Jared Price is short and never played college basketball, but he enjoys a tie that binds him to a tall man who did. The former engineer of AncestryDNA, which links people to their past, is connected to Cougar legend Kresimir Cosic like no other BYU grad in the world.
The Price-Cosic bloodline doesn’t intersect for generations, and the two men never met face to face, but their very different worlds began to align in 2002 when Price opened his mission call from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He was assigned to the Slovenia Ljubljana Mission, which included Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia — countries that broke away from the former Yugoslavia — Cosic’s homeland.
“It was much like serving a mission in the very first days of the church. Nobody knew who we were,” Price told the “Y’s Guys” podcast. “It wasn’t long after the war and most of our church houses (in Croatia) were riddled with bullets.”
The people may not have known Price or the missionaries, but they knew Cosic.
“They had been through horror with the war and the Gospel of Christ was unbelievable for those people,” said Price, who spent most of his mission in Croatia. “Kreso — we owe everything to him. He opened the country. He became the Deputy-Ambassador to the United States. He convinced the government to allow the missionaries into Croatia in the first place.
“Every person I met in the church — they knew him. Everybody knew him. Our district president, some of the highest leadership in the church, they were all former basketball players.”
Thirty-three years before Price proselyted in the Balkans, Cosic pulled into Provo and during his time at BYU, he was converted to the church. After earning All-America status with the Cougars, the loyal countryman turned down a career in the NBA and returned home to play professionally in Yugoslavia.
Cosic’s career hit its crescendo in the 1980 Moscow Olympics, when Yugoslavia beat Italy 86-77 to win the proud nation’s first and only basketball gold medal. Throughout his steady growth of international stardom, Cosic kept a spotlight on the Latter-day Saint faith.
“We heard Kreso stories all the time. He was such a nice, big-hearted, generous guy, he couldn’t help but talk about it. It changed his life and helped him out,” Price said. “In just the perfect spirit of missionary work, he shared what he loved with his friends and his friends were touched by that. That guy changed my life in significant ways. I feel a lot of gratitude for him.”
Price’s mission ended in 2004, but his connection to Cosic was only getting started and the biggest tie that would bind them together was still years away.
Jersey retirement
On March 4, 2006, 11 years after Cosic, who wore No. 11 at BYU, died of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a jammed-packed Marriott Center gave his family a standing ovation.
Joining President Thomas S. Monson of the First Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints during the halftime ceremony was Cosic’s wife Ljerka and children Ana, Iva and Kresimir Jr.
The Cougars celebrated Cosic’s life and retired his jersey. Full of emotion, Price cheered from the stands, surrounded by his own family and former missionaries who witnessed Cosic’s legacy of goodness firsthand.
“It was awesome. Ana gave a beautiful tribute,” Price said. “His story is just insane. He comes over to BYU, he’s taught by Hugh Nibley and other great BYU scholars, and there is his famous quip — ‘There are a hundred reasons why I should not join the church and only one reason why I should — because it is true.’ He was such an incredible missionary.”
Translator
While attending BYU post-mission, Price taught Croatian at the Missionary Training Center in Provo. The pay wasn’t great, but the benefit he was about to receive proved to be priceless.
Two years after Cosic’s jersey retirement, in 2008, the Cosic-Price connection crossed paths again — only this time, it would be in a full-circle way Price never saw coming.
“The church called and invited me to participate in the translation of the Book of Mormon (into Croatian), which was wild because Kresimir did that,” he said. The previous translation was done in the mid-’70s by Cosic, with help from a Croatian Catholic priest.
“Sometimes there are events in life that just feel like they are destined to be, and for me, that was one of them,” Price said. “It was just unbelievable.”
As the only natural English speaker on the three-person revision project, Price’s job was as intense as it was arduous.
“I just came to have such an appreciation for the amount of brilliance in the Book of Mormon,” he said. “When you go through it at that level, and I have to get every word right — it’s not even just conveying the meaning, every single word has to be right. You just come away from that as a different person. It’s just a miracle. It was an honor and privilege to work on it.”
Today, Book of Mormon readers in Croatia have both Cosic and Price, among others, to thank for the translation — one, a national legend, and the other, a former church-ball superstar living a world away in Pleasant Grove, Utah.
Shoulder to shoulder
A statue of Cosic stands outside an arena that bears his name in Zadar, Croatia. It’s a fitting tribute from a country that refers to him as its “Father of Basketball.” BYU met up with Cosic’s family and played a game in Kresimir Cosic Hall during a summer tour of Croatia and Italy in 2023.
After leaving his mark in advancing DNA research at Ancestry, Price spends his time as president of Eddy, linking small businesses to software that manages human resources and payroll.
Cosic is 6-foot-11. Price is 5-7, but they forever stand shoulder to shoulder as BYU grads, Balkan missionaries, and as translators of the Book of Mormon into the Croatian language. For two guys who never met each other, that’s quite a connection.
Dave McCann is a sportswriter and columnist for the Deseret News and is a play-by-play announcer and show host for BYUtv/ESPN+. He co-hosts “Y’s Guys” at ysguys.com and is the author of the children’s book “C is for Cougar,” available at deseretbook.com