MARIAM LISA KRIKORIAN Big Dan Gadzuric
is a nice guy, except when he steps on the court to wage battle
against the forces of evil: the other team.
By Dylan Hernandez
Daily Bruin Senior Staff
His four years at UCLA have been tempestuous, his basketball
career a constantly swinging pendulum. He’s scaled up to the
peak of Olympus and has slid down to the depths of Hades.
He’s been spectacular during some stretches and
turn-the-other-way awful for others.
Dan Gadzuric will be the first to say he’s been frustrated
on the court at times and hurt when others have been critical of
his play.
But somehow he’s always remembered to be patient and that
becoming a better basketball player takes years, not months.
He’s reminded himself that he isn’t like everyone else
he’s on the floor with. He didn’t begin shooting hoops
when he was five or six years old, dreaming he would one day be in
the NBA. Growing up in the Netherlands, he didn’t idolize
Michael Jordan or Magic Johnson; he idolized Diego Maradona, the
Argentine soccer star.
With each tumble the 6-foot-11 senior center has taken,
he’s learned to slowly adjust his perspective, to better
understand the culture which now surrounds him and to anticipate
how people will react the next time he falters.
And, really, that’s what Gadzuric came to the United
States to do: to learn about a different society, to grow up, to
challenge himself, and while doing so, to enjoy his life.
“It was just to see what was out there,” Gadzuric
said of his decision to leave his home town of Den Haag to transfer
to Governor Dummer Academy in Byfield, Mass., as a high school
junior. “That’s why I decided to go. I never had that
idea (that I would become a top basketball player).”
This idea is what Gadzuric tries to keep in mind whenever the
pressure becomes overwhelming and when he finds himself
frustrated.
Gadzuric doesn’t remember when it was that he first joined
a local recreational basketball league in Den Haag. He was either
14 or 15, he says. What he does remember is that despite his
height, he wasn’t any good at first.
“I sucked,” he said. “I was pretty horrible. I
couldn’t dribble at all and I couldn’t shoot. It was my
first time touching the ball.”
Yet he found the game to his liking. And the more he learned
about it ““ the techniques, the strategies, the emotions
involved ““ the more he was intrigued.
So he played and played and played ““ not because he had
dreams of making the NBA or of making millions of dollars, but
because he liked the game, no strings attached.
To his pleasant surprise, he progressed rapidly and within two
years, he was on the junior national team in the Netherlands. And
when he was presented with the opportunity to be schooled in the
United States, Gadzuric took it, even though he and his parents
didn’t think it would lead to much.
“I had no idea at the time it would become like
this,” his father, Sanford Lancelot Scott said.
Gadzuric came to the States expecting nothing, then suddenly
found himself shouldering the hopes of thousands. Before Gadzuric
could even comprehend what was going on around him, he was a
McDonald’s All-American, a potential NBA lottery pick, a
top-five player in the country and eventually a UCLA recruit.
Gadzuric certainly didn’t mind the hype ““ who would?
““ but wasn’t completely convinced by it either.
“I was just playing against a lot smaller kids,”
Gadzuric said of his high school days. “All I did was dunk.
But when I watched the NBA, I saw a lot of other big guys. And as
time went on, I saw more and more and more.”
Expecting someone who picked up a basketball at 14 or 15 to
become another Lew Alcindor is beyond the understanding of anyone
of reasonable intelligence. But many UCLA fans wanted to see their
prized recruit become an instant star. And whenever they saw
Gadzuric struggle early in his Bruin career, they shredded him and
mocked his clumsiness.
“It bothered me, the lack of knowledge that they had about
me,” Gadzuric said. “It was weird at first because
basketball’s so serious and the tradition’s so strong
at UCLA. Being in school, I got to understand the whole situation,
that people put their emotion into the school’s history. I
kind of compared it to soccer back home.
“I took that to my advantage, to grow as a
person.”
So this year, when he started the season by blowing wide-open
dunks and followed it with a string of games in which he
couldn’t keep himself out of foul trouble, he knew how to
handle himself better. He told himself to ignore the bad press and
to keep working on the fundamental skills he had not yet
refined.
“Dan has been through a lot, going from one place to
another and adjusting to different cultures and languages,”
Bruin forward T.J. Cummings said. “He has come a long
way.”
The patience has paid off.
In the Bruins’ last six games, Gadzuric has averaged 16.2
points, 11.0 rebounds and 2.3 blocks per contest while shooting
56.8 percent from the field. Keeping him in the game, virtually all
of the Bruins agree, is necessary for UCLA to be successful.
“We’d like Danny to play as many minutes as
possible,” Bruin head coach Steve Lavin said. “When he
plays 32 to 38 minutes, it’s good for us.
“Gadzuric is as dominant as any postman in the
country.”
Too little, too late, some Bruin fans argue, and perhaps they
are correct in saying so.
But Gadzuric, now 24 years old and NBA-bound, tries not to
listen to what they have to say. He has no other choice.
He’s still learning a game that he discovered relatively
late in life and failure almost certainly awaits him early in his
NBA career. And if there’s anything he’s learned at
UCLA, it’s that there’s nothing wrong in failing, as
long as the experience will benefit him later on.
He felt that way when he blew the open dunks early this year at
Pauley Pavilion.
“I just wanted to play more and make the next dunk,”
he said.
And he’ll feel that way, he says, when he faces Shaquille
O’Neal for the first time next season.
“He might dunk on me a couple of times,” he said,
laughing. “But I’ll get bigger, too.”