The Dream That Led Him to Provo: Krešimir Ćosić, the Yugoslav Basketball Superstar Who Carried the Gospel Home (1969–1995)

In October 1969, 20-year-old Krešimir Ćosić left a successful basketball career with KK Zadar in Yugoslavia to play at an American university he had chosen almost by accident. Because of his limited English, he had not understood that Brigham Young University was a religious school with an honor code. "How did I ever get here?" he asked himself. "Now that I'm here, how can I get out? And if I can't get out, how can I survive?"

Yet the choice was not really accidental. Years earlier, during visits to his grandmother — one of his only exposures to religion in communist, officially atheist Yugoslavia, where she knelt daily in prayer and spoke privately of a heavenly power — Ćosić had a recurring dream: he saw himself playing basketball in a large arena between high mountains and a quiet lake. It was that dream that later drew him to BYU's recruiting brochure.

At BYU he was homesick and adrift. He smoked, drank wine, and as the star of his national team had been the object of fan worship that stroked his ego. During his second year, one night he decided he had had enough: he told his friend Christina Nibley he was calling a cab, going to the airport, and flying home. Three hours later he came back and told her he was not going to leave — that he knew there was a reason he needed to be there. "Something came over him," Christina said. She watched him pace in front of her couch, having a dialogue with himself, "responding to his own questions now viewed from the perspective of a spiritual plan. (Of course! That makes sense! Of course, that's it!)" — his hands gesturing wildly, his face glowing. "In the past 40 years whenever I've tried to explain it, I've simply stated that I watched Kreso convert himself," she later wrote. "Not even my father (Hugh Nibley) converted him; he only confirmed what Kreso already knew. But I always knew that on that day I had witnessed a transformation and I knew it was something glorious."

Ćosić began attending family home evening with Christina and stopping by the campus office of her father, Professor Hugh Nibley, to discuss religion. "My desire to study and to know more became unquenchable," he remembered. He also sought out philosopher Truman Madsen. "Within my heart, there began to burn familiarities — feelings that I had known as a child," Ćosić explained. "Those experiences began in my second year (at BYU). Through the process of my conversion, I had been given understanding. My vision was no longer bound by the limitations of mortality. ... I realized I was not alone. Our Father in his love for us had never intended us to be alone." Of his decision he said: "There are a hundred reasons why I should not join the Church, and only one reason why I should — because it is true."

In November 1971, Hugh Nibley baptized Ćosić in the font of the Salt Lake Tabernacle. Ćosić was also set apart as a special missionary to Yugoslavia, called to share the gospel in the course of his everyday life. He filled that calling with a convert's whole intensity. When fans approached him on the street, he offered them BYU T-shirts if they would read a card with the Articles of Faith or his written testimony. He recorded his own translated voice-overs for Church videos to share with friends and teammates. On road trips, while teammates relaxed at the hotel pool, he stayed in his room devouring religious books — "He didn't just read, he devoured the material," said teammate Doug Richards. During his senior year, roommate Craig Jorgensen reported that Ćosić rose at 4:30 every morning to translate the Book of Mormon into Croatian.

His new faith carried a cost at home. After the 1972 Munich Olympics, the Communist Party confiscated his passport for two and a half weeks for showing a Church film to a crowd at an exhibition game — "Man's Search for Happiness" instead of the basketball footage everyone expected — and the Yugoslav press branded him an "active religious propagator" embracing an ideology "completely alien to the ideals of our youth." The state kept him under surveillance; his phone calls were monitored. Yet those who knew him saw positive changes: "He returned to Yugoslavia a complete man and player," said coach Ranko Žeravica, and friend Ankica Ostarčević noticed "he seemed happier than ever." In the summer of 1974, Ćosić personally baptized Ankica and her husband Mišo Ostarčević, a national teammate, and began holding Church meetings in their home.

Over the following two decades, Ćosić — one of the greatest international basketball players of the century (Olympic gold in 1980, twice a Hall of Famer, later voted the best Croatian athlete of the 20th century) — became the bridge over which the restored gospel crossed into his homeland. With Mišo's help and an outside scholar, he saw the Book of Mormon translated into Serbo-Croatian and published inside Yugoslavia, because imported copies risked interception as contraband. He helped find a way for missionaries to enter the country in 1977 and helped organize the first branches in Zadar, Zagreb, and Beograd. After Croatia's independence and the war that followed, he turned to peacemaking, serving as deputy ambassador of Croatia to the United States. Diagnosed with cancer in 1994, he died on May 25, 1995, at 46; tens of thousands attended his funeral, where Franciscan friar Bonaventura Duda said of him: "He did not only believe. He wholeheartedly tried to practice his faith in real life." In 2010, when Elder Russell M. Nelson dedicated Croatia for the preaching of the gospel, he expressed gratitude for Ćosić and his dedication to bringing the gospel to his people.

The story reads as a single, decades-long providence: a boy's recurring dream of an arena between mountains and a lake; a recruiting brochure that matched it; a night of despair turned to certainty in three hours; a baptism in the Tabernacle font; and a smuggled translation that opened a communist nation to the Book of Mormon — the Lord preparing a basketball superstar, years in advance, to carry the restored gospel back to his own people.

Fuller account of this event (as retold in Dick Davis and Duane Hiatt, 'Kresimir Cosic—Basketball and Baptism,' New Era, Feb. 1974, 8–13.):

In the fall of 1971, Kresimir was a senior at BYU. He was a star basketball player, but he was also a man in search of something he couldn't quite name. He had been raised in a communist country where religion was discouraged, and he had come to BYU almost by accident. But as he spent time at the university, he began to feel a pull toward the gospel. One day, he went to the home of Hugh Nibley, a professor at BYU and a well-known scholar of the Church. Kresimir told him, 'I have been reading the Book of Mormon, and I have been praying about it. I know it is true.' Hugh Nibley was not surprised. He had been expecting this. He had been teaching Kresimir for months, and he knew that Kresimir was a man of great faith. A few weeks later, Kresimir was baptized in the Salt Lake Tabernacle. It was a day he would never forget. He was surrounded by friends and family, and he felt a sense of peace he had never known before. After his baptism, Kresimir was called to be a special missionary to Yugoslavia. He was excited to share the gospel with his people, and he spent the rest of his life doing just that. He was a powerful witness of the truth, and he touched the lives of many people.