British writer and columnist Boris Starling published an emotional story in which the main character is the captain of the Croatian national football team, Luka Modrić. Although a smart bet would be on the French, writes Starling, the heart desires something else. It wants a victory for Croatia, a fairy tale for the oppressed, proud nation forged in war, and above all, a victory for the special captain and the grandfather after whom he was named.
To better understand these wishes, we present his lengthy account in full.
The grandfather that morning, in December 1991, took the livestock to the hill, as he did every day, rain or shine, winter or summer. He took the livestock that day to the hill and never returned. A handful of people dressed in police uniforms arrested him. The question is whether they were real police officers, but that was irrelevant. In those parts, power was proven with weapons, not a piece of paper.
The crime of that man was the same crime that always is in places where a schism reigns: he was not one of them. He was the other. He was the enemy. His crime was not something he did, but what he was. He was a Croat, and they were Serbs. And that was all. The men in uniforms took him and a few others to the nearby village of Jesenice and killed them there. The grandfather left behind a family he loved and who loved him, including his six-year-old grandson with whom he shared a name and with whom he was practically inseparable, a grandfather who was crazy about his grandson and a grandson who adored him.
The name they shared is Luka Modrić, and this Sunday that boy, now a 32-year-old footballer, will lead his country in the World Cup final. In football, the language of war is used: attack, strike, defense… Modrić, like his compatriots, knows the difference between those words in reality and in football. He also knows that in Croatia one is always connected to the other, because they together are the history of that small, proud nation.
After his grandfather was killed, Luka’s house was burned down, and the whole family had to live for years in a hotel, not a luxurious one, but an ordinary, modest one, in almost dilapidated condition in their Zadar. While grenades fell, as they often did, little Luka would sit inside and wait for it to stop, but when they announced that it was all over, he would go play football in the hotel parking lot, sometimes with other children, sometimes alone. All just to escape the harsh and terrible reality of life in a state of continuous war.
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He was small, too small to, as it turned out, play for Hajduk. At 18, he ended up at Zrinjski from Mostar, in the BH league, where his teammates and opponents discovered two things about Luka: he had all the skills you could wish for and he knew how to take care of himself. His 15-year journey took him from Dinamo to Tottenham and Real. Although even today, as Guardian’s Barney Ronay wrote, ‘he looks like a little boy dressed as a witch’, he is now one of the best footballers in the world with incredible talent, one of the few who adapts time and space to himself. Of all his talents, perhaps the greatest is that others play better because of him. When a simple pass is the best option, that’s what he plays. If he needs to hold the ball at his feet for a few moments so that his teammates can get into better positions, he does that. If he needs to cover someone else’s mistake, he will do that.
