Luka Doncic heard the story and barely could believe it.
Tim Marovt also was once a prodigy, identified early as one of the best athletes in Slovenia. Marovt had a goal to become a world-class skier along with the skills and passion to become one of the best to come out of his country. Doncic had lived that life too, moving from basketball prodigy to European teen sensation to NBA megastar.
It wasn’t so straightforward for Marovt. Doncic had locked in as the skinny kid shared what he’d gone through.
Marovt traveled to Hawaii for a family vacation in 2014, the 12-year-old already on his way to achieving his sporting dreams. But a single day surfing in the Pacific Ocean changed all of those plans, a freak injury called surfer’s myelopathy shattering those dreams and putting seemingly impossible obstacles in his way.
“After 30 minutes of surfing, I felt a little tired and went to hotel room. Everything was OK, but I felt something unusual in my back. It was not painful but just like a weird feeling,” Marovt remembered. “So I went back to hotel room. I took a shower and laid down for a couple of minutes in my bed. And after 15 minutes I went to use the restroom but I fell on the bed. I was immediately paralyzed from my waist down.”
He was rushed to a hospital where doctors told him that if his condition didn’t improve in the next 72 hours, he’d spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair.
“I was very young but I didn't doubt myself for a single moment," he said. "Since that young age, I was so focused. When I see something, I'll do anything to achieve it.”
Doncic first heard the story in the 2A Sports Lab in Ljubljana, Slovenia, the gym where they both trained with Anze Macek.
Doncic was there to get ready for a season with the Dallas Mavericks. Marovt, who had been through hell trying to take a single stride, was there training for a marathon.
“It was so inspiring,” Doncic told The Times. “… It was kind of amazing just to hear. I mean, what happened to him was horrible. So just to get his mind to do everything he's doing now, it's unbelievable.”
That day in Hawaii, Marovt accepted the challenge and not his fate, soon taking the first step toward conquering adversity. And if Marovt could work to take his next steps, the least Doncic could do when facing his biggest NBA challenge would be to do the same.
Wednesday, Doncic takes another step in his new life as a member of the Lakers when his team plays in Dallas for the first time since the Mavericks traded him — a decision that led to protests and open wounds in a fan base that hasn’t recovered.
Doncic has fared better, the Lakers star regaining his form as his new team pushes toward the postseason in the best position it's been in since it won a title in 2020 as the West’s top seed.
Yet the process to get Doncic back to being the behind-the-head passing, on-court-screaming maestro has been incremental.
A mixture of shock, sadness and anger lived all over Doncic’s face, it dripped on every word and highlighted every expression on his first day as a Laker. The Mavericks had just very publicly bet against him, had pushed him off the path he thought he was staying on forever and into the unknown.
The first days in Los Angeles were more about the past than the future. But in the chaos there was a principal that Doncic and the people closest to him tried to reinforce. Things would get better, the new would become natural, the discomfort would become ease.
They knew he’d work his way through the challenge.
Doncic and his support staff were stunned by the trade and especially stung by Dallas’ rationale, reasons he believed were personal and questioned his character and work ethic. The notion that he doesn’t work hard, in particular, upset him.
“They have no idea,” Doncic told The Times of those doubters. “… I didn't end up here by mistake. You know? I worked my ass to be here. So it's kinda, I would say disrespectful, just sad that people say that.”
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Since joining the Lakers, people close to the team have praised Doncic for his work to get healthy after missing 22 games because of a calf strain. He’s been a constant presence at the optional workouts while continuing his work with Macek and Javier Barrio, his fitness and medical coaches who are now on staff with the Lakers.
Doncic and the Lakers acknowledge there are ways to get the most out of him, a player who spent his teenage years as a young pro in Spain going through highly regimented, drill-based training with soccer club Real Madrid. It’s far from his preferred process of work.
“I always say, you know, I’ve always got better at the game when I was playing five-on-five, one-on-one, two-and-two in practice,” Doncic told the Times. “That's what I always see that I'm most improved when I play that way in practice.”
It’s why Doncic has found ways to add competition to the noncompetitive parts of his routine, his pregame on-court workout featuring a lengthy menu of trick shots, including a half-court contest that ends with either Doncic or Lakers coaches Greg St. Jean and Ty Abbott doing pushups.
“When you’re not challenging him in practice, it’s really hard to get the best out of him,” Macek told The Times with a laugh.
Doncic acknowledged the same Sunday after the Lakers beat the Thunder in Oklahoma City, saying that the pressure from Lugentz Dort, one of the best perimeter defenders in the NBA, helped push him to another level.
“It brings the competitive spirit out of me,” he said. “It brings the best out of me.”
Macek’s been in the gym with Marovt and Doncic and has seen the ways their approaches are very different. And he’s seen the ways they’re the same.
For Marovt, there was intense work with visualization and mind power. Doncic isn’t so into that.
“I would say I’m more reactionary,” Doncic said.,
But Macek has seen the way both have responded to doubt and used it as fuel.
“When he was 15 years old, he barely walk,” Macek remembered of Marovt. “He came with the crutches … totally out of shape. He couldn't lift his legs. He couldn't move well. But what I saw in his eyes was this passion to improve … to do something big. He was so motivated. And I said, ‘OK, I need to help this kid.’”
Macek surveyed the damage done to Marovt by the spinal and nerve injuries, the tightness in his muscles, the disconnected pathways between his brain and legs that made every step a challenge.
But like Doncic, Marovt needed to be challenged. He needed goals to conquer.
“Some challenges were not-so-big goals. We didn't say in the beginning that he will run marathons,” Macek said. “But we said, ‘OK, you'll walk without walking sticks or without crutches one kilometer.' … When we will reach this, we will go, we will set another goal like, ‘OK, now you need to bend your knee. You need to, to lift your leg.' And every time when we pass those goals, we just advance, advance, advance.
“When he reached the goals and we set other goals, this motivated him. And with this kind of motivation, he was alive.”
Marovt sees the same thing in Doncic, the thrill of accomplishing something big accompanied by the rush from proving others wrong.
“I like that when people say that I'm not able to do that. Now when I run marathons, everybody say, ‘Tim, but you will injure your hips. You are damaging your body.’ And I'm just, ‘Yep, just keep going. Just keep going because I like to take big challenges.' … And I think this is also with Luka, he likes big challenges. He loves when people doubt him. Especially like that trade.”
The biggest challenges for the Lakers are still to come, the playoffs set to start at the end of next week with the goal of Doncic winning his first NBA championship coming into focus. Wednesday in Dallas will be full of emotion, reminding Doncic of what he lost when the Mavericks traded him — a fan base that adored him, a city that he thought would be home his entire career.
Yet luckily for the Lakers, it’ll remind Doncic that the Mavericks ultimately didn’t believe in him for their future. And Marovt knows how people like him and Doncic handle hearing things like that.
“We have the same habits here because we get more excited and more motivated when people think it's not possible. And we just like to work hard and just show up and show everybody that they were wrong,” Marovt said. “Don't get me wrong, this is not personally to just to prove something to somebody else. Of course, in the first stage, everything we do is for our own [self]. But yeah, I think this is just to get more motivated to keep going and to show the world that everything is possible if we really put our mind into it and work hard.
“And since Luka got traded, I know that in a few weeks, he would be unstoppable.”
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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
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