TOKYO — It all started with “White Men Can’t Jump.”
Dusan Bulut was 9 years old and channel surfing at home in Novi Sad, Serbia, when the street ball caper starring Woody Harrelson and Wesley Snipes appeared on the television.
He was transfixed. He decided he wanted to become good at basketball.
From roughly that point forward, Bulut oriented his life around the game, measuring his progress by where he was playing. In the unglamorous neighborhood where he grew up, where basketball courts served as asphalt oases between gray buildings, this meant proving his worth on a hierarchy of pickup courts, each one featuring older, better players than the last.