by Mirin Fader
Copyright © 2021 by Mirin Fader
Cover design by Amanda Kain
Cover photograph © Mark Blinch/Getty Images
Cover copyright © 2021 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
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First Edition: August 2021
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2021939362
ISBNs: 978-0-306-92412-5 (hardcover); 978-0-306-92410-1 (ebook)
E3-20210624-JV-NF-ORI
CONTENTS
COVER
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
DEDICATION
EPIGRAPH
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1—HUNGER
CHAPTER 2—DREAMING
CHAPTER 3—STATELESS
CHAPTER 4—FOUND
CHAPTER 5—AMERICA
CHAPTER 6—LONELY
CHAPTER 7—HOPE
CHAPTER 8—REUNITED
CHAPTER 9—MEAN
CHAPTER 10—STAR
CHAPTER 11—LOSS
CHAPTER 12—IDENTITY
CHAPTER 13—FREAK
CHAPTER 14—MVP
CHAPTER 15—HOME
PHOTOS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
DISCOVER MORE
NOTES
For my family
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However far the stream flows, it never forgets its source.
—NIGERIAN PROVERB
One minute of patience, ten years of peace.
—GREEK PROVERB
PROLOGUE
Giannis Antetokounmpo and his family didn’t have much time. They had until sundown to get out of their apartment. They had fallen short on the rent. Again. They were being evicted. Again.
The landlord, in Sepolia, Athens, where Giannis and his family lived, had been barging into their apartment, telling them they had maybe a day, maybe two, to leave. But this time, the family wasn’t so lucky.
Veronica, Giannis’s mother, told him and his brothers to pack their things. Thanasis, the oldest of the four; Giannis; Kostas; and Alex, the youngest, didn’t ask any questions. They didn’t want to add to the burden. So they nodded, kept quiet, gathered their clothes.
But after packing all their belongings, Giannis and his brothers looked at each other, staring at their massive fridge in the kitchen, each thinking, What are we going to do with this? Charles, their father, looked around, trying to find something to leverage the fridge with.
Then Kostas, nine years old at the time, spotted a small skateboard. “Let’s put it on the skateboard!” he squealed. Giannis, twelve, and his father stared blankly at each other. What other option did they have? “Let’s give it a try,” Charles said. The three of them managed to hoist the fridge on top of the skateboard.
It seemed impossible, this giant fridge on a puny skateboard.
It looked ridiculous.
But Giannis held up one side, while Kostas and Charles held up the others, and they wheeled the fridge out the front door.
As a twelve-year-old, Giannis was already used to moving. Not knowing what would happen next. All he knew was that he couldn’t show fear. Couldn’t cry. His younger brothers depended on him, looked up to him. “He’d come up to us and explain to us why we were leaving,” Kostas recalls. Giannis was calm but stern when he spoke, even though he himself was just a kid. When he told his brothers everything would be OK, they believed him.
As they began wheeling the fridge down the road, Giannis reassured them that it would not break. They had about a mile to go, as they’d be staying at a friend’s house until they figured out where to live next.
They kept holding on to the fridge, praying it wouldn’t tip over. They didn’t care who was looking at them. Judging them. They wheeled and wheeled, pushed and pushed, as the hot sun beat down their backs. The fridge kept wobbling, threatening to topple over on the narrow sidewalk, especially when the skateboard grazed over loose stones on the uneven pavement.
They breathed a sigh of relief upon making it to the friend’s house. Their arms were sore, their hands stiff. The sky was dark. Standing in the elevator, fridge beside them, they couldn’t believe that little skateboard didn’t break.
* * *
Veronica remembers those nights in Greece. Remembers the uncertainty she felt, the strength she had to project. Her boys couldn’t know that she was worried. Scared. She never acted that way. Sometimes she’d leave the house at 11:00 p.m. to travel to places beyond Athens to sell trinkets on the street to make money to feed her children. She knew she had to provide for her boys.
“You do what you need to do to survive. If you have children, you have to survive,” says Veronica, known to her friends as Vera. She and Charles had emigrated from Lagos, Nigeria, to Greece in 1991 in search of a better life.
She’s clutching a white wristband she wears every day that reads “God is here.” “God is good,” she says. “You have to be strong and never lose hope.” It is by the grace of God, she thinks, that she is sitting with Giannis in the nearly ten-thousand-square-foot mansion she now shares with him; Alex; and Giannis’s girlfriend, Mariah Riddlesprigger, in River Hills, an affluent community near Milwaukee.
Her son, now a six-foot-eleven NBA star and one of the best basketball players in the world, is making millions of dollars. Something that seemed unfathomable in Sepolia back when Veronica, Charles, Giannis, and his brothers would dress up in their Sunday best, wearing polished-up hand-me-down clothes, and flash wide smiles when meeting with prospective landlords, trying to fool them into believing that they were well off. Worthy.
Veronica won’t forget what that feels like. “You don’t change, because you know that some people still do not have. You do not take a step higher,” Veronica says. “We are still who we are.”
Rain settles on the slender trees surrounding the family’s brick Milwaukee home. Tall branches form a canopy over a narrow lane leading to the front door. The area is quiet. Tranquil. An elderly couple holds hands while walking their shih tzu in the middle of the road.
Mariah opens the door on this muggy June day in 2019. Mila, the family’s goldendoodle, jumps up and down, almost leaping outside onto the gold doormat stamped with a giant black A in the center. “Mila just wants to say hi,” Mariah says. Inside, there is a sign that says “Family” in cursive, as well as a print that reads “Turn your worries into prayer.”
Alex is downstairs in the basement, sitting on a couch in front of four flat-screen TVs. There’s a pool table, air hockey, foosball, table tennis. A popcorn machine and scattered basketballs and trophies. The
re are boxes still to unpack, as the family moved here just a few months back. They used to live downtown, near Fiserv Forum, where the Bucks play. They’ve moved five times since coming to the US in 2013, when Giannis was drafted fifteenth overall by the Bucks.
A lot has changed. Giannis preserves each change through black-framed photos. There’s a 2013 piece titled “American Dream” from a Greek magazine. “You see this in the seats every time you fly in and out of Greece,” Alex says, beaming. There’s his Esquire cover, his Sports Illustrated cover. There’s also a portrait of the outdoor court in Greece where the brothers used to play. “It’s a reminder: that’s where we started from,” Alex says.
Back then, when they barely had food to eat, Charles would go without eating a day or two when needed for the family to get by. “We’ve got to make the most of today,” Charles would often tell his boys. “Tomorrow is not promised.”
Giannis saw the way his father would sacrifice, so he began sacrificing too. Giannis would scramble to find one or two euros for a yogurt or croissant, pretend that he had eaten, and give the food to his younger brothers. He’d go to sleep with his stomach rumbling, trying to forget that he was hungry but satisfied that he was helping the family.
They were evicted more times than they can remember. “A lot,” Alex says, trying to recall a number, then repeats himself: “A lot.” Kostas remembers three times clearly, then “a couple times before that” less clearly. The years blend, fold into each other, fracture into memories where only feeling remains.
Alex remembers the feeling of panic, of time shrinking, when the landlord would rush into their place, shouting at them to leave. He remembers arguments, the back-and-forth about payments, with his parents pleading, “We just need more time. Please. Just a little bit more time.”
* * *
Giannis often thinks of those days now that he will never have to worry about finding shelter, finding food.
And neither will Alex.
Giannis is keenly conscious of the fact that Alex, living in America and attending private school, came of age in a very different environment from the one he experienced at the same age. “It’s hard to be motivated when you have everything. When your life is good,” Giannis says. “I didn’t have a choice. I had to be motivated.”
It is still in the back of Giannis’s mind: Not having. Moving. Sacrificing. Maybe it always will be.
“What drives Giannis so much is that he’s afraid that at any moment somebody could take it all away,” says Josh Oppenheimer, Bucks assistant coach and close friend. “And I think that’s why he works so hard.”
That’s apparent as Giannis stands on the court in Milwaukee’s downtown practice facility on this June afternoon. His eyes narrow. He’s not smiling. He rarely is when he’s here. He approaches basketball as if he is still the child in Sepolia, waving sunglasses in the air on the street, hoping someone will buy from him.
So he doesn’t take off possessions. Doesn’t rest much. Has to be told to take breaks, has to be removed from the gym. He operates like he is one poor outing away from being cut.
“Our work ethic comes from what we’ve been through,” Giannis says.
Which is why he can’t tolerate the lackadaisical manner in which then-seventeen-year-old Alex, one of the top prospects in the area, is practicing one afternoon. Alex is wearing a “God is here” wristband, identical to his mother’s; he considers it sacred because she blessed it with holy water and prayed over it. He is jogging, not sprinting, as he knows Giannis would have preferred.
Alex starts dribbling. His legs turn into scissors as he slices a basketball between them, showing off his seven-foot, two-inch wingspan. He is six feet seven and crafty. Building speed. Probably because he knows Giannis is watching.
He yearns to impress Giannis, and Giannis in turn sees in him a younger version of himself. A slimmer version of himself. Alex starts toward the hoop from the three-point line and softly lays the ball in. Too softly. Giannis’s shoulders stiffen. There’s a sense of urgency. There always is when he watches Alex, the one he nurtures, protects, and mentors, almost like a father would. “I get more nervous going to watch Alex play in a high school game than playing in the Eastern Conference Finals,” Giannis says, his head tilting, tracking the flight of Alex’s next jumper.
When the two are together, the court is a cocoon. A place just for them. A place where they do not have to think about grief or pressure or money or failure.
We just need more time.
When Giannis speaks to Alex, most often in Greek, he is blunt but empathetic. Intense but warm. Sure of the plan he’s created for his brothers since they lived in Sepolia. Giannis assures Alex that if he works hard, if he gives everything, he can get to the NBA, just as Thanasis (Bucks) and Kostas (Lakers) did. And not just get there but star there. “I definitely think Alex can be better than me,” Giannis says.
Having all his brothers make the NBA is Giannis’s biggest motivation, besides winning an NBA championship for Milwaukee and a gold medal for the Greek national team. “It’s crazy. It seems like a dream,” Kostas says, given that a decade ago, he says, “we didn’t even play basketball.”
Giannis is trying to teach all his brothers, but particularly Alex, discipline and focus—to not get distracted by anyone or anything outside the cocoon. “It’s just me,” Giannis says, pointing to his chest, “and you.” He points to Alex’s chest. “Nobody else. Just me and you.”
He often reminds Alex where they’ve been. Those dark nights. Those uncertain nights. Giannis tells Alex what it feels like to play in front of twenty thousand people screaming insults, trying to get in his head: he knows his brother might soon face the same.
“Lock that shit out!” Giannis says. “It’s just me and you.”
Alex nods. He knows his brother has pure intentions. Nobody pushes Alex harder than Giannis. Nobody cheers louder for Alex than Giannis. “Just trust me,” Giannis often tells him. “I’ve been in your shoes. You got this.”
The time together is for Giannis’s sake too. After the two work out, the sharp parts of Giannis soften. He and Alex laugh and laugh. Share the same hearty, cheesy laugh too—the kind that starts in the belly and ends in tears.
Sometimes Giannis looks at Alex and glows. Full of pride, full of love. And fear. He wants to protect Alex from the things he’s been through. It’s a long list. He wants Alex to understand that he will fail at times, but he must always keep moving ahead. He wants to teach him to not care what people think. To choose friends wisely. To avoid social media. To take care of his body. To drink more water, less lemon-lime Gatorade. To be fundamentally sound. To cry when he needs to. To respect the game. To respect himself. To uplift their mother—always.
CHAPTER 1
HUNGER
Giannis was six years old when he started selling items on the street to help his family. He’d go with Thanasis and his mother. They’d find items for cheap, maybe one or two euros, in poorer neighborhoods and then sell them for more, maybe three or four euros, in better, more suburban neighborhoods.
They’d travel to beaches, especially upscale ones such as Alimos Beach, to pitch their goods, hoping the wealthy visitors would buy something. Giannis would hold Veronica’s hand, dangling an item in the air, hoping someone would find his adorable puffy cheeks endearing, his big sweet smile inviting.
Giannis didn’t understand what they were doing at first. What was really happening. How deeply they were suffering. But he knew things weren’t good. He knew he was hungry. He’d see their pantry, their fridge, bare. Some days they didn’t sell enough to have a meal until late into the night. He saw that being here, convincing someone to buy something from them, was a matter of eating or not eating. Surviving or not surviving.
And he saw the way his mother never slumped her shoulders, never lowered her chin. She kept faith even when she didn’t feel like she could keep going. Even when it didn’t seem possible that she would be able to feed her boys, her husband. “God
is good,” she’d remind them. She sold whatever she could find: sunglasses, DVDs, knockoff purses, watches, toys, clothes, beauty products. “Anything,” Veronica says.
Once little Alex was born, she’d take him on trips closer to home, waking up early for the Laikh Market in Sepolia on Wednesdays. The Laikh was an open-air market in the center of town with a bunch of stands. It had everything: produce, herbs, tea, yogurt. Migrants would sell trinkets off to the side, oftentimes not having legal permits to sell goods there.
In later years, Veronica traveled farther and farther to hawk her wares. She didn’t want to leave Alex for extended periods of time, so he became her close companion. “I traveled out of Athens, traveled for three days,” Veronica says. “I couldn’t be by myself. That is my baby.”
Veronica didn’t want this life, to stand on the street corner for hours on end. But her options were limited. As a Black migrant, she struggled to find other steady work, especially in the years following the financial crisis of 2008. It was the worst economic downturn since the 1930s. Banks failed. Stocks cratered. Europe fell into a steep recession.
Jobs, especially the ones Charles and Veronica and other migrants were searching for, were scarce. Even Greek citizens couldn’t find work. About 21.5 million citizens of the European Union were out of work, and as many as two-fifths of Greek youths were unemployed. Many lost their homes, lost family members to sickness, and were unable to afford medical expenses, let alone rent in the already-crowded housing districts.
It was hard enough for white Greek citizens to survive, but for a migrant woman from Nigeria? Difficult beyond measure. Though she raised her kids in Greece, walked the sidewalks in Greece, and went to church in Greece, she was not considered Greek. To many Greeks, she simply was a Black woman raising Black children. They didn’t respect her employment history, her accomplishments from back home in Nigeria.
“When I was in Nigeria, I’ve been a secretary, I’ve worked in offices. I walked in very big places, but when you go to Greece, they don’t recognize,” Veronica says. “They don’t want that.”