DARKO MILICIC
Toni Kukoc hails from Croatia.
So did the late, great Drazen Petrovic, a Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame inductee. He came first.
Then Stojko Vrankovic, Dino Rada and Kukoc.
And please note their countrymen who followed including Dario Saric, Bojan Bogdanovic, Mario Hezonja, Dragan Bender, Zan Tabak, Bruno Sundov, Dalibor Bagaric, Gordan Giricek, Zoran Planinic, Mario Kasun, Damir Markota, Roko Ukic, Duje Dukan and Ante Zizic.
Serbia proudly boasts its own crew, the most prominent of whom are Vlade Divac, Predrag (Peja) Stojakovic, Vladimir Radmanovic, Aleksander Pavlovic, Marko Jaric, Nenad Krstic, Zeljko Rebraca and Darko Milicic.
There are currently seven Croat and half-a-dozen active Serb ballers holding NBA roster spots through the start of the 2017-’18 season.
(Please do forgive my ignorance with respect to the “tilde” or the “virgulilla” and other appropriate punctuation placements/accents which ensure correct name pronunciation but alas, do not appear).
Of all these players who have come and gone as well as those active, nobody was drafted higher than Darko Milicic.
Darko Milicic was the second overall selection in the 2003 NBA draft, taking his talents to Detroit.
LeBron James was the first pick. Carmelo Anthony, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh — rounding out the top five — were among the many others drafted after Milicic.
In a checkered 10-year professional career Darko Milicic averaged 18.5 minutes per game and 6 points while banking about $52 million or $52,323,642 to be more precise.
Milicic wore the uniform of no fewer than six NBA clubs. His best season came as a member of the Orlando Magic; he backed up Dwight Howard and averaged 8.0 points and 5.5 rebounds a contest.
In the 2010-’11 NBA season he was credited with 140 blocked shots good for tenth in the league and his average of 2.0/game was the circuit’s fifth-best. His blocked shot percentage in three campaigns (2006-’07; 2007-’08; and 2010-’11) landed him in the top ten and twice his “Defensive Box Plus/Minus” was worthy of top ten recognition.
Not too shabby for the 7-footer, nicknamed “The Human Victory Cigar,” right? Or is this not the definition of grasping at straws? Damning with faint praise? Empty suit stats, especially for a player that size.
Darko Milicic holds the dubious distinction of being one of the NBA’s most epic busts of all time, joining the likes of draft history laid eggs such as Joe Barry Carroll; Pervis Ellison; Dajuan Wagner; Fran Vazquez; Darius Miles; Kent Benson; Jonathan Bender; Jared Jeffries; Jan Vesely; Eddy Curry; Danny Ferry; Joe Alexander; Todd Fuller; Hasheem Thabeet; Robert Swift; Anthony Bennett; Marvin Williams; Shawn Bradley; Jay Williams; Robert Traylor; Chris Washburn; Adam Morrison; Kwame Brown; LaRue Martin; Greg Oden; Michael Olowokandi; and Sam Bowie.
Certainly, there are degrees to everything.
Some like Carroll (1980–1983; 1985–1991) — selected first in 1980 (before Kevin McHale and involved with McHale’s selection — #3 — and Robert Parish in one of the most lopsided trades in NBA annals) — Ellison (1989–2000); Benson (1977–1989); Jeffries (2002–2013); Ferry (1989–2003); Thabeet (2009–2014); Marvin Williams (2005-present); Traylor (1998–2005); Bowie (1984–1995); and even Olowokandi (1998–2007) carved out niche careers for themselves which lasted for several seasons in each case.
Carroll, Ellison, Benson, Ferry, Bowie and Olowokandi played in college for four years; Jeffries and Thabeet for two and three respectively; Traylor for three; and Williams for one.
That Darko Milicic, drafted at barely 18, managed to simply hang around the league for ten years is a miracle in and of itself.
One of the many beauties of the 7’0” now 300-plus-pound and thirty-two-year-old Milicic is his positive, upbeat attitude. His self-deprecating nature and his robust, belly-laughing sense of humor stand him in very good stead.
These attributes were essential for a then skinny kid with the weight of all of his native Serbia on his eighteen-year-old shoulders.
He doesn’t mind talking about his abject NBA failure but that chapter of his life is over for him. “…I kind of feel like Old Darko died,” he remarked matter-of-factly. “Like, when I think about myself, or myself when I was playing, I feel like I’m sort of thinking about someone who is dead.”
And as a child in Serbia in the 1990s navigating through his country’s involvement in the Balkan and Bosnian wars, NATO bombings and the like, death was not a foreign concept to him.
In fact, it gave him perspective.
In spite of his imposing size and his improving skills, he had no delusions of grandeur because basketball was never his passion. It evolved into his purpose; he played because he thought he was supposed to play. He had no idols and he watched few overseas NBA games. He went with the flow.
This is not to suggest that his woeful play on the world’s greatest basketball stage didn’t frustrate him; it drove him nuts. He punched walls, he drank to excess and he pouted. He was a teenager an ocean away from home in a culture that was new and different. He couldn’t be the star so he thought he’d assume the bad-boy role instead. He was immature, impatient, impetuous and prone to outrageous rants. This kind of behavior endeared him to neither coaches, referees, teammates nor fans.
He wasn’t too happy with himself either.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the bank.
Darko grew up.
He became ‘New Darko,’ very much at ease with the calamitous track of his NBA career.
Today he is a commercial farmer at home with 125 acres loaded with apple trees, the apples from which he exports to Dubai, Russia and several African countries.
But he sees the next opportunity and about this he is passionate. Cherries are his vision. The financial return on cherries is enormous and the market is wide open, summoning him with the siren call. He wants to do it. “I want to make these cherries,” he gleefully proclaims. “I think it’s time.”
Removing the pressures and the intensity of basketball and all of what it represented to him, has helped calm Darko. As he knew that it was the right time to pursue his agricultural cherry operation, he recognized when it was time to quit playing. When he wasn’t offered a contract extension in Orlando he began to think about his exit. A $21 million deal with Memphis temporarily changed his mind and when that didn’t pan out, Minnesota traded for him — something he advised them not to do — and offered him $20 million.
Darko was like a very expensive 7-foot mass of clay to be molded in any number of ways with a gleaming finished product forever imagined, by everyone but he.
Even the Celtics thought they could do it and that was when Darko took over.
In November of 2012 after playing a total of five minutes in nine games Darko knocked on Doc Rivers’ office door to say goodbye. For good. Stunning Rivers but remaining unbowed, Darko Milicic commuted the sentence imposed upon him as a young boy. He was 27.
“Darko, what are you talking about? Where are you going?” Rivers asked. “You are going to play tonight.” Replied Darko, “Doc, that’s it…I’m packed and going home…In the center position, if something goes bad for the team, you have [Jason] Collins, you have [Fab] Melo…Doc, that’s it. I’m not playing tonight, I’m not playing ever again. Thank you guys for trying. It didn’t go well. I’m out.”
Darko finally wrested control over his life even though “everybody was trying to find a way to keep [him].”
He admitted that after all those years of pushing, prodding and pulling he had had more than enough. “I was so lost,” he lamented. “I really came to hate basketball, you know? I just wanted to come back home and live another life.”
So home he went with his wife Zorana, and after a brief comeback attempt with a Serbian team and an unfortunate foray into kickboxing which went about as well as his NBA career, he became intrigued by agriculture.
For some reason he was convinced that he could do it, that he could master it.
He traveled to Italy to visit famous orchards. He learned from the ground up, pardon the pun. He studied soil, growing patterns, tree heights and the ideal distance each fruit (apples in this case) should be from the tree’s trunk. He became expert in the many varieties of apples and how to grow them. He took great pride in his work which had become his passion, something that had been missing for so long in his life.
Within five years of retirement an estimated 60% of former NBA players are broke.
The bar for radically improving the financial habits and travails of professional athletes is lower than low. They are the perfect foils, the unwitting subjects of the smooth-talking duplicitous team of “advisors.” And of their families and “friends.” They have little experience with money itself or in business. Everything proposed by someone who wears a tie or a tailored pantsuit looks like a can’t-miss opportunity.
And nothing could be further from the truth.
It is thought that only one in 30 of the highest-caliber private investment deals works out as advertised.
For the risk-averse investor the template looks like this: 5% to private equity; 7–12% to real estate; 50–65% to blended public securities such as stocks, mutual funds, etc.; and the rest to alternatives such as gold and hedge funds for example.
With the extraordinarily-paid athlete — typically disinterested in conservative spending or the stock market — these percentages are turned upside-down.
Securities are invisible, unintelligible without at least a basic understanding and boring. The thrill of tangibility in the form of the more glitzy and glamorous nightclub, restaurant, car dealership, apparel line or ‘invention’ seductively turns the athlete’s head and transforms him/her into easy prey.
Jungle lions should have it so good.
Money slips through their fingers until there is nothing left. And then they owe.
The college kid who owes can get out from under faster.
Darko Milicic, with his compound in Novi Sad, Serbia (mansion, guesthouse, indoor pool, outdoor pool, playground, full basketball court, palatial covered open-sided outdoor lounge space, hunting room, weight room, man-made fully stocked lake…) and his aforementioned 125-acre farm, along with his fleet of luxury vehicles (Porsche Panamera; Range Rover; Mercedes S600; Custom Ford F-350 Truck) notwithstanding, has invested his money wisely.
$52 million according to Darko will last “about 200 years” in Novi Sad.
He had enough to sink into the pursuit of what turned out to be his real passion, his real purpose. Apples. He invested about $8 million into his apple orchard and growth has been steady.
Cherries. The next thing.
Passion and purpose give a person reason to be. To hope. To go on. To live.
Darko Milicic is living his dream thanks to that and believe it or not, thanks to his clear understanding of life and of his place in it.
[Editor’s Note: This piece was written by Mr. Kaplan in October 2017.]
