“Once Brothers,” a documentary produced by ESPN 15 years ago, detailed the friendship that developed between Vlade Divac and Drazen Petrovic as they starred on Yugoslavia’s emerging national team in the late 1980s.
It also detailed how everything — their relationship, the team and the nation — fell apart.
Croatia, one of the nation’s six republics, declared its independence in 1991, leading to war with Serbia. While the latter republic was the aggressor, an official in the film is quoted as saying that it “wasn’t a black-and-white struggle,” that both sides were guilty of war crimes and ethnic cleansing.