coaches all over the world recruit 7-footers--and Divac moved from his unpronounceable home village of Prijepolje to the comparative metropolis (pop. 30,000) of Kraljevo. He lived with a relative there from the age of 13 until he became a star player with the pro team Sloga.

The world found out about Divac in the Seoul Olympics in 1988 where his Yugoslav team won the gold medal, finishing second to the Russians who got the gold and ahead of the Americans who got the bronze. The American team that year had David Robinson, Danny Manning, Dan Majerle, Charles Smith and Stacey Augmon on it, but lost, if you can believe it. Yugoslavia had Divac, Toni Kukoc and Dino Radja.

But if the Lakers, who drafted Divac in the first round, thought they had a guy who would swoop down on troop trains or mine railroads, they were wrong.

Divac looks fierce enough with his menacing black beard, long arms and coal black eyes. It’s easy to picture him throwing a grenade or dynamiting a bridge, but Vlade Divac is an almost gentle giant. Although emotional, he plays the game with an almost mechanical efficiency.

Some key players excel in one discipline. Dennis Rodman rebounds. Dikembe Motumbo blocks shots. Karl Malone scores.

Vlade Divac does all of the above. Well, but not spectacularly. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, he’s not. Nor Shaquille O’Neal. He is not an intimidator. The Lakers sometimes wish he’d go to a weight room and bulk up to Shaq figures, get a growl, break a few backboards. Divac simply smiles. He enjoys basketball.

But what he does do, has done, is bring an all-around consistency to his team. He has 616 lifetime steals, 794 lifetime blocked shots and 6,079 points, which he piles up at a rate of 1,000-1,200 a year. His ratios are right on the money.

He is not a take-charge guy. He is a take-orders guy. Good Soldier Schweik. That’s why he is glad to see Magic Johnson back in the lineup. “Oh, yes!” he enthuses. “Such a great player! Such a great influence! I feel as if I have the best seat in the house some nights.”

The Lakers concede there are some nights Divac does act as if he had come to watch, not to play. “He leaves his concentration home on the couch some nights,” sighs assistant coach Bill Bertka.

Divac is just glad to be here. And why not? To go from line of fire to American millionaire in five short years is success enough to give anybody a sunny outlook on life. And, while blunting the fastbreak of Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen or trying to keep O’Neal from eating the building is no day at the beach, it sure beats crawling on your belly through fields of barbed wire and hidden mines in Bosnia, now, wouldn’t you have to say?