A Yugoslav and world basketball coaching legend. The man who changed Yugoslav basketball and who won as many as 22 medals with all Yugoslav national teams! The man who laid the foundations of Argentine as well as Spanish basketball, because of whom people in the Pyrenees speak of “before Ranko and after Ranko,” and from whom Maradona asked for an autograph. Ladies and gentlemen – the great Ranko Žeravica.
He was only thirty-seven years old when, under his command, the World Championship in Chile (1966) was won. He repeated this result in Ljubljana (1970), when the Americans were defeated in the final (70:63). He then led his selected players to the Olympic title in Moscow (1980).
Žeravica was born on November 17, 1929, in Novo Miloševo (Dragutinovo). He began working as a coach in the early 1950s, at the time when he was finishing his playing career with Radnički Belgrade, and until 1966 he worked as a coach of both men’s and women’s teams.
He will be remembered as the expert who introduced many innovations and modern methods into Yugoslav basketball at the beginning of the 1970s, combining the Soviet and American schools. From 1960 to 1965 he was assistant coach to the famous national team coach Aleksandar Nikolić, and in 1965 he became the head coach of the national team.
Parallel with his work with the national team, Žeravica had a decisive influence on Partizan’s great “boom” at the beginning of the 1970s, when he selected the team led by Dalipagić and Kićanović, which won many trophies over the following ten years. He coached the Yugoslav national team at three Olympic Games, three World Championships, and three European Championships.
During 1979 and 1980 he also successfully coached the Argentine national team. After that, during the 1980s, he was the head coach of Red Star Belgrade. He is Red Star’s record holder for the number of victories as the club’s head coach, with 167 wins in 272 games.
He also coached Barcelona, Pula, Zaragoza, Desio, Napoli, Conservas, Split, and Juvecaserta. He ended his coaching career in 2003 in Zaragoza. He was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2007.
With his wife, Zaga, a former basketball player, he had two sons: Dušan and Goran.
“I would go through everything with him again, both the good and the bad. There was all sorts of everything. People used to say that we argued using the formal form of address. Because he would tell me: ‘I am not the one. I am not the other one. It takes two people to argue.’ Then I would start laughing, and that would be the end of everything. I remember once he took the children to Pionir for practice. He came back without them because he got caught up talking with the coaches and forgot about Goran and Dušan. That tells you everything about his dedication. Many times people asked me how I managed? What? For me, that was normal, that was our life,” Zaga said about Ranko.
During the last years of his life, he suffered from heart problems. He passed away on October 29, 2015, in Belgrade, and was buried in the Alley of Distinguished Citizens at the New Cemetery in Belgrade, in the presence of many stars not only of Yugoslav basketball, but also of European and world basketball.
