Editor’s Note: First in a series highlighting the life of Kresimir Cosic.
PROVO — He galloped down the court, a kind of lanky elongated giraffe, handling the ball like a guard. He could shoot from downtown in the days there was no 3-point line. He loved to lead the fast break. He passed like a 6-foot-11 Pete Maravich, and his game was as unpredictable as it was entertaining. Kresimir Cosic’s passion for the game transcended borders of continents and time zones.
He drove down the lane like a tall John Stockton, finishing with underhand scoop shots or no-look passes. He’d pull up from 20 feet, his legs kicking up and then straightening stiff for an extra extension, and at his apex, he sent off a laser-driven, net-snapping shot.
Cosic was Jimmer before Jimmer.
He was part statesman, part entertainer, a bit of Globetrotter, Houdini and Magic Johnson all rolled into one.
May 25 marks the 25th anniversary of his death at just 46 years of age.
This is the first article in a series remembering Cosic through the eyes of those who knew him best, including former BYU point guard and recently retired attorney in the Utah Attorney General’s office Doug Richards, who I interviewed and whose memories of Cosic have been preserved by the Church History Department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Also used is a book titled “Kresimir Cosic: One Man’s Spiritual Journey,” by Beverly Campbell, and other sources in the public domain.
When I was a senior at Provo High, one afternoon I drove my 1963 Volkswagen Beetle near BYU’s campus by what was then Heaps of Pizza just off 800 North. Cosic was walking along a sidewalk near the Smith Fieldhouse practice fields, holding out his thumb for a ride. I pulled over, and he got in. He somehow crammed his giant frame into the passenger seat and politely asked for a ride to the newly created Marriott Center. As soon as he settled in the seat, he reached over and turned on the radio, smiled with his famous goofy grin, and began playing air drums to Iron Butterfly’s “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.”
This is a memory forever etched in my brain. At that time, Cosic was the big man on campus, a virtual superstar and legend. He was the Kareem Abdul-Jabbar of BYU basketball, a kind of comic book character, entertainer and performer. He was bigger than life as a basketball player, already a medal winner in the 1968 Mexico Olympics and doing things in American college basketball nobody had seen before from a big man.
To give the guy a short ride with the radio blaring? It was a big deal. I had no idea that through the decades, I’d be writing about him in newspapers and magazines long after he passed.
Cosic was born in Zagreb, Croatia, on Nov. 26, 1948, to Ante and Darinka Cosic, but he was raised in the city of Zadar, a coastal city on the Adriatic Sea that features Roman and Venetian ruins and is a popular tourist site for many Europeans.
“The basketball game he played was played 20 years later,” said Croatian sports writer Neven Berticevic, describing the boyhood pickup games Cosic took to the Yugoslavian national team as a 17-year-old before he put in a year in the army and showed up at BYU in 1969.
“I don’t think Europe has ever seen a better basketball player,” said Berticevic.
Cosic played in four Olympics including Mexico City (1968), Munich (1972), Montreal (1976) and Moscow (1980), where he helped lead Yugoslavia to the gold medal. He coached Yugoslavia to a silver medal in the Seoul Olympics in 1988.
Already famous in European basketball as a teen, Cosic is considered to be the first international player to enroll and star in the NCAA. He was the second European basketball player to be inducted into the Naismith Memorial Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1996.
In 2006, Cosic was inducted into the National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame in Kansas City, Missouri.
A boyhood friend in Croatia, who followed Cosic to BYU, is Misho Ostarcevic, an international and NBA scout who currently lives in St. George.
Ostarcevic remembers Cosic was taller than most of the kids he played with on the playgrounds of Zadar at about 6-foot-6, but shot up to 6-foot-11 in the course of one year.
“Because he was so much taller than the other kids, he was told it was unfair that he got to play near the basket where he could simply dominate everyone he played against. So there was a rule put in by those who played with him that he had to stay outside the key and play. Because of that, Cosic had to learn to shoot what is now the 3-point shot and he practiced it all the time. That led to him being so good from the outside.” — Doug Richards
“Because he was so much taller than the other kids, he was told it was unfair that he got to play near the basket where he could simply dominate everyone he played against. So there was a rule put in by those who played with him that he had to stay outside the key and play. Because of that, Cosic had to learn to shoot what is now the 3-point shot and he practiced it all the time. That led to him being so good from the outside,” said Richards.
In Zadar, there is a saying, “God created men, and Zadar created basketball.”
Nobody from that city ever reached higher in the heights in the game than Cosic. There is a statue of him now in that city with a street named after him and the local KK Zadar basketball arena that looks like Utah’s Huntsman Center — only it seats 10,000 — is named after Cosic.
As a kid, Cosic led KK Zadar to Yugoslavian League championships in 1965, 1967 and 1968.
In 1967, at the age of 17, Cosic was invited to play for the Yugoslavian national team, and that squad earned a silver medal in the FIBA World Championship. Two years later, he left Europe for BYU, where his life changed forever.
Next: The paths of Granite High’s Doug Richards and Cosic collide, creating a bond that spans continents and decades.