It is a warm, sunny spring day in Bjeliši, a quaint seaside town in the Southeast of Montenegro. Vitor Andrisevic is working the front desk at his father’s Bed and Breakfast when the telephone rings. The caller ID reads “CHARISMA”.
Young Vitor stares at the phone a moment, his heart racing.
“Hello?”
On the other end of the telephone call is Coach Ricky “Charisma” O’Donnell, longtime Western Illinois University Head Basketball Coach. Since taking over the Leathernecks program in 2007, O’Donnell has turned the program, located in rural Macomb, Illinois, into a perennial Mid-major juggernaut due in large part to his tireless recruiting efforts. This has earned him the moniker “The Warthog” among his coaching peers.
“Vitor? Coach Charisma here. We think you’ve got what it takes to wear the Leatherneck purple and gold and we’d like you to fly in this Fall for an official visit.”
Vitor was in shock. As he tries to muster the words to respond his father Andrej walks into the lobby. Vitor is trembling; a single tear streamed down his face. In that moment Andrej realizes who is on the other end of the telephone.
“I’ll be there, Coach.”
Vitor’s road to Western Illinois Basketball winds much longer than that of most of his teammates. His father, a Croatian Serb, fled his homeland in 1992 to escape a series of violent sectarian conflicts that plagued the Balkans following the dissolution of Yugoslavia. Andrej settled in Bjeliši with nothing more than a suitcase. The early days were difficult; he found work as a deckhand on a fishing vessel where he toiled in the dangerous currents of the Adriatic Sea for ten years before finally saving enough money to start his own B&B in the center of Bjeliši’s thriving seaside tourism industry.
Andrej met his future wife, Lutka, at a local bar in 2000 while watching the FR Yugoslavia National Basketball Team compete in the Summer Olympics. Both share what they describe as a lifelong love of the sport.
“Watching players from my homeland like Dražen [Petrović] and Toni [Kukoč] was an escape when things were difficult in Croatia”, Andrej explains.
In 2003 Andrej and Lutka married and in 2005 Vitor, their second child, was born. Lutka remembers Vitor’s love of basketball starting at a young age.
“The first toy we ever gave Vitor was a basketball. He would dribble for hours and hours. He wasn’t interested in cartoons, in playing with the other children — it was all basketball all the time.”
Throughout his childhood Vitor worked tirelessly to improve his game. He set his alarm at 3 am every day his favorite NBA team, the New Jersey Nets, played. Despite his unrelenting devotion to the game of basketball, few viewed his talents as anything remarkable. He tried out for the Montenegrian Nation Team every year from age 14 to 17 but never once made it past the first round of cuts. Scouts appreciated his impressive work ethic but most viewed him as lacking the pure athleticism and shooting touch to have any hope of playing basketball professionally.
It looked as though Vitor’s basketball future was dead on arrival. But Vitor, ever the hard worker, was not prepared to call it quits. Using a set of VHS “Highlight Tapes” his father crudely taped during his high school years, Vitor worked day and night to splice together enough footage to convince an American NCAA Basketball program to take a flier on him. The final product was — as Vitor himself describes it — “rough”.
“The quality [of the VHS footage] was so poor you could barely make out who I even was”, Vitor lamented. “Most coaches would probably just toss it in the trash.”
Realizing his final product would likely not be good enough to elicit any scholarship offers, Vitor did something he is not proud of.
“I found a bunch of YouTube videos of some of the best players in Montenegro that were filmed in the same gym and were of the same quality as my VHS tapes. You couldn’t tell anyone apart. One kid wore the same number as me, was roughly my height and weight, and is now on the Croatian Olympic Team. I worked some of his clips into my original tape.”
The conflicting emotions were difficult to reconcile as he prepared over 200 doctored copies of the tape to distribute to every NCAA Division I Program in America. “I know the video overstates my abilities, but I work so hard at this game. I felt like I could become a great player if I just got a chance.”
After nearly 18 hours traveling on his first ever flight, Vitor was elated to touch down at Lambert International Airport in St. Louis, Missouri. He fondly remembers the fields of wheat, corn, and soy blending into the Southern Illinois landscape on the three hour drive to Macomb. Though his introduction to America was a major departure from what you may see on European television, for a kid who grew up on the ocean Vitor found the humble farmland welcoming. He felt home.
As he arrived in Macomb and was dropped off at the University Union, Vitor experienced that familiar pang of guilt and fear. He knew he had to impress while he was in town — his fraudulent tape was good enough to get the attention of Coach O’Donnell, but in conversations leading up to the visit it was made clear he would have to earn his scholarship offer on the court. Jet lagged, he checked in to his on-campus dorm to get some rest and prepare for the most consequential weekend of his life.
Vitor arrived at Western Illinois Western Hall basketball arena promptly at 7 am on Saturday morning. As he walked into the arena he was greeted by other athletes in town on their official visit — Pat Giddens, Tron Whaley, and Allan Cunningham, all current Western Illinois basketball players. Vitor recalls Coach O’Donnell walking in the arena wearing a purple Adidas tracksuit complete with bright gold stripes down the sides.
“I fully expected to play some basketball that morning but that just .. didn’t happen” explains Vitor. “Coach began setting up the court but eventually stopped and said he was taking us to a local restaurant called Waffle House instead.”
As Vitor describes it, not a single minute of basketball was played that weekend.
“From the moment we met Coach he immediately began selling us on the University. He let us see his two NCAA Championship rings and acted like a parent might treat his son.”
“The focus of the weekend was entirely predicated on getting to know us and having fun” says Vitor.
That Saturday night Vitor and the other athletes on their official visit were invited to an on-campus party. The NCAA has alleged that a series of recruiting infractions were committed on this evening but have since suspended the probe citing a lack of evidence. No Western Illinois coaches or representatives have addressed the allegations on the record, but the NCAA investigation claimed that the athletes were chaperoned to the party by Recruiting Hostesses, known colloquially on campus as “The Leather Throats” and a night of “debauchery” with “copious amounts of alcohol, marijuana, and quaaludes” ensued.
We may never know what happened that Saturday night, but what is known is that Allan Cunningham, Tron Whaley, and Pat Giddens all committed to Western Illinois the following day over the likes of Oregon, Cal, and St. Joes. Vitor began packing his bags and still had not been approached by Coach O’Donnell with a scholarship offer. Knowing he had an 8 am flight Monday morning he walked over to Western Hall in hopes of discussing the matter. As he approached O’Donnell’s office Vitor could hear O’Donnell on a telephone call through the door.
“He sounded really angry” says Vitor. “He kept saying something about a ‘strong-ass offer’ and was using a lot of foul language.” (Editor’s Note: The FBI recorded this telephone conversation and shared it with the NCAA who investigated it in reference to Stane’s Hobson, a former WIU recruiting target and current point guard at Vanderbilt. This investigation was also canceled citing a lack of evidence.)
As O’Donnell ended the phone call, Vitor meekly tapped on O’Donnell’s office door.
“Coach greeted me enthusiastically and in an instant it was like whatever he was mad about was no big deal. He sat me down and offered me their final scholarship for the recruiting.”
Vitor called his family immediately to share the good news. But since that day, the thrill and jubilation he felt has given way to feelings of inadequacy and disappointment.
Shortly after arriving on campus as a scholarship athlete it became obvious to WIU coaching staff that Andrisevic was not the Five Star recruit they expected him to be. Midway through his Freshman campaign the guilt became too much to bear and he came clean to Coach Charisma about the duplicitous recruiting tape.
Vitor is contrite. “Coach says he understand why I did what I did and that he plans to honor my scholarship” he says. Others have not been as kind. The student section at Western Illinois home games are, in Vitor’s words, “ruthless”. He declined to discuss specifics. Some teammates also resent him.
“Real talk, he’s a bitch” says Freshman guard Koko Reeves.
Four years into his tenure at Western Illinois Vitor still has not cracked the rotation. He was passed up on the depth chart this season by Redshirt Freshman Jamie Burke and is unlikely to ever play any meaningful minutes in a Western Illinois uniform. Through it all, Vitor tries to focus on the positives. He graduated this fall with a degree in Political Science and plans to enroll in graduate level courses in the Spring. His goal is to move back to Montenegro to pursue a career in politics.
“I come from a region of the world that has faced many challenges. My father sacrificed everything to give me an opportunity to educate myself, so I want to make our homeland a peaceful place so generations after mine only know of war through textbooks.”
As for Coach O’Donnell, its safe to say he has learned a few lessons from the Andrisevic commitment. In his tenure at Western Illinois, O’Donnell has been arguably the most prolific recruiter in college basketball. He has discovered and developed nearly 20 NBA players, most notably Seattle Sonics All-Stars Deke Van and Giovanni Nelke. This sustained success has envious opposing coaches continuing to call him “The Warthog”, but even Warthogs occasionally eat shit.