There are, in life, impossibly difficult decisions that people aren’t capable of making at a young age, in those cases it is the responsibility of the ones who watch over us, to make the tough choice. Such was the case for Ratsko Popovic’s parents who had the obvious, yet nevertheless arduous task, of taking their 13-year-old son out of Yugoslavia in 1994 while the country was embroiled in civil war.
“I remember the day I left and I was crying because I didn’t want to leave my friends. My parents tried to explain to me what a horrible country Yugoslavia was,” the Bosnian-born Popovic recalls.
Popovic, who is now in his third year with the Concordia men’s basketball team, has been part of many hard-fought battles on the court but none of them compare with the one that was taking place right outside his home in Sarajevo when he was just 11 years old. “You were sitting in your house and you could hear the bombs falling all over the place.” The violence forced his parents to send him and his sister to Belgrade for a year and a half where they stayed with relatives.
At the time there was military draft that prevented Popovic’s parents from leaving with their children. “At that point only women and some kids were allowed to leave Sarajevo. We didn’t think we’d be apart that long, no one thought it was going to last as long as it did,” he says.
While he waited for his family to be re-united Popovic joined the basketball team at his school in Belgrade. It is just one of several examples of how his involvement with the sport, which he has played since the age of seven, has been one of the few consistent things in his life.
Finally, the time would arrive when Popovic and the rest of his family were able to leave Yugoslavia together and come to Canada. But there were still challenges to be faced and basketball would again play a factor in keeping him grounded.
“When I got here I spoke a little bit of English and I was in a class with a bunch of other kids from Yugoslavia,” he says of his time going to school at Ecole Secondaire de L’ile in Hull. “I didn’t have a lot of friends but I joined the high school basketball team. It’s just something that has always kept me happy.”
After four years in Hull, Popovic set his sights on a higher degree of education as well as a higher level of basketball. He got a CEGEP education at Sherbrooke; the only AAA team that sought to recruit him, then went about making his way to Concordia.
“I wanted to study business and I didn’t really want to stay there [Sherbrooke] to play at Bishop’s. As soon as I talked to coach [John] Dore he invited me to practice with the team at Concordia.” Although settled in his new home, Popovic’s ties to his homeland remain an important influence in his life and that of the rest of his family.
“This transition was harder for my parents. I’m still going to school and playing basketball but they had to make a big sacrifice,” Popovic says. “My sister and I want to give back to our parents because they did so much so that we could have a good life. But I’ll never be able to give them what they gave us.”
The John Molson school of business student has also managed to maintain a relationship with some of his friends that still live in Belgrade, even visiting for a month when he was 17. “It’s far from being a normal life over there now. It’s a life after war.”
When possible Popovic also shares a small piece of his new life with those back in the former Yugoslavia. “Sometimes I’ll try to send something for a birthday. I got a Canada hockey jersey for one of my friends; you can’t get something like that over there.”
For their part, Popovic and his sister have not wasted the opportunity that their parents gave them a decade ago. With his sister, who is eight years older, graduating from UQAM with a degree in communications and getting a job at the National Film Board, Popovic feels that it is his turn to step-up. “She did her part and got a good job. I hope I can do the same,” he says.
According to Popovic, any success that he enjoys in the future, will be owed large in part to his time spent at Concordia. “I’ve really been accepted well here…I haven’t just learned how to be a better basketball player but also a better person.”