Until the appearance of Ivan Balić, the world had not seen anything like it, until then handball was something like the championship of the Lepoglava penitentiary in the border guards, a cruel men's game in which the team that meets the end of the game with more vital functions wins
The talented citizens of Split have so far won as many as three hundred and twenty medals from the Olympic Games and various world and European championships. There is no serious house here without an Olympic medal, some kind of handsome silver cup or at least the Wimbledon Cup on the shelf, and the unlucky person who returns from the Olympics fourth is the whole town screwing him: he is not the one for marriage or for a job in the municipality, so his strict father - a golden boy from Tokyo 1964 - usually thrown out into the street, so as not to embarrass the family and the skyscraper.
There is no sport that was not received in Split, and after the frantic Ivan Šola assembled a four-seater bobsled on the Riva and qualified for the Winter Olympics in Vancouver, there was only show jumping left. Because of all this, the people of Split like to arrogantly brag that their city is "the most sporty in the world", but don't believe them too much: Split has European champions in water polo, world champions in the high jump and golden Olympic rowers - its eighty-two Olympic medals, after all, The people of Split have won in ten different sports - but in the city of Split, there is seriously only one: football. Actually, only Hajduk. When Milorad Bibić Mosor died a few years ago, the other Split first league team, RNK Split, lost a third of its fans. For some obscure reason, namely, every kid in the most sporty city in the world only dreams of plowing the fields.
Club without success
It's an interesting thing, because Hajduk is one of the two city clubs that have never won any world or at least European trophy. The already famous Jugoplastika, whose generation from the late XNUMXs was crowned European champion three times in a row and the best white basketball team of the century, has fewer fans than Zagreb's Dinamo. Basketball is as popular in Split as jazz, and it is practiced only by the unlucky ones whose father didn't have enough cash for Hajduk's strict selection.
Or those little ones, like one kid - everyone in town knows him, you'll love the story - who was seduced by the euphoria surrounding Kukoc and Radja in the XNUMXs and started training at Gripe and memorized all the NBA league lineups, with a vague idea of a world career under the baskets. Good height for a playmaker, with a fantastic overview of the game and a Kukočev joke in the game, the little boy was destined for great things, but at the age of sixteen he saw that he would not get enough from basketball in Split, so he decided to correct his mistake and went to train - handball.
It was important to tell the myth of the most sporty city in the world in order to understand Ivano Balić. When an unfinished and unrealized young basketball player in a city completely obsessed with football and Hajduk decides to switch to handball, probably the only team sport less popular than basketball in Split, he goes to the handball club Brodomerkur - along with Hajduk, the only one in the city that has never been European champion , the only Split club that has never been champion of anything in history - there are only two possible explanations: either his mother and father were professional handball players, so they put the little one in the family business, or he is a wayward guy who, despite all over Split, through bloody daily training and manic work, he decided to become the best in the world in the history of sports that no one in the city is interested in.
Ivan Balić, clearly, both his mother and father were professional handball players.
Balić, namely, was not from that, another popular urban myth, the one about the split split. If it had been that, he would have chosen some other sport to begin with, say show jumping, or even football, any other than the one that both his father and mother were involved in. If he had been a coward, he would have trained bloody hard every day in the Brodomerkur handball club and worked maniacally to one day bring the unfortunate Brodomerkur the title of vice-champion of Croatia - which, for handball ruled by Zoran Gobac and the country in which RK Zagreb has been from the beginning of the world until today, twenty-three champion for years in a row, the most distant measurable ambition - so he would throw it under the noses of both his father and the city, "fuck you handball", and bought a horse for show jumping on credit.
A listless look
Instead of ambition and ambition, Ivano Balić had only talent. Huge, the biggest this game has ever seen. He didn't even know how he ended up with him - it must be that both his father and mother were handball players, there is no other explanation - only the rest of his career looked like a typical Split loser from Riva trapped in the body of the world's greatest handball player. Like a guy who doesn't really want to spend evenings in handball halls, but when he's there, he'll be the best in the world.
You've seen it countless times, in his listless look, in what they call a "stufajica" in Split, in the way he magnificently ignored journalists, publicity and fame, in his lazy, lazy step, as if he were on the Riva at plus forty, and not in the final of the Olympic Games at minus one, and that sudden explosion at the end, a moment of God's or Whose inspiration - there is no evolution, nothing to do with it, the talented would lead humanity to have it - when the ball in the next split second behind the French player ends up with Vori on the line , or over the shoulder there on the wing, near Dzomba, or in a zeppelin over the seven-pointer, or from below, from the parquet, into the fork of the opposing goalkeeper, who at the moment I am writing these lines is still poor in the goal of the Helliniko Olympic Hall in Athens, waiting to see what Balić will do with the ball.
Genetic mutation
It was a rare genetic mutation, a cross between a talent for handball and a talent for basketball. Until the appearance of Ivan Balić, the world had not seen anything like it, until then handball was something like the championship of the Lepoglava penitentiary in the border guards, a cruel man's game in which the team that meets the end of the game with more vital functions wins: that is why, as you yourself have noticed, there is no American handball, as there is American football. Goals were scored from a distance, with heavy artillery, or by breaking through, in such a way that the biggest lola in the team ran into the opponent's defensive wall with all his strength, and if he survived, he tried to shoot at the goal, and the assist was more a sign of a lack of ideas than it was the idea itself. There were, I'm not saying, also fantasists with a built-in idea, but they ended up getting killed multiple times in the back nine: it wasn't a sport for artists.
Then, at the 2003 World Cup in Portugal, a generation appeared that would change everything, and the world met the new Maradona. This Diego Armando, however, chose a sport in which hand goals were legal: the "Hand of God" from Split will already be declared the most useful player of the tournament next year at the European Championship in Slovenia, and a reign unrecorded in the history of team sports will begin: from that championship , through the mythical Olympic gold medal in Athens, and up to the World Championship in Germany in 2007, Ivano Balić was named MVP of the tournament five times in a row at major competitions, twice in the meantime elected the best handball player in the world, as the only one with two such trophy with Nikola Karabatić.
Whose father, a small digression, is from Vrsin near Trogir, close to Split, so the fact that the two best handball players in the history of the game are natives of the Split suburban bus line just recklessly and rather irresponsibly feeds the already thick Split myth.
In the end, although his generation, after the world championship in Portugal and the Olympic gold in Athens, never again climbed the podium, and even with the clubs he played in, he never won the Champions Cup, in 2010 Ivano Balić in a poll on the official website of the World Handball Federation overwhelmingly - with more votes than all the other candidates combined, including Karabatić and the gigantic Talant Dušebaev - elected the best handball player in history.
The topic is actually a birthday one, the greatest in sports are chosen in cafes and during school holidays, because there are no exact parameters for the greatest of all time. If they existed, Nikola Karabatić would be bigger: the man has two Olympic golds, three world and three European titles, and three club Champions Cups. And still play. One day, when he leaves handball, he will certainly be declared the greatest, but only idle voters in the polls of the world handball federation and professional myth-mongers deal with that anyway. Ivano Balić is not the greatest - well, one of the three greatest - because his house would look like Real's trophy room, but because he is one of those, rare in any sport, after which the game is no longer the same.
Paradoxically - and the paradox, as we have learned so far, is roughly the concept of Split sport - such Ivano Balić, with more individual trophies than team trophies, never played for himself: from basketball to handball, he brought Kukočev's assist - the one that counts in a goal, because it is not it's half a goal, Vori's goal is already a fifth of Balić's assist - and the joy of a good move, the joy of the game, introducing the "yoga bonito" from Brazilian school playgrounds, parking lots and stadiums into a brutal bar fight between goals. That's why it was possible for him to be the MVP in Germany, even though Croatia was fifth, that's why it was possible that next year, when he handed the MVP crown to Karabatić at the Euros in Norway, and the championship title to the Danes, the whole hall in Lillehammer chanted his name after the final.
Scandinavian shrubs
Experts say: if he liked to train, if he wasn't so "stuff", if he didn't smoke, if he was more ambitious, he would undoubtedly be the greatest in the world. However, he never played to be the greatest, the way neither Garrincha nor Socrates, nor Baka Slišković nor Toni Kukoč played for that reason. He played because he had to - he didn't choose his talent - and he had to because he loved it. There, in the hall, with a ball in his hand among six tattooed Scandinavian bushes and two small pockets with whistles, he was at home: he had no others. He didn't like popularity, he didn't like journalists, he didn't like cameras - he didn't even like coaches and selectors - he just liked the game, that moment when the poor guy in the opponent's goal doesn't know if the long-haired five-fingered sloth will pass the ball behind his back to the pivot on the line, or over the shoulder on the wing, whether he will send it in an airship over the seven-man, or from below, from the floor, into his forks. And he suddenly pulled it from his elbow through his legs.
Dikod enters, dikod does not enter, Mate Baturina would say, but the joy of the game is not recorded on the scoreboard anyway. It's not about playing for the audience, it's one of the biggest frauds in sports: artists who play "for the audience" are actually playing for their inner reason and drive, the one from which literature or music is born - the audience is only there to he loves and enjoys it. Players like Balić play for their teammates and their own pleasure, their handball is what once upon a time was, let's say, a clapper song, five or six of them gather in a tavern or the Olympic Hall in Athens, it doesn't matter, so if it's also the audience's pleasure listen and watch, even better. Just don't bother and screw around, don't rattle your wallets, don't take photos and don't ask for statements.
Officially the best
In the end, the chroniclers will therefore place Ivan Balić in a place of honor in the pantheon of Balkan sports bohemians - along with Lamza, Šekularac, Prosinečki or Slišković, among those who could have done much more if they did not like to light a red Marlboro - as the only Croat who was in a team sport officially the best in the world. Well, the only one with Split water polo player Josip Pavić, but we agreed that we will not irresponsibly feed silly Split myths. That's what the experts will say - that he liked to train, that he wasn't such a "dude", that he didn't smoke, that he was more ambitious - but let them speak. Let Balić be there, let him be among those who "could have done much more". It is, after all, the most accurate measure of the great: never was more expected of the small.
The corporate, industrial-marketing sport of the twenty-first century has almost exterminated the species anyway. Ivano Balić, the only legal "Hand of God" in world sports, was one of the last.
Last night, in the match of the last round of the German Bundesliga between Wetzlar and Göppingen, exactly twenty years after he left the floor of the gym in Gripe, Balić was the last to dunk the ball. He will return to Split, light a cigarette for the first time, without anyone pissing him off, and then - who knows - buy a horse for show jumping with the money he earned.
There are countless words of greeting that are used at the end of such texts, but for Ivan Balić, only one fits, the one that the people of Split greet each other when they stroll along the Riva or, as I know, the Olympic Hall in Athens.
That's why - a little bit, maestro.
Jutarnji.hr
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