Partizan Basketball Fans

The number of people present doesn’t always equal the intensity of the crowd. The most unusual basketball game I’ve watched, when it comes to the fans, could have been the late eighties match-up between Partizan and Maccabi (Tel Aviv), played in Belgrade. It was one of the loudest, too. I had to show up an hour early because having the ticket didn’t guaranty that I would get in. There was no such thing as my own seat, in stark contrast with my first NBA experience in the Garden in Boston. As soon as I found a decent spot, a good angle to see the game from, I saw a group of maybe 300 rabid Partizan fans who chanted with a very strong accent. Their head gear wasn’t much different from the hats and scarves regular Partizan fans wore. As a visitor to the city, not too familiar with the Grobari rituals (“grave diggers” is what Partizan fans call themselves), I asked the guy next to me who they were and he said: “These are Palestinian students, they come every time we play against an Israeli club.”

Basketball means different things to different people. For those young people it was a venue to express their opinion and to vent their frustration. I watched them more closely than the game itself. At first, they chanted something in the language I couldn’t understand. I am sure the chants were similar to the ones which preceded the bloody break-up of Yugoslavia. (It didn’t take long before the fans took the guns in Belgrade.) But I’ll leave that analysis to an observer of a different kind.

Their chants soon became understandable to me, they were less and less contra-Israel, and more and more pro-Partizan. Play by play, these young men got sucked into the game. By the middle of the second half nobody was sitting any more, they trembled with every pass and jumped to every three made by the boys in the black-and-white. When Pecarski, an obscure player who had just been signed by the club, dunked the ball on the first alley-oop I’ve ever seen live, the Palestinian uproar merged with the eruption of the rest of 7,700 fans. For a very brief moment, Miroslav Pecarski might have been bigger than Yasser Arafat.

If you water-boarded me I couldn’t tell you who won that game, and I bet those Palestinians can’t remember either. I could easily find out if I checked one of the many European basketball websites. Although tempted, I will not do it, therefore I will never know. And does it really matter? Bobby Knight once said: “You don’t play against opponents. You play against the game of basketball.” I am still struggling to understand what exactly he meant. Along the same lines, though, maybe that night in Belgrade neither opponent won, maybe the winner that night was the game of basketball. And that’s a possibility which will never be recorded in the official books.