by Mirin Fader
And he did “discover” Giannis, after all. Handed Giannis an orange leather ball and said, “Why don’t you try it? See if you like it?”
* * *
Velliniatis was drawn to Giannis in some way because he himself felt like an outsider all his life. Velliniatis was from a “mixed background,” as he puts it, half Greek and half German, growing up in Greece. “It was a difficult way to grow up, not fitting in to either society,” he says.
He felt a certain connection to the immigrant community. Connected to their plight, somehow, even though he was white and they were Black—and he never faced, and would never know what it felt like to face, the kind of discrimination and inequities they did. Still, in hopes of helping them gain access to Greek clubs, he continued to find talented Black migrants, including Michalis Afolanio, who would go on to become the first African Greek to ever speak before the Hellenic parliament, as well as Greek rapper MC Yinka, whose real name is Emmanuel Olayinka Afolayan.
“We were the first generation, the children of immigrants. The first Afro-Greeks,” says Afolayan, who was born in 1981 in Greece to Nigerian parents who had migrated in the ’70s. He lived most of his life without papers. Afolayan loved basketball but didn’t have many opportunities to play. He made friends, including Thanasis (Thanasis would come over to his home in Attika Square to hang out with Afolayan’s younger sister, Victoria), and felt accepted, especially since he quickly learned Greek. But classmates lobbed racist slurs at him as well.
“The way they treated immigrants was a bit fucked up,” Afolayan says. “Being Afro-Greek in the eighties, I was like an alien.”
Velliniatis mentored him and helped him play for his team, Pegasus United, in Kato Patisia. “Spiros saw that the African community has talented people, and maybe he admired them,” Afolayan says. “He wanted to help because there was a lot of wasted talent, people that didn’t have access to certain rights.” Meaning they could not get citizenship and therefore, in some cases, could not join sports teams. Greek law at the time prohibited undocumented immigrants over the age of fifteen from playing organized sports without a sponsor, according to Velliniatis. “We were not people, in this society,” Afolayan says.
Velliniatis became a respected coach in Athens, known for bringing in top-tier talent from poor neighborhoods. “He was trying to find diamonds in the rough,” says Harris Stavrou, a Greek sports journalist. Diamonds that wanted to be coached. “His main job was to find playground talents,” says Stefanos Dedas, a Greek coach who now coaches Hapoel Holon in Israel. “Not skilled guys, not talented guys, not shooters. Physical guys. Maybe taller, maybe longer.”
Velliniatis joined Filathlitikos B.C., a club in the city of Zografou, becoming coach Takis Zivas’s assistant. Zivas needed talent—quickly. Filathlitikos wasn’t exactly a small club or a big club. It was, however, a mediocre club. In need of something unexpected.
So when Velliniatis found Giannis and his brothers on the playground in Sepolia, he thought, I’m going to help them. He was excited, thinking how the brothers could potentially bring Filathlitikos out of mediocrity.
Problem was, Giannis didn’t want anything to do with basketball. He hated it.
* * *
Giannis’s heart was still in soccer, given that his dad was such a fantastic player. The thirteen-year-old still wanted to somehow turn pro in soccer. He had zero interest in basketball. Though basketball seemed like it could help pay the bills—given Velliniatis and the club’s offer—he couldn’t see dedicating himself fully to the sport, focusing on the more immediate task of street-corner salesmanship.
Velliniatis pleaded. He wouldn’t give up. “Give it a chance,” Velliniatis remembers telling Giannis. “For your family.”
Family was the only reason Giannis was open to listening to this strange man who wouldn’t leave him and his brothers alone. Giannis wanted to be just like Thanasis, so when basketball meant hanging out with Thanasis more, Giannis decided to give it a try. Velliniatis made a deal: try it out for fun, play for one month, and the team, Filathlitikos, would help out financially.
Thanasis loved basketball, but Giannis kept pleading with his older brother to play soccer with him. Still, Giannis couldn’t pass up the money. They needed to eat.
There were a couple of problems, though.
First, the club was farther away, in a completely different neighborhood. Zografou, where the gym is located, was ten miles away. They’d have to leave school, walk twenty minutes to the train station, hop on a train, then hop on another train, the Metro Line 2 (the Red Line), then walk twenty minutes, then hop on bus 230, just to get to their team’s gym for practice. It was about a fifty-minute trip.
Second, Giannis and Thanasis would need a sponsor, quickly, because of the Greek law that prohibited undocumented immigrants over the age of fifteen from playing without one. Thanasis was about to turn fifteen, so Velliniatis had to lobby on the boys’ behalf to allow them to play. Velliniatis found a way and drove them to Zografou for their first Filathlitikos practice.
Filathlitikos practiced in a small gym. Or, as Kostas describes it, “a little-ass gym.” It was tiny. Run down. It was so hot—the air-conditioning rarely worked—that humidity created precipitation that slid down the walls. There was no hot water. The showers were old, leaky; the tiles were faded. There were only about five hundred seats.
“It’s not like a USA court,” says Coach Zivas, whose friend Lefteris Zarmakoupis is translating for him. The gym had two standard baskets. A couple of basketballs. “It’s not a great gym, but it had the basics,” says Giorgos Kordas, former Filathlitikos teammate.
Zivas wasn’t sure what to expect when thirteen-year-old Giannis walked in with two of his brothers, Kostas and Thanasis. Zivas kept an open mind but tempered his expectations. Giannis was young. He would need time to develop. Nobody knew who the kid was. Who any of his brothers were. “We had to see if they were good for basketball,” Zivas says.
Giannis and his brothers looked around excitedly at the empty court, the leather basketballs. “Obviously they hadn’t entered a closed basketball court in their lives until then,” says Grigoris Melas, a Filathlitikos assistant coach, who now coaches at Giannis’s AntetokounBros Academy in Athens.
The coaches watched young Giannis run up and down the floor. He was so thin, so lanky, so skinny, that it looked like he might fall over if someone tapped him on the shoulder. Zivas thought one word to himself: shadow. He kept saying the word, over and over, in his mind. Shadow… shadow… shadow…
“He really was like a shadow,” Zivas says, in that Giannis was quiet and unassuming. He was one of those tall players who would slouch just a bit to blend in. He was polite and friendly but didn’t say much to anyone. He still didn’t really want to be there.
He wanted to be outside on the pitch. Kicking a soccer ball. Plus, he wasn’t very good at basketball at first. He had limited resources: the first time he ever shot a ball, he shot bank shots with a soccer ball at a broken rim. “Giannis is getting five hundred euros a month, and he doesn’t even know how to dribble the ball,” Velliniatis recalls. “He doesn’t know nothing.”
It was true! Giannis couldn’t dribble. Didn’t understand basketball. His hands seemed to be ahead of his feet. He’d trip over himself. The ball would trickle off his knee. He’d carry the ball. “I feel like he was confused, like all of us,” Kostas says, laughing. “His first game he had a whole lot of travel violations.”
His biggest weakness? “Pretty much everything,” Kordas says. “He wasn’t that good at first. He was passionate, though.”
Giannis instinctively ran hard, but he just didn’t know where to run. The older players would post him up, have their way with him. He was behind, as starting to learn basketball at thirteen was, and still is, considered late. And so the more Zivas watched, the more he was convinced: “Giannis is not ready for this,” Zivas says. “He wasn’t ready to play basketball.”
And Zivas had a hunch about why, just look
ing at Giannis’s body. “He wasn’t eating the portions that he needed to,” Zivas says. “That’s why he was very slim.”
Some parents complained at first that the club was giving money to a kid with so little skill, so little potential. Velliniatis told parents to give Giannis time to improve, to not be so harsh to a kid in need. “The Greeks do not understand what those kids and this family was going through,” he says.
Once, Thanasis wasn’t playing well in a game, and Velliniatis took him to a Greek restaurant afterward, and he remembers Thanasis eating eight souvlaki with double bread—a very large amount of food. Velliniatis had a friend eat with them. “I told my friend after,” Velliniatis says, “now you understand—it’s not that the kid is not talented. It’s that these kids are starving.”
Zivas remained patient. Making sure Giannis continued to show up to play was a priority for him. Giannis clearly had a ways to go, filling into his body, learning the rules of the game. He was raw, but he showed some promise. Zivas watched the way Giannis would never be the last one on sprints. The way he’d sprint back after a turnover no matter what. The way he wouldn’t give up after getting scored on three times; he would come back more angry, more stubborn, for the fourth.
“It was very obvious from the start, his determination,” Zivas says. “I think he was born with this.”
Giannis would often play one-on-one with Tselios Konstantinos, another teammate. Konstantinos was the better shooter, but Giannis never stopped hustling. “He was fighting for every point,” Konstantinos says. “He’s strong willed.”
One day, Velliniatis had the players line up against the wall and sit for wall squats for as long as possible. Thighs burned, calves shook. Every player dipped over, couldn’t handle it anymore, at five minutes. Giannis’s legs wobbled, but he wouldn’t collapse. He lasted for seven minutes.
* * *
Still, even with the help of the club, the Antetokounmpos continued to struggle financially. They were not an anomaly in Athens, though. This particular stretch of time was difficult for many Greeks, not just migrants, because of the financial crisis.
As more and more Black and brown migrants came to Greece, fleeing authoritarian regimes and political unrest, tensions rose even higher. Greek citizens blamed the newly arrived migrants for their economic troubles. And there seemed to be no relief in sight. A second wave of hardship would later hit: by early 2012, one in three Greeks lived below the poverty line. The minimum wage was reduced by 22 percent. More than twenty thousand were homeless.
Without papers, Charles and Veronica were forced to take under-the-table work wherever they could, but it was never enough. Velliniatis recalls growing more concerned for the family. He started subsidizing the Antetokoumpos out of his own pocket, he says, even when he himself didn’t have much. He became close with the boys, spending time training them, teaching them the fundamentals of the game.
“He loved us too much. I cannot say where the love comes from,” Giannis later told OnMilwaukee. “I didn’t even know him so well. He helped us so much.” He was, Giannis said, “like a second father for me.”
One morning, Velliniatis took him to a national training camp in the area that lasted a few days. Giorgos Pantelakis, Velliniatis’s friend, was coaching the camp. Pantelakis, who now coaches the women’s team for the Greek powerhouse Olympiacos, picked up Giannis in his Toyota, handing him a sandwich in the back seat. Giannis was surprised. Grateful. He was reserved but started opening up about his brothers, his surroundings.
“He was very mature for his age,” Pantelakis says. “He was a thirteen-year-old kid, but he spoke like a twenty-year-old guy.”
But once they arrived at the gym, Pantelakis realized Giannis had a long way to go in terms of maturing on the court. “He was very weak,” Pantelakis says. “You couldn’t imagine that this guy will be an NBA superstar.”
What was clear was that there was an edge to him. A hardness to him. He ripped down rebounds fiercely. He’d practice moves he couldn’t master over and over rather than drink water during breaks. And in games, kids knocked him around, but he never stayed down on the floor for more than a second or two before popping back up. “He wasn’t as strong as the other kids at the camp, but he tried two hundred percent more than every kid,” Pantelakis says.
The camp would start at 8:00 a.m. each day. After the first day, Giannis asked the coaches politely, “Can I come to practice early?” He showed up forty minutes early every day after that. He never left the gym for the duration of the day. The other kids rested or went swimming in between, but Giannis kept working. “He sees something he is not good at, he tries ten times more,” Pantelakis says. “He doesn’t let it go.”
He was improving because of the hours he put in. And the hours Velliniatis and other coaches spent teaching him. “There was no miracle, no recipe,” Velliniatis says. “You cannot learn mathematics by yourself. Somebody has to teach you.”
Pantelakis told his fiancée about Giannis, told her he was not very good at basketball but that she had to come to the gym to see how hard he played. And that is what she saw: Giannis missed every shot, to the point that players backed off him and just let him shoot.
Clank!
Clank!
Clank!
But then, after the game, she saw Giannis head to the side of the court and practice dunking. Yes, dunking, even though he could barely make a layup.
Something burned in him to fly. Rise higher and higher to the basket. He’d start at the free throw line and practice his steps, trying to get his rhythm down. He failed and failed, struggled to even grip the ball. For the next five days, he leaped and failed, leaped and failed. Wouldn’t leave until he dunked.
On the last day of the camp, he finally dunked the ball. Well, sort of. He laid the ball in aggressively, dunking it in with his fingertips. It was not really a dunk. But Giannis smiled, so proud of himself.
The excitement dissolved, though, as soon as he left the gym. His worries were never far behind.
* * *
Giannis and his brothers weren’t consistently coming to Filathlitikos’s practices. Maybe two or three times a week. They had to work. Provide for their family, especially on the weekends, taking those long trips outside the city to peddle their wares.
Sometimes they’d be in and out to the point that the coaches couldn’t predict when they would show: they’d be gone for a month, back for a month, missing for two months, back for a month. Especially Giannis, who worked the longest hours.
And when Giannis was at practice, he wasn’t really focused on basketball. He was there, but he wasn’t there. His mind was on selling. Scrambling. Surviving.
Club officials felt they needed to speak with the family. It was hard to pin Charles and Veronica down because they were working so much. “The children played with Filathlitikos for six years,” Zivas says. “We see Charles and Veronica less than ten times.”
The club tried to help the family in a variety of ways. The general manager of Filathlitikos, Giannis Smyrlis, was also the owner of a cleaning service, and he offered Charles and Veronica work cleaning buildings. They didn’t take the job, but Zivas kept pushing. He offered food in his fridge, allowed the boys to stay over. He would ask them, before every practice, “Did you eat today?” He would save them a yogurt, a croissant. Anything he could to keep the boys somewhat nourished, at least enough to make it through a practice.
Their teammates began to catch on to what they were going through. Christos Saloustros, Giannis’s close friend on the team, started noticing that Giannis wasn’t eating. He’d ask Giannis, “Are you OK? Are you hungry? Do you want something to eat?”
Giannis would shake his head. “No, I’m OK.”
“But then you were seeing them [the brothers] lie,” Saloustros says. “In their eyes, you can see that they are hungry.”
Saloustros, who now plays for the Greek club Peristeri and remains a close friend, would bring Giannis food no matter how many times Giannis
declined. He was worried about his friend. The entire team was. Nikos Gkikas, another close friend on the team who remains close to Giannis, remembers how intently little Alex would look at him as he ate a snack before practice. That’s when Gkikas fully realized the extent of their hardship. “From the first moment, we knew,” says Gkikas, who now plays for AEK Athens. “We saw four Black guys that were skinny as shit.”
Once, Konstantinos, Giannis’s teammate, had his mother make Giannis a bowl of rice and chicken. A month later, Konstantinos remembers Giannis telling him, “Oh man, I remember this dish. It was amazing.” Konstantinos laughs at this memory. “In my opinion it was the simplest meal,” he says. “So I said, ‘What the fuck? What is he eating on a daily basis?’ I didn’t know.”
No one did, because Giannis never talked about it. He didn’t want people to know. To feel sorry for him. He just wanted to compete. Compete hard. “He never asked from me or the other players for any sort of money,” says Melas, the assistant coach.
Melas didn’t understand the extent of Giannis’s family’s troubles until, one afternoon, he noticed Giannis looked really exhausted from training. Bent over, gasping for air, exhausted. He just could not go anymore. And that was really unlike him. “I realized how starving and weak he was,” Melas says.
And then Giannis fainted, collapsed on the floor. He hadn’t had breakfast, hadn’t eaten anything all day. Everyone rushed over to him, and Zivas sent a few to get food. From then on, everyone started asking Giannis if he needed food—especially Melas, who tried to make sure he always had a snack with him to give to Giannis. He’d often give him some change for a croissant. “This is something I put the blame on me for not having supported him earlier,” Melas says.
Giannis would sprint and hustle and sprint and hustle. Basketball wasn’t necessarily his refuge yet. But it was a convenient distraction. When his hands were dribbling, he didn’t have to think about hunger. When his legs were sprinting, he didn’t have to think about hunger.