by Mirin Fader
We just need more time—his mother’s words always in his head.
Watching Giannis evolve, garner more attention, Alex saw potential and pain in that orange leather ball. That ball could be the difference between a good day and a bad day, between having and not having. Some nights, everything they dreamed of doing with that ball seemed just out of reach.
Giannis wouldn’t accept that conclusion. He pushed all of them in drills—especially Alex. That was when he started telling Alex that one day he could be better than him. Alex didn’t dare question his brother. But Alex just looked at Giannis’s body, then back at his own, and thought, How?
At the same time, Alex’s head swelled as his skills improved. Alex started thinking he was really good just because he was bigger than the other kids. Giannis wouldn’t tolerate that. Though just a teenager, Giannis had a determination to lift his family from one continent to another—that could not be shaken. So he would not allow his youngest brother to become complacent.
One day, Giannis told Alex that there are a lot more players in the world, in other countries, in America, who are good at basketball. Who are great at basketball. Better than him. Better than any of them.
“There’s so much more out there,” Giannis said. “You have to keep working.”
Sometimes, in the summer, Giannis would stay in the gym all day. “He could stay ten hours,” Gkikas says. Everyone else would leave. Giannis might not have had anything to eat. He might not have had bus money. Sometimes it was just too late at night. But he’d complete his team’s practice, then the men’s team practice, then work out in the gym by himself. Shoot, shoot, shoot.
He’d stay past dinner, partially because his home was several bus rides away. He would rather stay. Stay with the nets, the cones. The leather ball. Keep working, keep working, he could hear his father urging.
When his arms were numb, too tired to keep shooting, he’d find his customary spot on a beat-up blue mattress, where players would stretch, just behind the basket, and curl up. No blanket, no pillow. He didn’t need anything. Shutting his eyes, he’d doze off, fall asleep, dreaming of something better.
* * *
The day before Christmas, migrant children and teens often participated in kalanta, where they’d travel to upscale areas in Athens and sing Christmas carols in shops, in people’s houses, wherever anyone would give them money.
Giannis told Rana, “I’m going to buy my family a TV and a PlayStation,” two things he had wanted. He went with his brothers Kostas and Alex, while Rana and Nkwònia went together. The two groups wanted to see who could bring home the most money.
But Giannis’s group got a head start because Giannis insisted on singing at 6:00 a.m. He went all day until 5:00 p.m. He didn’t eat anything the entire time. Didn’t stop and rest for a second. He would not be deterred.
Giannis managed to pocket €800 and buy the TV and PlayStation. Veronica was so proud of her son. Charles was too. Every time Charles clicked on the TV, he felt a burst of pride that they owned this device. They could watch whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted. Then he’d beam at his son. His son who understood the true meaning of hard work.
CHAPTER 3
STATELESS
“Go home, monkeys!” Filathlitikos had traveled to Crete, about 245 miles away from Athens, for a road game when Giannis was about sixteen. Local fans were hostile to all Filathlitikos players, but especially to Giannis and Thanasis.
It was painful. Unrelenting. Fans threw soda cans, bottles of water, and even coins onto the court. After the game, Giannis and Thanasis cried. “They were just shattered,” Rana says. “It was the saddest day, just seeing how racist people are. We were working hard to be accepted in this society, and people were just rejecting us.”
Rana saw the way Giannis ignored it, pretended as if he didn’t hear it. But often Giannis couldn’t do that, like the day he sang Christmas carols to buy his family a TV. Giannis went into a coffee shop to sing, and the owner shooed him out with a broom, as if Giannis’s mere presence in the shop was toxic. And if that wasn’t humiliating enough, the owner said, “We don’t want your kind here. You shouldn’t be singing Greek Christmas carols.”
People often assumed Giannis was older than he was because he was so tall and lanky. Sometimes that allowed him entry to dance clubs with Thanasis. Rana remembers Giannis telling him about one such night when Giannis and Thanasis were hanging out, talking to a few girls, when a white man approached Giannis and said, “Look at this Black kid!”
They exchanged a few words, and within minutes, the man and Giannis ended up outside tussling. The man shouted, “I hope you go back to your country with your monkey people!”
Thanasis rushed outside, spotting Giannis on the ground, the man practically choking him. Thanasis flew over, tore the man off his brother, and then punched him out.
He would do anything for his brother.
* * *
Though these incidents took a toll, the brothers were embraced by many neighbors, friends, and schoolmates. Though they were the only Black kids at their school, 53rd High School in Sepolia, they’d gather with kids and parents from the school every Sunday, and Veronica remembered feeling that her family felt loved.
Giannis’s teammates treated him well also. “We treat him like he was one of us,” Gkikas says. And he was. They spoke the same language. Went to the same church. Jogged on the same sidewalks. Rode the same buses—the Red Line metro, third stop at the end for Sepolia. “Giannis is more Greek than the Greeks,” says veteran player Nikos Zisis, Giannis’s former Greek national-team teammate whose nickname is “The Lord of the Rings.” He currently plays for AEK Athens. “Giannis loves this country.”
But not everyone treated them so well.
“We were treated like every other immigrant,” Alex says, “which is: not very great.” Alex began to notice the way some people said hi to them and some didn’t. Didn’t even look at them. Recognize them. “The way they just looked at us as if we were lesser,” Alex says. “Our neighborhood did a great job to not make us feel like racism is a problem,” says Alex, given that their neighborhood was filled with migrants, “but that doesn’t mean that every neighborhood did.”
The brothers knew they couldn’t walk alone in certain areas at night. Even together, they were still a target. Still a threat to the white vigilantes who sometimes roamed the streets looking for migrants to terrorize. Black and brown kids, especially. Kids who looked like the brothers.
The Golden Dawn, a racist, violent Neo-Nazi Greek party, would chase, rob, and even murder migrants, especially those from South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. They’d target diverse neighborhoods like Sepolia, nearby Kypseli, and Agios Panteleimonas.
Golden Dawn’s goal was intimidation, sometimes by throwing rocks or beating people with clubs. They believed all immigrants should be deported immediately. They’d even beat up whites who didn’t look fully Greek, such as Albanians. Police would often look the other way.
Golden Dawn members would shout, “Foreigners, out of Greece! Greece is for Greeks! Blood, Honour, Golden Dawn!”
In the middle of Saint Panteleimon Square, a plaza in front of Saint Panteleimon Church, about a ten-minute walk from where the Antetokounmpos lived, was a message written on the ground that read, “We will clean this square.” Golden Dawn wanted to cleanse the country of Black and brown immigrants and anyone else who was not a fully white Greek. Their slogan was “Rid the land of filth.” They didn’t see Black people as Greek or even as human.
The Antetokounmpos were aware of them, which is why they tried not to walk the streets at night. But sometimes, after a long practice, they couldn’t help it, even if they knew it was unsafe. “It was a little scary,” Kostas says. “It was something you had in the back of your mind, like when you’re walking by yourself late at night, you gotta be careful. You just know. You could sense it.”
So they kept their eyes straight, shoulders back. Heads on a swivel. Alert. Alwa
ys alert. They weren’t afraid to leave their home—they felt safe and loved and respected by many of their peers—but there was always this threat. Always this fear. “They tried to put fear in people,” Kostas says.
Nikolaos Michaloliakos, a twenty-two-year-old Greek man, founded Golden Dawn in 1980. His father, Georgios Michaloliakos, was a member of a security force called Tagmata Asfalias, which was armed by the Nazis. He was also an officer of the Greek Gendarmerie, which was a kind of provincial police.
The young Michaloliakos grew up in a subculture that praised the hanging of Communists. He began building bombs at twenty, leaving them to detonate in cinemas where Soviet films were played, according to Konstantinos Georgousis, Greek filmmaker of the 2012 documentary The Cleaners, about Golden Dawn.
Michaloliakos had served thirteen months in jail in 1979 before starting Golden Dawn, which sympathized with the military dictatorship that governed Greece from 1967 to 1974. Golden Dawn had swastikas on the cover of its magazine. It praised Hitler and white supremacists.
The group registered as a political party by 1993 but still hovered around the fringes of Greek politics. It barely made a dent in the national-election vote as late as 2009, getting just 0.3 percent of the vote that year; Syriza, a leftist party, won 4.6 percent of the vote. But things were changing. Greece, like many countries in Europe, was turning to the right. Golden Dawn became more visible the following year, in 2010, when Michaloliakos was elected to Athens City Council. He was seen on camera doing the Nazi salute. When asked if he believed that the Holocaust happened, he said, “I think all history is written by the winners.”
Golden Dawn began calling itself the party of “nationalists,” refraining from outwardly praising Nazi ideology in order to appear more palatable politically. But it was clearly motivated by Nazism. At the group’s rallies, members sang “Horst-Wessel-Lied,” a Nazi anthem banned in Germany. They sold Mein Kampf at their official headquarters. They had a symbol resembling a swastika on their flag. They incited arson attacks on mosques and synagogues while calling themselves the “party of order.”
“What many Greeks got wrong was that they thought Golden Dawn was just an extreme group, that they were not really violent,” says Georgousis, the filmmaker. “Violence was the main part. You cannot be Golden Dawn and not be violent. It’s like saying you can be a basketball player and not be playing basketball.”
Georgousis embedded with Golden Dawn, observing them during the summer leading up to the 2012 elections, when Golden Dawn gained an astounding eighteen seats of the three-hundred-seat parliament, coming in third with about 7 percent of the vote.
At that time, unemployment stood at a whopping 25 percent, and over 50 percent for young people. The government allowed supermarkets to sell expired food at discounted prices; the price of home heating oil had tripled since 2009. Golden Dawn blamed Greece’s economic troubles on Jews and migrants, calling them “parasites.”
“The financial crisis will be solved once we get rid of three million immigrants. These parasites drink our water, eat our food, and breathe our Greek air,” said Alekos Plomaritis, a Golden Dawn candidate running for office in 2012. “They are primitive, miasmas, and subhuman.… We will turn them into soap.
“We will make lamps from their skin,” he added.
Tensions were exacerbated by the evolving migrant crisis, as Greece was a popular entry point both for asylum seekers and those planning on moving to northern and western Europe. Golden Dawn’s views became more accepted in working-class areas like Kos, which, like Sepolia, was filled with refugees. A fifty-year-old Greek woman living there at the time told the New York Times that immigrants were “filthy.” “Soon enough, the Greeks will become a minority in our own land,” the woman said.
Georgousis captured footage of party leaders saying, “[Immigrants] will hear Golden Dawn, and they will tremble with fear.” Georgousis recorded Golden Dawn members intimidating Bangladeshi voters, tearing up their ballots, taunting Afghani immigrants on the street in neighborhoods close to where Giannis grew up and calling them “baboons.”
As Golden Dawn won 7 percent of parliament that year, Georgousis filmed supporters cheering on a dark night as Michaloliakos stood on a balcony and exclaimed that they were fighting “for a Greece that belongs to Greeks!” He grew louder: “Next time it will be seventeen percent, twenty-seven percent, and one day we will govern the whole country!”
Immigrants made up only about 10 percent of the country’s population in 2012, according to the Migration Policy Institute. But they were constantly targeted. One afternoon, about fifty Golden Dawn members on motorbikes, armed with heavy wooden poles, stormed the city of Nikaia, one of the Golden Dawn’s biggest strongholds. Flashing shields that resembled swastikas, they screamed at immigrant business owners, “You’re the cause of Greece’s problems. You have seven days to close, or we’ll burn your shop—and we’ll burn you,” Mohammed Irfan, a legal Pakistani immigrant who owned a hair salon in the city, recalled to the New York Times.
In another instance, forty Golden Dawn members, led by Giorgos Germenis, marched through the town of Rafina at nighttime, ordering “dark-skinned merchants” to show permits, according to the Times. Such incidents were not uncommon, as a Human Rights Watch report at the time noted, warning that xenophobic violence had become an “alarming phenomenon” in parts of Greece.
Favor Ukpebor, a young Black Greek basketball player, who knew the Antetokounmpos (he was friends with Alex, his sisters were friends with Giannis, and his mom sold shoes alongside Veronica at outdoor markets), saw Golden Dawn up close. Ukpebor remembers Golden Dawn marching through his neighborhood in Kypseli many times, shouting, “Blood, Honour, Golden Dawn! Greece is for Greeks!”
Ukpebor’s mother, a migrant from Nigeria, was scared for him to go outside because she heard that Golden Dawn was murdering migrants. “I was really scared too,” Ukpebor says. He was almost always the only Black player on his teams and was bullied at school for his skin color. He felt lucky, though, that he wasn’t attacked by Golden Dawn. A Golden Dawn member, however, tried to attack his sister on a public bus. She was seventeen. Fortunately, the bus driver intervened and helped her escape, but it was terrifying.
Giannis tried not to let the fear of night consume him after a long day of practice. But he saw Golden Dawn a few times. And sometimes the fear was too close to shake.
* * *
Gkikas, one of Giannis’s close friends, is hesitant to share Giannis’s stories. “If I tell you the real story, there will be problems,” Gkikas says. “Let’s just say it was not a friendly city for these guys.” Meaning Giannis and his brothers. Black people.
“Giannis has buried it deep inside,” Gkikas says, “because he loves Greece.”
Because telling those stories could generate backlash. Challenge the truth that some Greeks deny: Greece can love Giannis deeply and still treat people who look like Giannis terribly. Acknowledging that Golden Dawn was not a mere fringe group and that racism and antimigrant sentiment existed then and still exist today would mean accepting an uncomfortable reality.
“In every country, there are racists. That’s for sure. But here in Greece, there are very few. Very, very few,” says Kostas Missas, who would later coach Giannis on Greece’s U-20 national team in 2013. “So no problem with that.”
That seems to be a common refrain within Greek basketball circles: “No problem with race.”
“We don’t have a big problem [with racism] in Greece,” says Kostas Kotsis, the Greek Basketball Federation general manager. “Giannis never complained. He never said anything about it. We are very proud of Giannis. All Greek people are proud of Giannis. With Giannis, we can hope that everything is possible. Giannis is our hero.”
Back then, he wasn’t considered a hero. Gkikas remembers Giannis telling him about a time when he was walking with his family and a car stopped in front of them, impeding their path. They all froze but then immediately started running. “Because most of t
hose guys [Golden Dawn],” Gkikas says, “would go out and hunt them down.”
Gkikas thinks of what Giannis would think recounting that story. “He would laugh. Even then he would laugh,” Gkikas says. “Everybody else would have been scared like crazy or say, ‘What the fuck am I doing here?’ But Giannis would say, ‘Fuck them.’ If he was scared, he would never have come from Sepolia to Zografou. He was risking his life every time.”
But another time, Giannis was walking back from practice and saw Golden Dawn sympathizers just in the distance, protesting, shouting. He bolted toward another route, running home safely. “Christos, I’m really afraid of them because if they see me on the road, what will happen?” Saloustros remembers Giannis telling him. “He was anxious about it… thinking that maybe one time if he finds himself alone, and if he goes by these guys, he was a little bit afraid.”
Saloustros was careful not to ask Giannis too many questions. He wanted Giannis to feel comfortable. Accepted. Because he was. His teammates didn’t discriminate against him. “Every teammate respect him,” Konstantinos says. The only name anyone was called on Filathlitikos was loukoumás, which means “doughnut”—a name Coach Melas called any player he was arguing with, in a sweet way, so as to soften the criticism.
“I didn’t want to remind him of the problems,” Saloustros says. “I wanted him to have his mind on basketball and to be happy.”
But Saloustros couldn’t change the way some people viewed Giannis. “There are many Greek people that are afraid of Black people,” says Yannis Psarakis, a Greek sports journalist. “Many people are afraid of being in touch with Black people or to go out with Black people, and this is for many decades in Greece. This is not something that happened now or ten years ago. This is very, very common for many Greek people.”