Bucks Back When ... Damir Markota

Damir Markota just completed his first NBA season, splitting his time between the NBA and the D-League. (Getty)

And the majority of the memories they do have would no doubt be dramatically different than Damir Markota’s.

At an age when most of his contemporaries were running around on a playground, running for a finish line or running the bases, Markota and his family were forced to run for their lives.

The 21-year-old Markota, who recently completed his rookie NBA season with the Milwaukee Bucks, was one of the many refugees forced to flee his homeland of Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina when war was raging on the Balkan Peninsula of southern Europe in 1992.

Markota’s recollections of those days are not vivid ones, but they are telltale nonetheless.

“I remember the fear from the first couple days,” he said. “Things were firing and flying around like crazy. But I don’t remember too much, since I was only 6 ½ years old at the time. I didn’t really understand what was going on.

“I just remember my mom telling me, ‘It’s war. We have to leave the city.’ So we left the city.”

Markota and his family took refuge in Sweden, which was 1,075 miles from Bosnia-Herzegovina. Damir was in the process of learning his native language, and he was suddenly forced to learn a different one.

“Moving from Bosnia to Sweden, those were different worlds, different languages,” he said. “I was just a kid, though, so I had to learn a language anyway in school. I was a quick learner, and I learned Swedish OK.

“But my parents still have a problem with that, even after being in Sweden for 13 or 14 years.”

Markota did not comprehend the scope of the Yugoslav wars until a number of years later.

“I didn’t even know what was actually going on,” he said. “Later on, when I was 12 or 13, my mom told me about all the problems that were there at the time.

“It was hard. I never get back to my home city. You’d like to learn about the place where you were born. I really couldn’t do that. But I didn’t think so much about it at the time. We just went to Stockholm, Sweden and started over from there. We just did the best we could.”

Sweden was not a hotbed of basketball, so Markota was exposed to other sports first.

“I started with soccer,” he said. “I started playing that in Sweden. Swedish basketball wasn’t that big and still isn’t. They only had like one or two practices a week.”

Basketball’s lack of prominence in Sweden would mean another life-changing transition for Markota, who was still only in his early teens.

“Maciej Lampe, the former NBA player, and I were best friends, and we were like, ‘We’ve got to do something.’ We were really talented. We had played in a couple of tournaments with the Swedish National Team and played around Europe and we thought, ‘Hey, we can play with these guys.’

“So he went to Real Madrid in Spain, and I went to Sebona, Zagreb (in Croatia). Going over there, it was hard. You have to live life without your parents and everything and start at the beginning. The first year, it was really hard. I talked with my mother on the phone every day. It was hard being 14 years old and leaving her in a different country … very hard.”

Markota considers himself fortunate that he did have some relatives living in Croatia while he was there. But he discovered that his decision to pursue basketball would lead to a demanding regimen.

“In Europe, when you’re between 13 and 18 years old, you practice seven or eight hours a day,” he said. “You spend all of that time with your coaches and teammates.”

That time was not idly spent, either. The majority of Markota’s hours in the gym were devoted to intense fundamental instruction. And every player is taught every skill, regardless of his height or position.

“They teach everything,” Markota said. “We’d have six to eight hours of practice, so you had to learn everything. When you’re spending that much time on the court, you learn it all. We went through guard skills, everything.

“Most of the European players – (Toni) Kukoc, (Vlade) Divac, now Ersan (Ilyasova) – they all have learned everything.”

As time went by, Markota continued to hone his skills and continued to grow taller, too, until he, like predecessors Kukoc and Divac had over a decade earlier, reached 6 feet-10 inches.

European scouts’ appraisals noted his great athleticism and size for his position, along with his perimeter shooting prowess. His arms are on the short side for a player of his stature -- one scout once referred to him as a "T-Rex" – but his size and elevation on his jump shot have helped him compensate.

Markota played for both the Croatian Junior National Team and Croatian Under-20 National Team. He competed in the Croatian A2 and A1 leagues and the Adriatic League between 2002 and ’06.

His breakthrough season came in 2005, when he averaged 18.3 points, 10.8 rebounds and 2.9 assists in the U20 European Championships in Moscow, Russia.

He was selected by the San Antonio Spurs in the second round of the 2006 NBA Draft with the 59th overall pick then traded immediately to the Bucks for the higher of Milwaukee’s two 2007 second-round NBA Draft picks. On July 25 of 2006, he signed a multi-year contract with the Bucks.

Markota played in 30 games for the Bucks in his rookie campaign, averaging 1.7 points and 1 rebound in 5.7 minutes per outing. He also played 10 games for the Tulsa 66ers of the National Basketball Development League, logging 10.4 points and 4.8 rebounds per contest.

Markota wishes he had broken in with Milwaukee just one season earlier. That would have given him the rare opportunity to call his boyhood hero his teammate.

“Of course, my favorite player was always (Toni) Kukoc,” he said. “It’s too bad I didn’t get here a year earlier. I’ve met him a number of times, but it’s not like I know him really well.

“Sometimes I’d be working out with the Croatian National Team and he’d come through and say hello.”

Markota realizes what an exemplary role model Kukoc was.

“His basketball IQ is unbelievable,” he said. “I think he’s one of the guys, for sure, who opened the way for European players. Drazen Petrovic did, too, but he died at such a young age, after only playing about two years here. He was unbelievable.”

Such insight and reverence are even rarer than the basketball skills with which Markota has intrigued scouts since his early teens.

If you do the math, you’ll calculate that when Drazen Petrovic was killed in an automobile accident in 1993, Damir Markota was only 7 years old … but already majoring in world history.