<div class="quote_poster">Quote:</div><div class="quote_post">Darko Milicic officially became an adult Friday. But this boy's life ended -- and a young man's began -- several years ago, long before the NBA riches were at hand. Milicic (pronounced MIL-eh-CHIK), a 7-foot Serbian teenager whom the Pistons are expected to take with the second overall pick in Thursday's NBA draft, celebrated his 18th birthday this week in New York, where he has been living since his arrival in the United States on May 19. He celebrated with a birthday dinner, joined by agent Marc Cornstein and his wife, Natasha, and their families, as well as fellow European draft prospects -- and Cornstein clients -- Aleksandar Pavlovic, Slavko Vranes and Zoran Planinic. They also welcomed a special guest Friday night: Milicic's father, Milorad, made the long trip from Novi Sad, Serbia and Montenegro, to be with his son, who a few days from now will become the highest drafted European in NBA history. "And I think that's what has Darko most excited, the fact that his father will be here," Natasha Cornstein said. "This is a special occasion." This, in fact, is the American dream realized, both for the father, forced to leave his family in the mid-1990s for the front lines of a civil war, and for the son, who left a few years later at 14, lured from home by the hope his basketball talent might provide a better future. With that future finally upon him, Milicic, along with an interpreter, fellow Serb Predrag Savovic of the Denver Nuggets, sat down with The Detroit News earlier this month at the NBA pre-draft camp in Chicago to talk about his long, difficult journey from Novi Sad to the NBA. "Even still today I can't believe it's true," Milicic said, shaking his head. "But I appreciate the opportunity I've been given." A child of war Milicic, seated awkwardly in a chair that doesn't begin to fit his 7-foot, 253-pound frame, is full of surprises. But the first of them is his voice, as he starts answering some questions before they've even been translated. "My English is not very well," Milicic explains, smiling sheepishly. "But I understand everything." And this he understands quite well: Shortly after 7 p.m. Thursday night at Madison Square Garden, Milicic will hear his name called, he'll walk up to the stage to shake hands with NBA Commissioner David Stern -- the two actually met in New York a few weeks ago -- and he'll realize a dream he once considered unattainable. "Maybe then I will wake up," he says, smiling again. Milicic goes on to tell about his childhood. He grew up on the outskirts of Serbia's second-largest city, Novi Sad, on the banks of the Danube River in what was then in northeastern Yugoslavia. And on a dirt court near his house, he says he began playing basketball when he was 10, mostly just as a way to spend time with friends from school and those he would later join on a local club team. His family wasn't poor, Milicic insists. At least not until most families went poor during the last decade, following the fall of the Soviet empire and the violence that erupted after the breakup of the Yugoslav republics. A decade-long civil war in the Balkans -- a horrific episode of ethnic cleansing, failed treaties and NATO bombing -- destroyed nearly everything, including the economy: Inflation hit 3,000 percent, unemployment rates climbed higher than 50 percent, and everyone -- no matter their political leaning -- felt the effects. After Milicic's father, an imposing 6-foot-7 man who worked as a police officer in the suburb of Beocin, was forced to leave home, Milicic's mother, Zora, sold the family car. With the money, she bought a cow so her children -- Milicic's sister, Tijana, now 13 -- could have milk. Or so the story goes. Milicic merely shrugs when asked whether the story is true. "It was difficult, very tough sometimes," Milicic said of his childhood. "But it also made me the man I am now." Leaving home Boyhood ended almost as soon as he became a teenager. Yet Milicic was off to basketball, not war, invited to join a professional league junior team in Vrsac, a small industrial town about 100 miles east of Novi Sad near the Romanian border. The team was owned by Hemofarm, Serbia's largest pharmaceutical company and, although it wasn't one of the elite teams in the capital city of Belgrade, for Milicic, it represented a remarkable opportunity. At 14, he became the youngest player ever to play professional basketball in Yugoslavia. "I had to work hard. One of the reasons I went into the sport was to help provide for my family," said Milicic, whose mother -- 6-3 herself -- also played professionally in Vrsac in the '60s. "In the beginning, it was just a game for me. But as time went by, it became much more than that." At first, the money wasn't much. Minimum wage, actually. Milicic was given room and board and $100 a month. But by the beginning of this past season, he'd gone from sleeping on a pullout couch in a cramped studio apartment to a two-bedroom apartment in a newly built complex. His salary was bumped from $20,000 to $100,000. Still, there was no escaping the memory of war, even now. The Serbian prime minister was assassinated three months ago. And when pressed, Milicic will recount a story from his first season in Vrsac, during the 78-day NATO bombing campaign in Serbia that killed hundreds, if not thousands, of civilians. One afternoon in the middle of a practice, the players heard sirens first, then warplanes overhead, and then explosions that were close enough to shake the floor underneath them. Frightened, the team looked to its coach, who did what coaches do in Yugoslavia: He barked at them to continue their drills. "His generation, they literally grew up with war," said Cornstein, Milicic's agent, whose office sits a block from where the World Trade Center towers once stood. "That's all they've known. They all know people that fought, people that died. "That day in the gym, it's a poignant thing to say, but (for Milicic) it was, 'OK, this is your life. And this (basketball) is your way of getting out of that life.' Poverty is an incredible motivational factor, but war beats poverty every time." Growing pains Still, there would be a fight on another front for Milicic, whose obvious talent grew as he did. After dominating his junior league, he was promoted to the KK Hemofarm senior team roster. Only 16, Milicic found himself guarding a 40-year-old in his first game. ("Some of the players were old enough to be my father," he laughed.) And in many of the cramped gymnasiums around the league, he also found himself, at times, a target of abuse from opposing fans. "They throw chairs, there are fights," said Cornstein's partner, Spomenko "Semi" Pajovic, who played professionally in Yugoslavia in the early 1980s. "But in Yugoslavia, it's all about winning." Perhaps, but Milicic's coach, Zeljko Lukajic, spent much of his time grousing about the attention his young, would-be star was receiving, particularly the steady stream of NBA scouts traveling through snow and ice and treacherous roads to see Milicic play. Often, the scouts would get only a glimpse. Lukajic, who resigned as Hemofarm's coach this spring, rarely ran plays for Milicic, instead using him primarily to set screens for his veteran guards. "There's almost a resentment when you get a player like Darko," said Cornstein, whose firm is being threatened with a lawsuit by Hemofarm over the buyout of Milicic's contract. "The coach, the other players and even some of the media in his country are saying, 'What have you done to warrant this?' "Unlike here, where with a kid like Lebron (James) or Carmelo (Anthony, the other top prospects in the draft), we'll anoint them as the next Michael Jordan, in Yugoslavia it's the total opposite mentality. You are nothing until you have proven yourself. So, you have some ability? Who cares? How many European titles have you won? How many Olympic medals have you won?" Last summer, Milicic traveled to the United States for the first time as a member of the Yugoslavian team in the Global Games, an annual under-22 tournament in Dallas. Two dozen NBA scouts were on hand to watch Milicic in his first game, but that was it: He was inexplicably benched for the final three games of the tournament. "I had every NBA team coming up to me asking, 'Why isn't he playing?' and 'Why are you hiding him?'" Cornstein said. "I mean, come on, if I was going to hide him I wouldn't fly him around the world. But this coach thought, 'Everybody's here to see this kid? Well, he's not bigger than my team, so I'm going to sit him on the bench.' "It's not that it's right or wrong. It's just the culture." The European way To be sure, basketball is a big part of the culture in Yugoslavia -- a religion of sorts, and one of the few shared beliefs in a region ripped apart by war. Last summer, when Yugoslavia upset the United States and went on to defeat Argentina for the gold medal at the 2002 World Championships in Indianapolis, they were celebrating the victory not just in Belgrade, but also in Kosovo and Croatia. As a result of this New World Order in basketball, the NBA international scouts -- and the Pistons' Tony Ronzone is widely viewed as the best -- are a busy lot these days. Nearly a third of the first-round picks Thursday figure to be Europeans, including a handful of Yugoslavians. Scouts and general managers in the league will tell you it's because the players there have been better schooled in the fundamentals and teamwork than many American players. (Ever since his move to Vrsac, Milicic has spent six hours a day training for a basketball career.) The scouts also will tell you the talent level in the European pro leagues -- and the passion for the game, too -- is higher than in Division I college basketball. "The European kids today, they're like the old ghetto kids, when basketball was a means to get an education," said Pistons Coach Larry Brown, who will lead the U.S. national team at an Olympic qualifying tournament in Puerto Rico this August. "The European kids are pretty easy to coach. Because they do respect the game, they do appreciate their opportunity to play, and they haven't been told from the time they're 14 years old that they're the best. "We've started to treat basketball as an individual sport here in our country. In Europe, they respect playing the right way, and they love making basketball plays." Coming to America Cornstein, a personable 32-year-old New Yorker, sensed this several years ago. The president of Pinnacle Management and a rising star in the agent business, he saw a relatively untapped market in Eastern Europe, and with the help of Pajovic and European point man Dragan Delic, he has built his own basketball pipeline from Yugoslavia to the NBA. Milicic isn't merely the prize catch, however. He's practically an adopted son, as are Cornstein's other clients in this year's draft. Pavlovic and Vranes, who at 7-foot-6 will become the NBA's tallest player, also are Serbian, and Planinic is from Croatia. The four are living within a few blocks of the Cornstein's upper East Side apartment in Manhattan, and they're over for breakfast each morning. They're out on the town, too, many nights, sampling upscale restaurants like Il Mulino and Mr. Chow's, where a few weeks ago they were seated at a table next to Mariah Carey. Of course, Milicic, who has a girlfriend back in Serbia, seemed more interested in his dinner that night than the diva. They've visited the Chrysler Building and toured the United Nations, but the sightseeing -- and shopping for clothes and hip-hop CDs -- takes a backseat to basketball, and it's off for a daily workout each morning at nearby John Jay College. That's where Milicic wowed the Pistons' staff with an impromptu workout last month during the Eastern Conference finals, only hours before the Pistons would luck into the No. 2 pick in the NBA draft lottery. That was the day the Pistons' fate was sealed, and not just by an envelope. Pistons President Joe Dumars was practically dumbfounded seeing Milicic's skill level in person, as were some of the players -- including Rip Hamilton and Ben Wallace -- who wandered over from their own practice to see what all the fuss was about. "You just started seeing a lot of jaws dropping," Cornstein said. Dumars said: "Impressive. Very impressive." Since then, of course, Milicic has traveled to Detroit for another workout, if only to confirm both parties' mutual interest. A second look at the raw numbers didn't hurt, either. Milicic, 7 feet and growing, had jaws dropping again with his quick feet -- he nearly set a franchise record with his time in a shuttle drill. In Chicago, he matched or beat Anthony, the likely No. 3 pick Thursday, in nearly every strength and agility test. On the court, he draws comparisons to a variety of players, most notably NBA All-Stars Kevin Garnett and Dirk Nowitzki -- "a miracle guy," Milicic says, nodding. But it also bears noting that even Nowitzki, a German who is now a star with the Dallas Mavericks, barely got off the bench as a rookie. "I appreciate the comparisons to all the players, guys I've watched on TV," said Milicic, a fluid, left-handed jump shooter who is ambidextrous around the basket. "But I expect some time in the near future to establish myself in the league. I'm looking forward to making my own name." 'The final piece' The Pistons hope he will do just that, providing a much-needed inside scoring presence and a matchup nightmare for opponents. Brown will get his first look at the future in two weeks when Milicic is expected to join the Pistons' summer-league team in Orlando, Fla. But with the Pistons coming off back-to-back 50-victory seasons, Milicic won't be asked to do too much in his first season. "I think it's an ideal situation," Cornstein said. "It's funny, and I was talking to Joe about this: The last time we could think of something like this happening was when James Worthy got drafted by the Lakers. I mean, it's a really unique situation. "Most rookies when they come in as a top-three pick, they're viewed as 'The Savior' -- and that's a lot of pressure. Here, at the most, he's going to be looked at as maybe the final piece to the puzzle." Milicic, for his part, appears to have no time for puzzles. He stands to make at least $11 million in a guaranteed three-year deal as the No. 2 pick, and he already has endorsement deals with the And1 shoe company and Upper Deck trading cards. But he remains thoroughly unimpressed, at least outwardly so, by the prospect of his own celebrity status. He is simply focused on proving himself, he said, and proving the dream wasn't a lie. "I've never really been afraid of a challenge," he said. "And this is no time to start." </div> Excellent article..amazing what he has had to go through..
