'Thank you for being my friend': The pure joy that was NBA Hall of Famer Dražen Petrović

Editor's note: We see the joy in sports all year. This seven-part series was created to share some of the memorable,ženPetrović happy, heartfelt and inspiring moments from USA TODAY's reporters and columnists. 

It was several weeks before Christmas, in 1992, and a white man from Croatia pulled me, an American Black man, aside in the locker room of the New Jersey Nets after their game against San Antonio. He said something that went like this: “Thank you for being my friend.”

His name was Dražen Petrović, a shooting guard with an almost mythical background. I was the Nets beat writer and we had become quite friendly. In fact, I violated one of the professional, and for me personal, edicts of journalism: keep a certain distance from the players you cover. That was impossible with Petro, as most Americans who knew him called him. He was the only athlete I’ve covered, in decades of doing this job, that I ever truly allowed myself to get close to.

That’s because there were few people like him. Petro, the basketball player, was the Steph Curry of his era. Petro, the person, was something far more significant. Kindness was in his bones, and that never changed despite a devastating civil war happening in Croatia. That war saddened and infuriated him. But it never deeply changed him. It never prevented him from seeing me, someone he’d learn was alone in New York at the time and a first-time Nets writer, and from reaching out. That’s how he rolled.

Petro smiled all the time. He asked constantly how my family was doing. He knew my brother's name. “Sit down,” he’d say, “What’s happening?” And we’d sit at his locker and talk. It was rarely about basketball. He wanted to know about life. About the United States. About me. About Black Americans.

Our talks became increasingly friendly and blunt, creating a feedback loop of trust and closeness.

Joy isn’t always linear. It doesn’t always come with tidy definitions and neat borders. It can be a huge moment or an event. Or it’s sometimes as simple as memories about an athlete you covered who made your job fun and deep, and who wanted to understand your world. And you, his world. And you remember him. And that brings happiness. This is the everlasting grace of Petro.

Michael Jordan, LeBron James and Petro

The 1992-93 Nets team was one of the most entertaining I’ve ever covered. It was coached by Chuck Daly, who previously won two consecutive titles with the Detroit Pistons. Willis Reed, yes that Willis Reed, was the general manager. Kenny Anderson, a New York high school legend, was the point guard. Maurice Cheeks and Bernard King, both four-time All-Stars, were later added to the roster. Derrick Coleman, a star at Syracuse, was the overall first pick of the 1990 draft and selected by the Nets. It was a charismatic and sometimes chaotic locker room, but a dream one for a beat writer.

The fact Petro was able to stand out with such a talented (and boisterous) roster tells you how talented he was. How talented? He once scored 112 points in a Yugoslav League game. In that contest, he made 40 of 60 field goals, was 10 of 20 from the three-point line and made all 22 of his free throws. He averaged over 20 points a game his final two seasons in the NBA, where he played for five.

"He had like 40 on (Michael) Jordan, and he was going at Jordan like, 'Yo, it ain't nothing. Give me the ball, I'm hot. I'm taking him,' " Anderson said in the ESPN documentary "Once Brothers".

LeBron James was once asked who was the best international player ever. “All-Time? Best international player of all time? Dirk (Nowitzki) or Petrović,” James said during the 2013 All-Star Weekend. “His ability to shoot the ball and he was very athletic. … He wasn't afraid of the moment, he wasn't afraid of anything, and you know he was awesome.”

Petro would come off a screen, get the ball, and in what seemed like milliseconds it was launched. If AI designed the perfect shooting form, it would be Petro’s. He would wreck today’s league. He’d be as good as Curry. No, actually, he’d be better.

“He is the best shooter I ever played against,” said Hall of Famer Reggie Miller in 2020. “I have never seen anything like it. Petrović had the quickest release I've ever seen and what made him so unique is I prided myself on working off screens, and you know working off the big men coming off, he was just as good, and we talked about footwork, arguably one of the best guys with that footwork at the shooting guard position. He was my greatest rival.”

This was the backdrop of our friendship. Petro was an international star but never too big to make a small fry like me his friend.

It’s been great being your friend, I told Petro in response after that Spurs game. That night, as he had for months, Petro asked how my family was doing. Even as he rushed to get dressed to make the team bus, he remembered something about where I grew up, and asked about it. Just out of the blue. When we talked about Petro’s childhood, he’d always get quiet. My home is so different now, he’d tell me.

After Croatia declared its independence from Yugoslavia, which is composed of many different ethnicities and religions, in the early 1990s, it was attacked by Serbia, which controlled the Yugoslavian military. The resulting conflict led to the deaths of over 100,000 people. A considerable number of the casualties included genocidal crimes against civilians.

The war destroyed more than lives; it disintegrated the friendship between Petro, who was Croatian, and Vlade Divac, who was Serbian. The two were extremely close. Then the conflict began. Their friendship, and its end, was one of the subjects of Once Brothers. Petro talked to me about many things, but that — the war … the deaths … Divac — he clearly didn’t want to discuss. But I still knew the conflict and loss of that friendship hurt him deeply.

That he was able to keep his game on such an elevated plane while his home nation was tearing itself apart always amazed me. But that’s what he did. That Spurs contest was a good example.

Petrović made a layup while falling to the ground and he did it in the face of 7-foot-1 center David Robinson. That tied the score at 96 with a tenth of a second left in regulation. Petro finished the game with 34 points and the Nets won in overtime.

After the game, he approached me, with that always-present Petro smile bigger than usual. Our talk went something like this: “Did you see that?” he said. “That was David Robinson.”

Me: “I knowwwww.”

I suddenly realized he wasn’t expressing shock over bettering Robinson. He was essentially saying: of course I beat Robinson. Because I’m Dražen Petrović. I beat everybody.

There was never a shot Petro couldn’t make. A miss was an invitation. He didn’t believe in defense. Only shooting. And he was good. Not gritty or a gym rat, the way some white athletes are often described. No, he was supremely talented and cocky. Super-duper cocky. He was one of the NBA’s most voracious trash talkers. Behind that cockiness though was a sincere glee over playing basketball. He loved the camaraderie and competition.

We talked about race a great deal. “We are the same,” he’d say. He meant all people are. He also knew the naivety of that but tried to use that as his guiding star. He’d talk about the racism in Europe and America. We talked about the beating of Rodney King, still then fresh in the minds of many Black Americans after an unarmed King was attacked by a group of LAPD officers in March of 1991. Riots spread across Los Angeles in 1992 after three of the four officers accused of beating King were acquitted on charges of excessive force (the jury didn't reach a verdict on the fourth).

"(Expletive) those dudes,” Petro said of the officers.

This moment, too, was the beauty of Petro.

'Petro’s dead'

I can’t remember exactly what time it was, but my phone rang late one day in June of 1993. It was Paul Silas, one of the Nets assistant coaches, who won three NBA titles as a player and was a two-time All-Star. He knew that Petro and I were friends. Silas was crying into the phone so hard I could barely understand what he was saying.

“Petro’s dead,” he said.

He kept repeating that over and over. When he finally calmed down, he told me what happened. I was stunned. Just several days before, Petro and I spoke over the phone, not long after he arrived in Croatia to see his family. He told me how good it was to be home again. As he spoke, I imagined him smiling as he always did.

Later, more specific details emerged. Petro was one of several passengers in a car on the Autobahn in Germany that hit a truck. He was ejected from the vehicle. He died on June 7, 1993. He was 28.

I ended up writing the main reaction story that appeared in the Times two days later. This was the beginning of it:

“The death of Drazen Petrović, a Croatian player who with the Nets became one of the National Basketball Association's top shooting guards, sent shock waves yesterday throughout this country and much of Europe, where his career began.

Petrović was killed instantly Monday when the car in which he was riding slammed into a trailer truck on a rain-slick road in Germany. He was 28.

Stunned Nets officials, including Willis Reed, the general manager, and Coach Chuck Daly held a short news conference yesterday to talk about the death of Petrović, the team's leading scorer in the 1992-93 season and a player considered to be one of the most talented and hardest working in the league.

“To me, it's like losing a son,” said Reed, who later broke down in tears.

Many of us who knew Petro did the same. Not long after the crash, he was posthumously inducted into the Hall of Fame.

It’s true that joy and sadness can sometimes be intermixed. I hate that Petro died, but I smile when I think of how kind and decent he was to me. To his teammates. To everyone. His game was joy. His life was joy.

Petro was joy.

Follow Mike Freeman on social media @mikefreemanNFL