April 2, 2009
A Game of Survival for Michigan State Center
By JOE LAPOINTE New York Times
EAST LANSING, Mich. — The family photograph from 10 years ago shows 13-year-old Goran Suton and his older brother, Darijan, playing basketball outside their home near Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The backboard built by their grandfather Nikola has their names painted on its bare wood. What the picture does not show is the overgrown field of tall grass and weeds nearby where the loose balls sometimes rolled.
The boys did not chase them there for fear of land mines left from the civil war of the 1990s, which forced the family from its home for seven years. “Our grandfather would say, ‘Please don’t go there, I’ll get the ball,’ ” Darijan Suton said.
Goran Suton said: “We’d beg him not to. He’d still do it. Thank God he didn’t step on a mine.” Later, the men who cleared the mines found three live ones in that same field. “Very close,” Darijan Suton said.
A year later, the family left Europe as refugees to join relatives in Lansing, Mich. The grandfather stayed behind. Goran enrolled at Everett High School, not realizing that Magic Johnson had played there in the 1970s before moving on to Michigan State.
Goran, who had played organized basketball in Bosnia, was rediscovered by his new classmates on a nearby playground. “They went to the basketball coaches and said, ‘Hey, there’s this tall white kid who’s got some moves,’ ” Darijan said.
As Goran Suton’s first decade in America nears its end, he is even taller, at 6-foot-10, and is making more moves on more prestigious courts. As the starting center for Michigan State, he will play this weekend at Ford Field in Detroit in the Final Four of the N.C.A.A. tournament.
In the Spartans’ first four tournament games, Suton has played the best basketball of his career. Last weekend he was the most valuable player of the Midwest regional. But in Saturday’s semifinal, Suton’s opposite center will be Hasheem Thabeet of Connecticut.
If the 7-foot-3 Thabeet and the favored Huskies vanquish the Spartans, it will end a magical run at Magic Johnson’s old college. But if Suton and the Spartans prevail, the late-blooming center and his teammates will advance to the championship game on Monday night.
“The guy is a monster,” Suton said of Thabeet. “You have to be smart about it. Keep him away from the basket. Hopefully, get him in foul trouble. It’s a challenge. I’ve been challenged the past four games in this tournament. I’m going to take this challenge.”
It is hardly the biggest challenge of Suton’s young life. When war broke out in the former Yugoslavia, the family fled to Serbia because Suton’s mother was Serbian and Christian Orthodox and his father was Croatian and Christian Catholic.
At that time of ethnic cleansing, people were killing and dying over nationality and religion. “I’ve seen some pretty graphic things,” Suton said. “People walking without legs. What happened over there was a disaster. It’s a tragedy. You just try to move on.”
When peace came, Suton said he helped a cousin search for his father. They had heard he might have died in a mass murder. They went to a large tent, where families looked at bones.
“It smelled so bad there I almost vomited,” Suton said. They never located the remains. After the family emigrated, Suton quickly learned English, adapted to American customs, led Everett to a state championship and became an American citizen.
He followed Johnson’s path to the nearby university, but his college coach, Tom Izzo, was not always pleased with Suton’s intensity. Even after Suton lost 20 pounds of junk-food weight, Izzo complained about his focus and effort.
“The live-and-die of a game usually isn’t the same for people that have seen life and death,” Izzo said. In some ways, Izzo has said, he has learned as much from Suton as Suton has learned from him.
But Izzo also said Suton told him that he wanted the coach to yell at him when his performance lagged. “Some people need to be pushed,” Izzo said. “I just want him to work harder every single minute on the court.”
Suton agreed. “It’s something that works for me,” he said of Izzo’s demanding ways. “I seem to respond. I don’t think anybody’s going to run as fast on the court as if somebody was shooting behind them. At times, I need a motivator and a screamer.”
It certainly worked in this, his senior season and fifth year at Michigan State, as Suton led the Big Ten in rebounding. In the tournament, Suton leads the Spartans in scoring with 14.3 points a game and in rebounding with 11.5.
Against Louisville in the regional final, Suton scored 19 points and hit three of three shots from 3-point range, the most of his career. Even then, however, Suton’s coach and teammates had to urge Suton to shoot.
Guard Travis Walton, Suton’s close friend and roommate, was one of them. Walton said Suton, whose nickname is G, sometimes lacks what is called, in figurative terms, a killer instinct.
“G is a happy person,” Walton said. “There is a kind of excitement and joy to his face all the time.” Izzo agreed, saying, “You won’t find a better kid, a better student, a better person, a better teammate.” Izzo also has called Suton a Larry Birdish rebounder.
Although not a great leaper, he is instinctive about positioning. With good peripheral vision, he passes well. His deft footwork comes from playing soccer in his native country. And his rebounding belies certain stereotypes about European players.
“Coaches have told me European players are usually soft, they spend their time outside, they don’t rebound,” Suton said. “You can’t make a statement about a whole continent.”
Suton’s good-natured bearing does not mean he shrugs off failure on the court. Early in his freshman season, in the Maui Invitational, the Spartans played Gonzaga in a game that lasted three overtimes.
With 4.6 seconds left in the third overtime and the Spartans down by a point, Suton missed a layup that could have won the game. Instead, Gonzaga got the ball back and scored two more points to win, 109-106.
“That still hurts, that will never stop,” Suton said of his missed layup. “I remember crying my butt off, feeling like a loser, and I lost everything in one of the greatest games in college basketball history. That’s something that’s always going to stick.”
If that was his worst moment in basketball, what was the best? “This is it right now,” he said. “I don’t think I’d get to play in front of 70,000 people if I’d stayed in Bosnia. I’m going to get my degree. Things are going well right now.”
Regarding the unusual trajectory of his life, Suton said: “I’ve seen both sides of the world, life and death. Basketball is something I love. There is a difference between basketball and stepping on a land mine.” His world, he said, is “a joy — it’s just a joy.”
