Dule had a developed sense of the beautiful - painted, written, played. Also sensitivity for all those wounded and pure souls that the world growls at because it can. He was a master of the finest weaving of life - the transformation of a caterpillar into a butterfly.
Brave as he was, he knew how to be brash - sometimes rude and angry - but few people cared about what he did and believed in as much as he did. This was evident wherever you sat in Pionir and wherever you listened and read it.
Basketball was not his job, but a calling, an obsession, a passion. He was not only a top basketball coach, but also a coach of young souls. He did not spare them. On the contrary, he exposed them to the winds without mercy. But he always used them to build a synthesis of form and content, sports talent and general education, a sense of art and play. They had to love basketball, it doesn't work without love.
Synthesis is necessary to form people, not just players, experts, scientists... Just as true values are also needed. Because whoever does not distinguish between good and evil and does not know how to rebel when evil starts to roll like a small lump, he has renounced the Man in himself. That is why he was a teacher in the tradition of the greatest.
And it is certain that Dulet's players - no matter where they played afterwards, they remained his - would have been successful even without him, but he built road signs for them to see wide horizons from narrow paths. Since his death, tributes have been pouring in that once again show how much he gave himself, until his own self-immolation.
The spirit of rebellion
He had quirks and flaws, he didn't even hide them, but society needed his virtues like water. Brave, dedicated to the core, always his own. Well-read as he was, he persistently searched for good books.
Dule is synonymous with Partizan. He also gave Partizan this rebellious spirit. They chased him away, Partizan is breaking, but that spirit lives on. And nothing will be named after them.
Saying goodbye to someone is always personal. I knew him superficially, but I was deeply grateful to him for what his Partizan meant to us, for everything he said, for all the players - domestic and foreign - who became ours.
Once he approached the "Vremena" stand at the Book Fair, while there was still a real Fair, and there the director of "Vremena", the then photo editor Milenkovic and I - haunted Partizans - ran like teenage girls at a rock concert to ask for a photo with us. Ceba, a friend and colleague, who also left too soon, and by the way a fan of the other club, took the phone, but the first picture was cut, the second a little blurry.... Dule looks on, then in a Sheret way: "This guarantor is rooting for Zvezda."
He didn't give himself to sons of bitches.
During my first conversation with Doulet - in which he finally utters the line from Kish's Tomb "I did not give myself to the sons of dogs" - I was so elated that our current photo editor said she had never seen me like that. And I did hundreds of interviews. But man, I was talking to Dulette.
He said then: "Luxury today is to have an attitude and pride, and I paid the luxury tax, above all, in health. But I don't consider myself a victim. A nit can only become yours, regardless of the circumstances in which it develops, and you can clip the wings of a falcon, but it will remain a falcon. A man shows his character in difficult circumstances and shows what his 'melting point' is. Your whole life, the genes you carry, the family, all of this develops a value system in a person. I know how much I my behavior cost me, and I don't consider that I lost the battle because I fought it with a man who has all the positions of power. Such a battle could not be won, nor was it a matter of foolish judgment. But I know that it cost me, but I also know how much it would have cost me."
He called a spade a spade, even if those "names" sometimes sounded like swear words.
He already saw poorly, but he wanted to authorize some parts anyway. I was driving the car with mine, Dule called, I shouted to my husband to brake, so that I could read Dule's interview out loud in peace. He leaves me in the parking lot, because that reading takes time. And Dule didn't change anything, almost not a word, but when we got to one of Zvezda's non-memorials, he initially said: "our people say, lies have short legs, and besides the president, there is also a man with short legs who is..." something like that, sharp, but moderate, decent.
"Stop, that's a blessing."
I am silent.
"Straighten up… with short legs who is literally the personification of all the worst and lies. It's better that way!"
The second interview we did was titled, again from literature, "I am the general of the dead army."
Dule and the beggar
Two and a half years ago, we sat for coffee, after it was filmed as part of a campaign where famous people talked about "Time." It was a few weeks after the election, on December 17 (2023).
A beggar approaches him, it is clear that they know each other and that Dule usually gives him money. But Dule is angry this time, he starts to argue that he voted for Vučić and now let him give him money. I'm laughing, the whole situation is bizarre, this martyr justifies himself: "I didn't, Dule, I didn't", and then: "Okay, I did, but the whole family forced me, what will I do, Dule, but I don't want any more children, I know what Vučić is like."
Then Dulet's phone rang, I think he was once again arranging for a book to be saved for him, and the interlocutor who is waiting for money points at him and sighs and rolls his eyes. And I realized only later what was particularly endearing about that scene - Dule was arguing with him as if he were his equal, like I would argue with someone from the family. There was no underestimation, paternalism, proving, but what, man, you can do...
In the end, Dule didn't have to call himself a Christian to be the salt of the earth, a fighter against all blandness and lukewarmness. He didn't have to believe in God because, I am convinced, God believed in Dulette. Travel, General, the flowers have bloomed. And it will.
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