Belgrade will get a Mate Parlov Street, named after the most successful Yugoslav boxer of all time, who won European, World, and Olympic titles in the 1970s, the city announced on Wednesday.

The decision was made as Belgrade hosted the World Boxing Championship. It is unclear where the street would be located.

Born in Croatia’s second city of Split in 1948, Parlov later lived in Fazana, a small town in Istria. His career lasted from the late 1960s until the late 1970s.

Parlov had a total of 310 matches in his amateur career and suffered only 13 defeats. He was champion of Yugoslavia in the light heavyweight category eight times (1967-74), a five-time Balkan champion (1971-74), and a two-time champion of Europe (1971 in Madrid and 1973 in Belgrade). He had also won the title of world amateur champion by winning the first World Championship, held in 1974 in Havana, Cuba, and he competed in the 1972 Munich Olympics, where he won a gold medal.

After retiring from sports, he ran a bar in the city of Pula, where he would often serve his customers himself. Parlov was one of the biggest sport stars of his generation in Yugoslavia, and is remembered for vocally opposing the rise of nationalism in the 1990s, famously saying in an interview that “he cannot be a nationalist, for he is a world champion.”

Parlov studied economics but dropped out of a MA university program with just one exam left before graduation, and was known to like poetry, which he said he would often read before boxing bouts to get inspiration. He was diagnosed with lung cancer in March 2008 and died several months later, at 60 years of age. Since then, bronze statues of Parlov have been erected in his hometown of Fazana and in Pula, where the town’s main sports arena carries his name.

To this day, he often tops polls for Croatia’s greatest all-time athlete. Even so, he did not appear in the media much, and is best remembered for an interview he gave in 2004 to a Bosnian magazine.

“The world admired my results, and everybody accepted me everywhere I went, white people, black people, whatever… I have seen the world, and because of this I cannot be anything but a cosmopolitan. That’s how I see sports and that’s how I see life,” he said.