Tim KeownNov 7, 2025, 07:35 AM ETCloseSenior Writer for ESPN The Magazine Columnist for ESPN.com Author of five books (3 NYT best-sellers)Follow on X
Pavkov laughed, and a realization struck: This giant man in front of him, the three-time NBA MVP, has never been anything other than a basketball player.
“Bro, just keep playing basketball,” Pavkov said. “You know what you do there, and now you know what we do here. You don’t want to have a regular job.”
But there is a place where he is anything but mysterious: Sombor, an unassuming town of 41,000 in northwest Serbia that appears to have been dropped by parachute into the surrounding fields of soybean and corn, the greens and browns of the landscape blending at the edges like a Rothko.
Vagić grew up with horses, too, on his grandfather’s ranch outside Sombor, and whenever he visits Jokić’s track, he visits the stables, tilting his head upward and then side to side, as if smelling something he can’t quite pinpoint.
“I’ve been around horses all my life, but something is wrong here,” Vagić says. “I can’t smell the horses.”
“Oh, I don’t know” — here Vagić shrugs and throws his palms at the sky, as if it’s nothing. “It’s just … just something isn’t right.”
It’s too much for Jokić. He knows Vagić is playing him, and he knows what he’s hearing isn’t true, but he falls for it every time.
“What kind of horseman are you? You’re a f—ing city slicker. You’ve never even been to a proper stable.”
Vagić scrunches up his face and balls his fists in front of his chest to pantomime an angry Jokić. Vagić starts breathing loudly and shaking those fists like he’s running a jackhammer. My God, how this man lives to taunt Jokić and then relive it. It’s enough to keep him breathing every day.
THE COURT SITS in a field beside Jokić’s primary school, Dositej Obradović, named after an 18th-century writer and philosopher who is credited with establishing the country’s first school of higher education. Obradović died 214 years ago, but the school remains in his name. In Serbia, history always prevails.
It was here, on this court, that Pavkov saw his friend change. Nikola was 17 when he left Sombor for the first time to play for a club team in Novi Sad. He was out of shape but nonetheless a marvel — “extremely slow legs and extremely fast arms,” says Ljuba Aničić, his coach in Novi Sad — and it didn’t take Jokić long to earn a spot with Mega Baskets, then known as Mega Vizura, a developmental professional team in Belgrade.
Jokić might as well have shown up at the courts wearing a cravat. Sombor boys don’t stretch. Sombor boys are the epitome of the country’s greatest compliment: They have Serbian blood. They play basketball and shove and hurl endless streams of abuse at each other. Suddenly, after a few months in the big city, here’s this fancy guy showing up and stretching his hamstrings before a run at the schoolyard.
“He stretched afterward, too,” Pavkov says, his mind still reeling 13 years later. “Later, it hit me: Something is changing in his life. Maybe he is thinking he can play basketball for a long time. Maybe that’s when he decided to get serious. That was a small thing, the stretching, but it stuck with me.”
And maybe it confirmed something none of them considered: Their friend Nikola had a dream, and no amount of ridicule would keep him from realizing it.
TO UNDERSTAND NIKOLA Jokić, it’s necessary to understand Serbia and all its many complications. Sombor speaks. Serbia booms.
Later, Marko tells me Isidor had a question before he got into the car: “What’s this guy doing with a Croatian license plate?”
There is one figure that is everywhere, sometimes in four or five places on a single building. Even in stencil, his bull neck, blunt features and Serbian military cap (šajkača) seem to extend off the walls, as if in 3D.
I ask Marko who this man is, and why he is so prominent, and he winces a bit before saying, “That is Ratko Mladić. The West considers him a war criminal, but to many in Serbia, he is a hero.”
At the station, a weekly silent protest took the form of a traffic blockade every Friday at 11:52 a.m., the time and day of the week of the collapse. Each protest lasted exactly 16 minutes.
He controls the pace of every game, the slowest body on the court controlled by the fastest brain. His 2024-25 season was an MVP season in every respect but the award. The numbers, thoroughly ridiculous from any angle, somehow diminish the beauty of the achievement. For posterity: 29.6 points, 12.7 rebounds and 10.2 assists per game; the third player and first center to average a triple-double. He shot 57.6% from the field, 41.7% from three and 80% from the free-throw line.
There are so many moments of sheer magic. His 3-point shooting defies geometry and physics, the ball released from behind his head and straight into the air, like he’s shooting out of a grain silo. He is 6-foot-11 and each of his dribbles seems to take up 6-foot-10 of that, and yet he can weave his way at slow-lane pace up and down and through and around defenders. And he does it all wearing an expression, or lack of expression, that indicates he is unimpressed by any of it.
“My man Nikola has a problem,” Vagić says. “He realized a long time ago: People just don’t get him. He gets quite frustrated. He can’t talk to just anybody.”
As recounted in “Why So Serious?” Mike Singer’s biography of Jokić, Varda’s response after seeing Jokić for the first time was, “Who is that fat guy?” Varda grew so frustrated with Jokić’s post mastery that soon after the between-the-legs humiliation, he caught Jokić with an elbow to the mouth that needed several stitches. But even the majestic and fierce Varda proved susceptible to Jokić’s guileless charms, eventually becoming a trusted mentor.
Mega’s coach at the time, the late Golden State Warriors assistant Dejan (Deki) Milojević, liked to run drills that created mismatches, like wing players going against post players one-on-one. It ran by playground rules: You score, you stay on offense. One practice, Jokić was matched against Krstić, a smooth but slender 6-9 small forward, who was two years older and far more accomplished than Jokić at the time.
The score was embarrassing enough, but having to admit he had not stopped Jokić even once was worse.
Milojević walked off and Jokić approached his teammate — “like a friend,” Krstić says — and hugged him.
“You cannot even get angry,” he says. “It’s just, this guy! His confidence was natural. He was like this from the start.”
It led Jokić to question the training practices in Serbia and that led to the widespread belief that he was not only out of shape but lazy. As recently as 10 years ago, when Jokić won the Adriatic Basketball Association MVP with Mega at 20, coaching in Serbia was heavily influenced by the Cold War-era ideas of the Yugoslavs and Soviets.
“Discipline, discipline, discipline,” says Dušan Ristić, who played with Jokić on the Serbian national team. “Putting team before individual. This goes back to the socialist countries, where it was more collectivist instead of individualist. Pass, pass, pass — work for the best shot. We all grew up in this system. If we go to dinner or lunch, we all go at the same time, we all meet wearing the same color shirt.”
Jokić chafed at the practices that ended with every player running lines for 15 minutes, holding a ball over their heads with both hands. If a player lowered the ball below the forehead, a whistle would blow and everyone would have to start over. “I used to run with Nikola,” Ristić says, “and I would tell him, ‘Let’s just do this once and get it over with.'” Jokić wondered how this improved his post moves, or the point guard’s ballhandling, or offensive chemistry.
“People said Jokić didn’t want to work, but no,” Nemanja Dangubić says. “He thought those exercises without a ball were pointless. He would say, ‘I don’t need this to build my character. I have my character. Let’s play basketball.'”
Vagić, ever the philosopher, says, “We remember the rough seas, don’t we? We remember the rough seas more than the calm seas. We don’t want them to last very long, but rough seas are very good. Rough seas make good sailors.”
Thirteen picks later, as Tatum walked to the podium, Dangubić thought, I know this isn’t me because if they played a commercial when Nikola was picked, there’s no way he’s walking up there to say my name. But Tatum stood at the podium in New York during the early morning hours in Serbia and told the world the Sixers had made Dangubić the 54th pick — and the third player from Mega — in the draft.
They shook their heads and thanked him for asking. The moment hangs in the air as he pedals off. The ladies return to formation, shopping bags in each arm.
“I can’t believe that is Nikola,” one of them said admiringly. “We just saw him playing on TV and now he is here.”
ONE AFTERNOON THIS past summer in Sombor, Serbia, Nikola Jokić sat in an auto body shop and watched his friend Nemanja Pavkov work. They’ve been buddies forever, but this was the first time Jokić paid attention to how his friend makes a living. Pavkov was in constant motion, going from his phone to his customers in the front of his shop to the back, where he oversaw a paint job for one of Jokić’s sulkies, the two-wheeled, chariot-like vehicles that attach to Jokić’s horses as they race around his track down the street. It was all Jokić could do to keep up.
It’s swirling in the air in sifting wisps on a Saturday morning at Nikola Jokić’s Dream Catcher hippodrome, where two horses pulling sulkies trot around the track with easy grace. One is ridden by one of Jokić’s uncles, the other by one of his good friends. Neither man matches anyone’s image of a jockey, thick with broad features, wearing jeans and flannel shirts. They exude a competent nonchalance, sitting expressionless on the tiny chariots, holding the reins in both hands, each with a burning cigarette hanging out of the right side of his mouth as if it’s part of a uniform.