How one south-central European region came to rule the water polo world
By
Chuck Culpepper
TOKYO — There’s a five-country “neighborhood” on this Earth in central and south-central Europe where you ought not go messing around with your water polo ball and your skimpy trunks unless you want to take a drubbing. An American might call it the world’s SEC of men’s water polo, in which case the “Alabama” would be Hungary.
Then again, a globalist might call the SEC the Hungary-Serbia-Croatia-Montenegro-Italy of college football.
“The best part of the world,” Serbia captain Filip Filipovic said, “if you’re speaking about water polo.”
This dominant neighborhood is small, probably smaller than Texas if you draw a tight circle. Hungary shares borders with Serbia and Croatia; Serbia with Hungary, Croatia and Montenegro; Montenegro with Serbia and Croatia; and Croatia with Hungary, Serbia, Montenegro and, if you want to go ahead and count a maritime border in the Adriatic Sea, Italy.
The past five world championships and the past two Olympic Games across the last decade allowed for 28 semifinalists, all told. Of those 28, 25 slots went to the five countries, including all eight in the 2012 and 2016 Olympics. Go to one of these matches and watch the introductions, and you’re wildly likely to hear one of five national anthems: “Hymn” (Hungary), “Our Beautiful Homeland” (Croatia), “God of Justice” (Serbia), “Oh, Bright Dawn of May” (Montenegro), or “The Song of the Italians” (obvious).
They’re playing those songs here for sure, even though there have been fresh interlopers. Greece, hungry for its first-ever Olympic medal on the men’s side, pulled the upset of the tournament with its 9-6 semifinal victory over Hungary, whose nine gold medals since Los Angeles 1932 lead the planet. Spain, a finalist at the 2019 world championships, had gone six matches without defeat, including a 12-8 win over a game United States in a quarterfinal, before falling 10-9 in the semifinals to, of course, Serbia.
It’s also partly because the draw shook out a colossus of a quarterfinal on Wednesday night, when Hungary played Croatia and somebody had to go. A smoking seven goals from Hungary’s Krisztian Manhercz helped make that be Croatia, which won gold in 2012 and silver in 2016 in this chronic round-robin of tussle.
That outcome matter much to the 10 million Hungarians at home plus those around the world from Cleveland to Los Angeles and back over to London and Romania and Serbia, for they lived a distinctive non-enjoyment of Hungary’s quarterfinal exits in 2012 (to Italy) and 2016 (to Montenegro). “For the Hungarian fans in water polo,” Gergely Kiss wrote in a text, “there is the gold medal. And nothing else counts.”
He knows well at age 43, having helped lead the most recent Hungarian golden age, and that’s literally golden with golds at Sydney 2000, Athens 2004 and Beijing 2008. In an interview at Athens 2004, he told of the public expectations, and it sounded like the radio sometimes crackled with water polo chatter (and angst), so it sounded like many other places with other games and huffy fans. In a telephone interview from Tokyo to Budapest, he likened water polo in Hungary to such passions as rugby in New Zealand and soccer in Brazil.
“It had to change,” Kiss said, “because historically we don’t have any period of more than three Olympic Games where we were without a medal.” Golds came at Los Angeles 1932, Berlin 1936, Helsinki 1952, Melbourne 1956 (in maybe the most famous of the lot), Tokyo 1964, Montreal 1976 and the three aforementioned.
Who dominates the Olympics? Depends on the sport.
“Many of us played in the Olympics in Rio,” current player Balazs Harai said, “and the quarterfinals, that’s where we got kicked out, knocked out from the Games, and it was a very hard obstacle for us. This time, I think that we are emotional for this game, a quarterfinal for the Olympics, which is always hard.”
But hey, it’s not all that drastically different in Serbia, the defending Olympic champion, even if other sports such as soccer might butt in more there.
“The Serbian national water polo team has pressure all the time, through very deep, back, into the history,” current player Branislav Mitrovic said. “So in every tournament we will go for the gold in the first place, so we forgot that pressure a long time ago.”
Almost a century ago, landlocked Hungary, with its helpful natural springs for training as Kiss told it, started flourishing with a silver at Amsterdam 1928, and a neighborhood has flourished in kind. Among the hurdles for a program such as the United States is that while the Americans got hard-fought silver medals in 1984 and 1988 behind only Yugoslavia, the breakup of Yugoslavia leaves three titans in the draws to surpass — Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro — rather than one.
“Yes, we have this culture of water polo, especially with the Balkan countries, with Hungary and Italy also,” Filipovic said. “So yes, it helps us a lot, because from the time we are raised with the balls, in the water, and we spend every summer on the beach or in the court. So we lived water polo for about the last 25 years.”
The coaching clearly works, right on down to the tykes.
“I think first of all I have to repeat that the tradition is strong,” Kiss said. “The coaches have taken it and taken it seriously to teach the children the fundamentals of the sport.”
He mentioned capitals Zagreb (Croatia), Belgrade (Serbia) and Budapest (Hungary), and said, “These cities are three to four hours from each other by car. You can reach each other. You can have friendly games. You can learn from each other. You can compete.” He said, “So this is like a very, very meaningful cradle, these cities like Budapest, Belgrade, Zagreb, Dubrovnik. They are specialized to teach little boys how to play water polo properly.”
These countries tend to produce lads with height, which matters in water polo. Then those lads grow as they do, and it gets to club play, and, as Kiss said, “These questions are quite interesting, but in the end they are easy. The Eastern European cities, if you made a big circle from Dubrovnik [around] to Rijeka. I think it’s smaller than Texas. And there are at least two to three hundred water polo clubs in that circle including fifteen or twenty top clubs of the world elite.”
In at least one way, the neighborhood seems to divert from the SEC: less hatred born of tighter familiarity, with players having seen each other all the time for so long, with friendships, with many opposing players on national teams also teammates on club teams. The water-treading hugging at the end of the Hungary-Croatia quarterfinal was striking for its unmistakable respect.
“We are familiar,” said Manhercz, the big goal scorer, “but in water polo we play against each other in every year, so I mean Serbia, Spain, Italy, their players are playing in the top teams. So we are playing the champions league, so we knew each other, everybody’s a really good player here."
“The first three Olympics of the 21st century,” Kiss said, “we had big fights against Serbia, or so-called Yugoslavia, or so-called Serbia and Montenegro. There were some punches. There were some fights. There were some arguments. But respect, yes, there was respect.”
Said Mitrovic of Serbia, “We, for example, [if] I play Hungary, I’m very, very good friends with them.”
And even in a sport noted for its roughhousing, Kiss said, there’s a hesitation when seeing a known face on other team while pondering that old, old issue, “‘Should I punch him in the face?’”
All of it deepens the difficulty for a program such as the United States, whose goalkeeper, Alex Wolf, spoke Wednesday of watching these intra-neighborhood games on video and realizing how the neighborhood had toughened the neighbors.
“It’s not a huge difference,” Wolf said of the Americans and the neighborhood, “but all the European teams have so much experience. They get those kind of opponents all the time.”
Meni nije jasno generalno, šta sprečava slabijeg borca da padne kao pokošen i na slabiji udarac i pravi se da je nokautiran ne bi li protivnika diskvalifikovali? Pretpostavljam da se takvi slučajevi ne događaju često, ali opet...
