“I imagined I’d end my career with the Serbian national team. It was the first time I ever went back to a team I’d worked with before. I never thought I’d do that, not even if it was the NBA. But Olympiacos is different. I’ve always had a soft spot for the Reds.”
Which is how the great Duda, the nickname for Dušan Ivković, one of the top coaches in the history of global basketball (as Željko Obradović, who was the best man at his wedding, has been reminding for years) explained in 2010, on why he accepted the Angelopoulos brothers’ proposal and returned to his beloved Piraeus.
The port city where he had done great things back in 1997, leading Olympiacos to an unprecedented triple crown, with victories in the Champions Cup in Rome as well as the Greek championship and Cup. No Club had ever achieved that before in the history of Greek basketball.
But Duda had done it before, in another land—and in his first year as head coach, at that.
In his person, Olympiacos found the individual that would turn dreams into reality – titles.
Having succeeded Ranko Žeravica (whose assistant he’d been) on the bench of Partizan Belgrade in what was still Yugoslavia, he won the double in his very first season (1978-79), along with the Korac Cup against the Italian side Arrigoni Rieti.
A basketball “Midas” – everything he touched turned to gold. Why? Because he knew how to work with young players and inspire them to be the best they could be. As for his being prone to feuds (which is an attribute applied to him in Greece, after disagreements with Nikos Galis at Aris and Panagiotis Fasoulas at PAOK and Olympiacos, and later with Giorgos Sigalas and Dimitris Papanikolaou, mainly at Olympiacos), he had this to say in an interview with state broadcaster ERT:
“It is my philosophy to use feuds to get players to play at their best. I can’t be bothered with early-morning training sessions, I’m too tired for them. They just never were a thing for me. I never liked cliques in teams, either, nor athletes who like to play the tough guy. I wanted order on every team I’ve worked with.”
And, truth be told, how could a man who had led what was perhaps the greatest European national side of all time—the great Yugoslav team of the late 1980s, with whom he won two EuroBasket titles, in Zagreb against the Greek national team in 1989 and again in Rome in 1991, and a World Championship in 1990 in Argentina—not be good at maintaining—and ending—feuds. All that was before that mega-team was ripped apart by war.
When Jure Zdovc had gone to his hotel room in Rome in 1991 with tears in his eyes and said: “Coach, if I play, Slovenia has threatened to declare me a traitor.” Well, Duda protected him.
With the incomparable Dražen Petrović as its maestro (about whom Duda once said “He’s more than just a Mozart, man, he’s an entire symphony all by himself”), the Yugoslav “orchestra” played other-worldy basketball.
European champions with Jugoplastika’s Toni Kukoč and Dino Rađa, the Partisan defense of Vlade Divac, Žarko Paspalj and the young Saša” Đorđević, Stojko Vranković, Zoran Čutura and Jure Zdovc, were the standout stars in a stellar team.
“If they’d let us play, I’m sure we’d have won the Dream Team in 1992,” European basketball’s “Wise Man” once said (‘Wise Man’ being what Panagiotis Fasoulas called him, with more than a touch of irony). But they didn’t let him try his hand at winning his heart’s desire.
His first teams in Greece were Aris, where he had astand-off with Nick Galis, though Duda himself had made it clear he never had a problem with the great player, and that others were putting words in the player’s mouth. Later with PAOK, which he honed into the best ever, European version of itself. Under him, PAOK reached the Final Four in Athens before losing in the semis to Treviso. Duda had lost Christos Tsekos just before the tournament, when he was seriously injured in a car accident, and the whole incident had cost him dearly. He also led PAOK to a championship title (1992), while his next basketball miracle was with Panionios Athens, where he worked extremely well with the young players.
Socratis Kokkalis brought him to Olympiacos to take over from Giannis Ioannidis, who had built a small basketball empire in Greece with four consecutive championships, but had failed to win the European title, losing two finals—one in Tel Aviv and one in Zaragoza.
Dúšan Ívkovič made that dream come true for a team that might not have played well at the start, but which gelled after the ‘Wise’ Serb hit on the brilliant idea of allowing the players to bring their families to a Christmas tournament in Madrid. It was Shannon Rivers, David’s wife, who, proposing a toast at the Christmas dinner, said something that left everyone speechless: “This team’s going to win everything!”
That’s precisely what they did, because Olympiacos was unrecognizable in the new year. Things started to fall into place and the squad found tempo. It was just that a defeat in Tel Aviv towards the end of the second half of the season that put them in the worst possible position (3rd), as they would now have to knock out two teams with the home advantage—the team placed second in their own group, and the top team from another group—to reach the final four.
With the Euroleague trophy, the legendary victory of 2012. The highlight of his career with the Reds.
Referee De Kayser might as well have been wearing a Maccabi jersey that night; with that look that…chills you to the bone, Duda had this to say to him: “You won’t blow that whistle at me again.” And so it was: he wouldn’t officiate another Olympiacos game until three years later, when Duda had left and Ioannidis had returned.
Olympiacos eliminated Partizan with two victories in Belgrade (and Duda found a plane at midnight from his homeland to Athens after losing to the Serbian team that had tied the series, so the team could fly home in the morning!) Then came the double triumph against the European champions, Panathinaikos, with 69-49 at the Athens Olympic Stadium and 65-57 in the Peace and Friendship Stadium. In Rome, he said it from the start: “The final is the semi-final against Olimpija Ljubljana,” and he was proved right as his team strolled to victory in the final against Barcelona. Ívkovič easily neutralized one of his own, Saša Đorđević, while he had already—since the quarterfinals against Panathinaikos—unleashed Rivers; playing side by side with Milan Tomic, the American had started scoring at will.
On the eve of the final against Barcelona in Rome, Ívkovič took his players for a stroll round Ostia, Rome’s port town, to throw pebbles into the sea—something he would later repeat in 2012, in Istanbul, when he took the team on a mini-cruise on the Bosporus.
That feat, the win in Constantinople, was perhaps the coaching maestro’s greatest work of art. The road there may have had some things in common with 1997 (a bad start, an upturn in the new year), but it one still unique. In his first tenure, he’d taken charge of a team that was a championship winner born and bred, and had only a European championship still to add to its trophy cabinet. In the summer of 2011, he had a team with a big contract (Spanoulis, whom he considered an unsurpassed leader), another great Greek player (Printezis), a number of promising young Greeks, but a management that was on the verge of quitting because of the situation in the Greek league.
It wasn’t going to be a far harder journey. Duda could have claimed his salary and left, but he chose the hard way and brought Olympiacos back to the top of Europe and Greece after an absence of 15 years! In fact, he wrested the championship from his best man, Željko Obradović, who had won it many times but lost the two main titles in his last year with Panathinaikos to Ívkovič, who proved he’d been right at his presentation by Olympiacos in 2010:
“For years now, Panathinaikos has had a stronger coaching team. But this year, they won’t have such a big advantage, because I’m here now!”
A man who did not hesitate to leap into the fray, if it was to defend his players, he was seasoned by hardship, born and bred in war. He was a great fighter; a warrior. He liked to relax with a good bottle of wine in the company of family and friends, but he also spent happy hours in his beloved sea view penthouse in Paleo Faliro and its roof, where he’d installed a dovecote for his pigeons.
Ívkovič inherited his love of the birds from his grandmother’s brother, the renowned scientist Nikola Tesla. His father, who had a doctorate in law and wrote several books, spent many years in prison for his anti-establishment views. When he got out, given his heart condition, he devoted himself to beekeeping.
