Petar Borota

Borota started playing professional football with OFK Beograd in 1969, recording 8 league appearances for the club by the end of the season. Over the coming years he marked himself out as an able goalkeeper, earning a spot on the Yugoslav under-21 team and attracting interest from bigger clubs.

Partizan

Eventually in 1975, he agreed terms with FK Partizan across town, leaving OFK after six seasons. However, before joining the crno-beli he went to serve the mandatory army stint that kept him out of action for the entire 1975–76 season.

1976–77 season

Borota finally joined the reigning league champion Partizan in late 1976 with the season already in progress. The 23-year-old claimed a place between the goal posts right away, making 27 league appearances until the end of the season under also newly arrived head coach Biće Mladinić.

1977–78 season

For the following 1977–78 season, Borota was an established squad member. With head coach Mladinić behind the bench, Partizan claimed the domestic title in dominating fashion behind the goalscoring efforts of club legend Moca Vukotić and new acquisition Slobodan Santrač (arrived in the winter transfer window, and scored 11 goals in 16 matches during the half-season), but also thanks in no small part to Borota (in addition to rugged central defenders Nenad Stojković and Jusuf Hatunić as well as full backs Nikica Klinčarski and Ivan Golac) who let in only 19 goals in 34 league matches.

1978–79…

As he came into his own with FK Partizan during the league-winning 1977–78 season, Borota started getting national team callups as well. The 26-year-old Hajduk Split's keeper Ivan Katalinić had been the national team's first choice goalie at the time under 3-man head coaching commission (consisting of Marko Valok, Stevan Vilotić, and Gojko Zec) as well as under previous head coach Ivan Toplak, however, the team's faltering 1978 World Cup qualifying campaign with two opening losses that led to Toplak's removal prompted a need to look at other options in goal as well. The coaching triumvirate of Valok, Vilotić and Zec gave 25-year-old Borota a debut as second-half substitute for Katalinić on 5 October 1977 in the away friendly versus Hungary.

1978 World Cup qualifying

One month after his debut, Borota got a surprise opportunity to start in the crucial qualifier away versus Romania that was a must-win for Yugoslavia. The contest turned into a furious and epic scoring affair with Borota amateurishly conceding a long-range lob effort by Iosif Vigu only 4 minutes in. Plavi overturned the score to 1–2 by the 18th minute on a goal from Safet Sušić and a superb 25-meter strike by Dražen Mužinić, but the momentum shifted again as Anghel Iordănescu and László Bölöni managed to beat Borota twice more by halftime for 3–2 Romanian lead with poor aerial heading effort and bad positional play of Yugoslav defenders contributing to both goals. Early into the second half young Sušić…

Borota tried his hand at coaching, but didn't get further than several low-profile appointments in South Africa during the 1980s. By the early 1990s he came back to Belgrade. Already devoting much of his time to abstract painting (he had his work displayed in London in 1981 while an active player), Borota put together an exhibition in Srećna nova umetnost gallery in Belgrade's SKC. In 1994, he was implicated in an art theft ring of Paja Jovanović paintings and served a six-month spell in investigative detention. After getting out of prison, through his friendship with Vujadin Boškov and Siniša Mihajlović, Borota moved to Genoa in Italy where he made a living by painting. He died on 12 February 2010 in Genoa, after a long illness, aged 57. He was buried at the New Cemetery in Belgrade on 25 February 2010 with the ceremony attended by his friends and colleagues such as Momčilo Vukotić, Slobodan Santrač, Vladimir Petrović Pižon, Dževad Prekazi, and Milutin Šoškić among others.