Man, life can be cruel. Death can be crueler.
What happened at a private team dinner in Salt Lake City on Tuesday night shoved NBA basketball into its proper secondary place. Shoved it hard. That’s what awful human tragedy can do.
Golden State Warriors assistant coach Dejan Milojevic suffered a heart attack at the team gathering, some 24 hours before the Warriors were scheduled to play the Utah Jazz, and later died at a local hospital. Wednesday’s scheduled game at the Delta Center appropriately was postponed, pushed off to some later date. Exactly when? Nobody cared. The Warriors certainly were and are in no state of mind and heart to play the game.
Not now. Not anytime soon.
“We are absolutely devastated by Dejan’s sudden passing,” coach Steve Kerr said in a statement. “This is a shocking and tragic blow to everyone associated with the Warriors and an incredibly difficult time for his family, friends, and all of us who had the incredible pleasure to work with him.”
It seems to matter little at a point like this that Milojevic was a fine, accomplished coach, which he was. Even had he been a mediocre one, heartbreak for the group Kerr mentioned would have been equally as painful.
The NBA and beyond felt the same shock and pain.
“The NBA mourns the sudden passing of … Dejan Milojevic, a beloved colleague and dear friend to so many in the global basketball community,” NBA commissioner Adam Silver said. “In addition to winning the 2022 NBA championship in his first season with the Warriors and mentoring some of the best players in the world, Dejan had a decorated international playing career and was a distinguished head coach in his native Serbia.”
It is said Milojevic loved basketball, a passion demonstrated in his playing and coaching. He once pronounced in an interview: “Only those who have a sincere love for the game can handle everything with great success.”
In Milojevic’s case, consider the great success handled.
It’s extremely rare that anything gets in the way of a scheduled NBA game, that anything prevents it from going off as planned. It’s as though the bounce of the basketball is the be-all, the end-all to life itself.
But it’s not and it never will be.
The people inside the game are the be-all, the end-all. And that’s too often forgotten, too often a small footnote scribbled on a tiny corner of the scorecard, a mere blip to what really matters, who wins and who loses and by how much.
Sports are made to be so freaking important in a world hungry for winners and losers, always seeking, as was said so many years ago on the infamous old intro to ABC’s Wide World of Sports, “the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.”
Significant it is, though, to remember that such sports, most of them, are a uniquely human endeavor. Of those who closely followed Warriors basketball on Wednesday, how many were immersed in the worry that Golden State had won only three of their past 10 games, that they were three slots below the Jazz in the Western Conference standings, just three slots above the bottom of the conference?
Nobody. Almost nobody.
They instead were concerned about an assistant coach named Dejan, concerned about his colleagues, his players, his family, his friends. Yeah, we know, tragedy abounds. No soul gets out of here alive. People die every day in all walks of life. But it’s worth remembering at a sad time like this that sports are a part of life. That everyone involved in them — even the strong-bodied and strong-minded — is a human being, a part of the human family.
Making that clear in everybody’s head at more “ordinary” moments might make fretting over the final numbers on the scoreboard, the placement in the standings, a little less burdensome, might make winning just as satisfying and losing less difficult, might make cheering a little easier and booing a bit less common.
What really hurts is what should hurt. What happened on Tuesday night at a team dinner in Salt Lake City is what hurts, not what could have happened in a loss on Wednesday night at the Delta Center.
