War is hell, but some wars — the kind of wars that tear a country apart along ethnic lines; the kind of wars that cause neighbors, best friends and family members to kill one another and commit unspeakable atrocities — are far more horrific.
Zarko Valjarevic and Marko Pirovic were born out of the rubble of opposing sides of such a war — a war predicated on “ethnic cleansing.” Valjarevic, a Serb, and Pirovic, a Croat, were supposed to be mortal enemies, their hatred for each other bred in their bones.
Instead, basketball at the University of Maine brought them together as something else.
“He’s my big brother,” said Pirovic, a sophomore, who at 6-feet, 7-inches with a strong, square jaw and broad shoulders, cuts an imposing figure, but he smiles easily and often.
“He’s my best friend since I came here; he’s family to me — he is my brother,” echoed Valjarevic, a 6-4 senior, who jokes frequently but smiles more subtly than his UMaine teammate.
“You can tell their friendship is really deep right away,” said Maine head coach Bob Walsh. “They’re both really intelligent — it’s not like they don’t know the history: They’ve been through it, they understand the history from their country. They get along so well, they’re literally like brothers on the court and off the court.”
The history that Walsh speaks of is what makes their brotherhood so improbable.
The horrors of war
The Croatian town of Vukovar was shelled heavily during the war.
The gunshots began in Croatia in August of 1990, pot shots exchanged in the shadows between partisans. At first, they were sporadic, solitary rifle rounds that echoed down alleys in the middle of the night, seldom embedding themselves in anything more than a brick wall.
But over the next year, the chorus of gunfire grew louder, joined by the snare-drum chatter of AKs, the broken glass and uncontrolled explosions of Molotov cocktails, the low thump of machine guns, the loud overhead whistle of mortar rounds, and finally, the horrific, eardrum-rupturing boom of artillery.
The fighting would rage across the former nation of Yugoslavia for more than a decade.
When the guns finally fell silent, and the warfare “officially” ended in 2001, anywhere between 130,000 and nearly 300,000 dead — mostly civilian — lay scattered across what would become seven countries. Hundreds of thousands more were left to carry on the physical and emotional scars of death squads, rape and genocide.
Both Slovenia and Croatia officially declared their independence in 1991, and Serbian-led Yugoslavia tried to pull them back in. With no shared borders with Serbia, Slovenia achieved independence in 10 days with minimal life lost.
For Croatia, it would take nearly five years of bloodshed, that would leave hundreds of thousands of refugees on both sides and charges of genocide and human rights abuses leveled at both Croat and Serb military figures. The fallout of the Yugoslav wars tore apart families and friendships, and was famously documented in the film “Once Brothers,” which chronicled Vlade Divac, a Serb, and Dražen Petrović, a Croatian, former members of the Yugoslavian basketball national team who would go on to play in the NBA, but whose friendship would be forever shattered by the war.
“It’s funny,” said Pirovic, “to think about that movie. We know it really well.”
“And we’re living the opposite of it,” said Valjarevic, finishing Pirovic’s thought mid-sentence.
First meeting
Valjarevic was born in Belgrade, the capital of present-day Serbia, in March of 1991, just months before war was officially declared. Pirovic was born almost exactly three years later to Croatian parents who had fled to Canada to escape the war. Both would be forever shaped by it, and both would find comfort in basketball.
“As a kid, there would be bombs going off, but I would be out on the court,” said Valjarevic, who speaks with a thick Serbian accent. “Basketball always calmed me down.”
“I felt like an outsider in Canada, sometimes, as an immigrant, and the rest of my family was still in Croatia, which was scary. And basketball just made things feel like they were going to be OK,” said Pirovic, whose accent stands at the crossroads between Croatia and Canada.
Valjarevic was the first to arrive on campus in Orono as a freshman late in the summer of 2011.
Two years later, Pirovic followed. Up until then, the two men didn’t know each other, and both were apprehensive upon first meeting — not because either bore any hatred in their hearts for the other, but because they worried about what the other would think of them.
“Before he came, of course I knew he was Croatian. There was a little bit of tension,” said Valjarevic. “I think I thought, there are different people: Some people really care about that [the war] and really have a bad attitude about it, and he’s one of the people that has good [attitude], and I am too.”
Pirovic definitely wondered if Valjarevic would be prejudiced but said “Zarko is just like me: I don’t take the past into consideration. Everyone’s the same with me and I never looked at it like that with Zarko.”
The pair quickly bonded over shared interests: food, music and language. And a love of laughter.
“I mean, we only fist-fought once,” laughed Pirovic, earning a playful, big-brotherly nug in the ribs from Valjarevic.
“We listen to a bunch of the same artists, same music and stuff, we get along,” Pirovic added. “You really have to be a specific type person to really take that and make it into a hatred thing, and neither of us do that. It only brought us closer, because we consider ourselves the same.”
“There’s two sides,” Valjarevic said. “There’s the political side, and they have a bad relationship with Croatia and Croatia has with Serbia. But then there’s the side that is normal people, and they don’t have to do with any of that. And Marko and me are just normal people.”
Brothers
Spend more than a few minutes around the pair, and very quickly you find yourself laughing at their constant one-upmanship, which alternates between English and Serbo-Croatian.
“Every now and then, I can tell they’re pissed off at me,” Walsh laughed. “They start speaking this Eastern bloc language out on the court.”
According to Pirovic, Valjarevic’s mentorship was invaluable to helping him adjusting to life at an American college, and Valjarevic credits his best friend with helping him to cope with the homesickness of being an ocean away from his family.
“Because it was really tough for me adjusting to the new atmosphere of college — I was far from home” Pirovic said. “And then when I met Zarko it just clicked — I just felt more at home, because I felt like I was talking to my dad in our own language.”
Said Valjarevic: “It’s huge here to see someone from same area where I’m from, to have the same mentality, same kind of food — he understands what I lived before more than other guys. It’s great for me.”
Both Valjarevic and Pirovic’s families have met the other, and both not only approve but also greatly appreciate the bond the pair share.
The duo spent the past summer cheering on the other’s country when they competed on the world’s sports stage, with Valjarevic becoming an honorary Croatian during the World Cup and Pirovic joining Valjarevic in cheering on the Serbian team in the Basketball World Cup.
And both are dreading this summer, when Valjarevic will graduate and move on from Maine. But according to both men, who share the same dream of playing professional basketball, their friendship will live on for the rest of their lives.
“I hope I can get the stats up, get a good contract. Hopefully we’re in the same country, we can go out for coffee — that would be the goal,” said Pirovic. “No matter what, in the summers I think we’re going to find each other on the beach somewhere.”
“Probably in Croatia,” said Valjarevic, who is immediately interrupted by Pirovic.
“That’s because Zarko knows about the ladies, eh?” he said, once again nudging his brother in the ribs.
“Wherever we go,” Valjarevic said, “we’re always going to find each other again.”
Sam Perkins is the editor-in-chief of onebidwonders.com, a website that provides comprehensive coverage of college basketball.