India, May 31 -- By the time he was six years old, Luka Modric had seen the horrors of war up-close.

His grandfather had been shot in front of him and his family by Serbian rebels, who then set fire to their house in the tiny, arid village of Modric, in what was then Yugoslavia.

Modric's family fled the region amid the war for Croatia's independence, and lived for a while in a sprawling, dilapidated hotel in the small town of Zadar, about 700 km down the coast, along with hundreds of other displaced families.

The parking lot of the hotel became his playground.

In this gravelly, pockmarked square, he thrilled the other children with his extraordinary talent. He was small and thin for his age, but made up for that with skills he seemed ...