By Yiannis Bouranis / info@eurohoops.net
It’s Dusan Ivkovic’s birthday today and the 72-year-old “Duda” will celebrate it on the court, as always, with Anadolus Efes facing Cedevita tonight! Ivkovic was born in October 29th 1943 in Belgrade and he has been a coach for 38 years now.
After 10 years as a Radnisky player, he was appointed as Ranko Zeravica’s assistant in Partizan. And what a tragic coincidence was that the day that Zeravica passed away, it’s Ivkovic birthday.
Next year, he became Partizan’s head coach for the first time in his career and earned all titles, namely the Yugoslavian Championship, the Yugoslavian Cup and the Korac Cup, with the Serbian team earning the trophy for the second time in a row!
Since then, he has been head coach in 11 teams, as five of the them were Greek, while he became twice the head coach of Olympiacos. With chronological order, the five Greek teams were Aris, PAOK, Panionios, Olympiacos and AEK Athens. He was twice also the national team’s head coach. The first one was from 1988 to 1995 and the second one was from 2009 to 2013.
Dozens of achievements
In a national level, he has earned six medals. Four of them are gold (the 1989, 1991, 1995 European Championships and the 1990 World Cup) and the remaining two are silver, namely in the 1998 World Cup and the 2009 Eurobasket.
In a club level, he is a two-time Euroleague winner with Olympiacos (1997, 2012), while he has also won the Korac Cup with Partizan (1978), the Saporta Cup with AEK Athens (2000) and the Eurocup with Dynamo Moscow in 2006.
He has also earned seven national championships with four different teams (Partizan, PAOK, Olympiacos, CSKA Moscow) and seven national cups (Partizan, Olympiacos, AEK Athens, CSKA Moscow, Anadolu Efes) with five different clubs.