In the midst of the ecstasy of Denver, after getting his first NBA ring, a clueless Nikola Jokic was wandering the track of the Ball Arena. He walked as if nothing happened, as if he hadn’t just made history, as if he didn’t want to be there.
And I really didn’t want to be there. At 9:02 p.m., the exact moment when the whole city exploded in jubilation, probably in his head he was already in Serbia, with his horses, away from the spotlight and all the attention he still needed to receive in the evening.
This is Jokic, a basketball enlightener who does not understand protocols or celebrations. “The job is done, we can go home now,” he said as he closed the post-game interview. And it wasn’t an expression, for him it was a visceral desire.
Their story began in Sombor, a small town in the north of what is now Serbia, near the Hungarian border. In the midst of the Balkan War, Nikola Jokic was born on February 19, 1995. “I remember sirens, bomb shelters, always with the lights off. We practically lived in the dark,” he told Bleacher Report in an interview.
By 2001, when the conflict ended, Jokic was finally able to enjoy peace in his childhood. He grew up playing basketball with his older brothers Strahinja and Nemanja, but he especially grew up surrounded by horses.
“My job is basketball, but my passion is horse racing,” the Serb once told Tim Tetrick, a harness runner, a Hall of Famer in his sport and also a friend of Jokic’s. “I’d change your job in a heartbeat if they paid better,” the Serb told him, Tetrick told The New York Daily News.
And that’s how basketball lives, as a job. Of course, a job that he is very good at, or perhaps saying so is an attenuation, because Jokic seems to get everything unintentionally. Almost without making sense what millions of eyes have seen the Serbian do since his arrival in the NBA in 2014.
The Serbian has changed the way of seeing basketball. In the midst of a sport in which speed is increasing, the extreme passivity of Jokic always contrasts, which emerges in the midst of chaos to slow down time and prepare the next play, with the greatest possible relaxation.
Bam Adebayo himself, center of the Miami Heat, recognized Jokic’s genius after being defeated by him. “He makes the correct play in each possession. I feel that this is his best quality. He is always going to try to make the correct play, beyond whether he is marking or assisting. He is not interested, that is what makes him so dynamic”, he sentenced the American.
A selflessness that leads everywhere. When he was selected in the NBA draft, the center was in Serbia, sleeping, and it was his brother Nemanja who called him excited to give him the news. After the victory against the Lakers in the conference finals, he said he was surprised not to feel more emotion, and also yesterday, at the press conference, after learning that the title celebration would be this Thursday, he reacted with an incredible: “No …I need to go home.”
Jokic doesn’t want to celebrate, he doesn’t want to be the center of attention anymore. All he wants is to go to Serbia to enjoy the peace (and his horses). He delivered on the pitch, made history and now he wants to leave immediately, as if he hadn’t changed the course of the sport. And he has earned it.
His coach Mike Malone said yesterday that he “never changed with all this success and never will. It’s great to be part of a historically great player who is an even better person. And I mean it honestly: Nikola is a great, great man.”
Now we will only have to wait if we will see Jokic in the celebration parade. Or if, while Denver lifts his teammates to heaven, Jokic will be sleeping in Serbia, once again.
