SPOKANE, Wash. — Drago Jankovic was working Saturday morning in Canada, driving his truck, when he pulled out his phone and recorded a video for his son Stefan, who a day earlier helped Hawaii defeat No. 4-seeded California in the NCAA tournament. Drago was so full of pride, he sang a Hawaiian song and shouted as he drove.
SPOKANE, Wash. — Drago Jankovic was working Saturday morning in Canada, driving his truck, when he pulled out his phone and recorded a video for his son Stefan, who a day earlier helped Hawaii defeat No. 4-seeded California in the NCAA tournament. Drago was so full of pride, he sang a Hawaiian song and shouted as he drove.
“Go, Warriors!” he said over and over.
That made Stefan Jankovic smile, his father’s Serbian accent a reminder of the home he left as a young boy. Jankovic, Hawaii’s 6-foot-11 star forward, had been thinking about Serbia after the upset, after the locker room had long cleared out, and he was still sitting at his locker, shaking his head. His intermittent journey, set in motion by civil war, included stops in Toronto, Florida and Missouri. And then it took him to Hawaii, where on Friday the Rainbow Warriors, a 13th seed, won the first NCAA tournament game in program history.
“All the people back in Serbia and Bosnia are watching this, too,” Jankovic said.
Stefan was born in Belgrade, Serbia, in 1993, not long after the start of the Balkan civil war. His father, a professional handball player, had his career cut short by the unrest, and the family lost several relatives and friends in the conflict.
After a few years, the Jankovics moved to Toronto, seeking a more stable life. Drago Jankovic picked up several jobs to provide for the family: delivering pizza, working construction, painting, working at a car dealership and shoveling snow. Then he started driving a truck. Eventually, he started his own trucking company.
“Every day I wake up at 4 a.m.,” Drago said in a phone interview. “Even on Saturdays.”
Stefan, meanwhile, was developing his own work habits. He grew about 9 inches in his first two years of high school and began taking basketball seriously. He developed a jump shot, trained at the IMG Academy in Florida and earned a scholarship to play at Missouri.
But he stayed at Missouri for only a little more than a season. When coach Frank Haith was suspended for five games at the start of Jankovic’s sophomore season for violating NCAA rules when he coached at Miami, Jankovic took it as a sign that Haith would not be long for the Missouri job. Jankovic also wasn’t happy with his playing time, so he transferred to Hawaii to play for coach Gib Arnold.
But before Jankovic ever played a game for Hawaii, he had another brush with the long arm of the NCAA. Arnold was removed as coach amid an investigation. In December, as the Rainbow Warriors were preparing to play Northern Iowa, they were told in the locker room that the NCAA had ruled they would be barred from the 2017 tournament.
“We just said, this year we’ve got to make it special,” said Jankovic, a junior.
Of all the stops Jankovic made along the way, he felt at home at Hawaii, not least because he found other Serbians. He befriended Niko Filipovich, a guard who had Serbian roots, and Stefan Jovanovic, a forward who was born in Serbia, too. They trash-talked one another in Serbian during practice and tried watching all of the matches of Serbian tennis star Novak Djokovic.
“They won’t let us change the TV when he’s on,” Aaron Valdes said.
The three Serbians have formed a clique. They tease Jankovic for starring in the Instagram account his girlfriend made for her tiny dog. They play the video game FIFA and lament that they can’t play as Serbia. Otherwise, they spend a lot of time at the beach.
“Jankovic is addicted to tanning,” Filipovich said. “You see how white I am? Stef has to go to the beach at least an hour a day to get his tan on, or he won’t be able to practice or focus.”
It must have paid off. Jankovic averaged 15.7 points, 6.6 rebounds and 1.2 blocks a game and was named the Big West Conference player of the year. His father watched every game, Jankovic said, throwing the remote at the television when he missed a free throw and admonishing him when he complained about fouls. When Stefan wasn’t in foul trouble Friday, he gave the Golden Bears fits in the first round of the tournament, scoring 16 points in 18 minutes.
When the Hawaii locker room opened for the news media Saturday, and a horde of reporters gathered around Jankovic, asking about the next matchup, against No. 5-seeded Maryland, Filipovich and Jovanovic sat nearby teasing him. Jankovic smiled, called them clowns and tried to politely answer questions. Filipovich and Jovanovic kept giggling.
“He’s just a superstar, man,” Jovanovic said.
“Half superstar, half model,” Filipovich said. “He changed, man.”