by Mirin Fader
There were only so many Black kids in Sepolia playing organized basketball. And like Giannis, those players could feel isolated at times. “It wasn’t something usual—you know what I mean?” says Fotios Katsikaris, Giannis’s former national-team coach. “For sure it was a little bit uncomfortable sometimes for those kids. How will the community and society accept them?”
Other Black Greeks could relate, especially those who migrated in the 1980s or earlier, before the Antetokounmpos. Nikos Deji Odubitan, founder of Generation 2.0 for Rights, Equality & Diversity, a group that advocates for legal protection and citizenship for second-generation migrants in Greece, grew up in Kypseli in the 1980s in one of the few Black African families around.
Like Giannis, Odubitan was also born and raised in Athens by Nigerian immigrant parents. Odubitan was actually one of Velliniatis’s first players. Odubitan felt accepted—until he became a teenager. Until he discovered what discrimination felt like. He was stopped by the police and asked for his papers. “Just being Black and with my friends,” Odubitan says. “This is when I started realizing that I’m different.”
He hadn’t even known what that phrase meant: “Show me your papers.” He was confused, thinking about the phrase, sitting in the police car. He spent the night at the police station until his parents picked him up in the morning. “I was kept there until they proved that I am not a young criminal,” Odubitan says. “This was very common. It happened to all young kids of Black backgrounds.”
His own experience being detained by the police changed things for him. Made him realize that he was born in a country that did not recognize him. “I was raised stateless,” Odubitan says. After graduating high school, he would be detained five more times.
Odubitan was someone who could understand what might happen to Giannis.
“Greeks, we have a problem with race, to be honest,” says Stavrou, the Greek sports journalist. “Giannis never said anything. He just focused on playing the best basketball he could.”
What else could the teenager do? What else could he say? He was trying to survive. Gain acceptance, climb the ladder of a Greek basketball system that was made up primarily of players who did not look like him. Managers, coaches, who did not look like him. Some of whom denied the experiences of people who looked like him.
Giannis was proud to be both Greek and African. He dreamed of carrying the Greek flag, which he would finally get to do a few years later, in 2013, on March 25, when Greece celebrates its independence. Filathlitikos was looking for a player to carry the flag. Giannis volunteered, smiled brightly when he asked his coaches if he could do it.
“My opinion is that he wanted to prove that he felt Greek as much as the other white Greeks,” says Melas, the Filathlitikos assistant coach. Wearing his team’s red jacket, with black pants and white-and-black Nikes, Giannis walked in front of his teammates, all a foot shorter, clutching the staff of the Greek white-and-blue flag with both hands. The flag whirled in the wind as Giannis looked ahead, proudly, back straight, and marched.
Giannis didn’t know that there was one person who idolized him watching from the crowd: Emmanuel Godwin, seven years younger, who was also born in Athens to Nigerian parents, who was also trying to get by without citizenship papers. Godwin had just started to play basketball. His mother also sold clothes to survive.
Godwin proudly watched Giannis carry the flag. And then he heard whispers in the crowd: “Wow. Why is this Black guy there? Why don’t we have a white kid hold the flag?”
Godwin wasn’t surprised. He was used to the stares, the racist comments, often hurled at himself. Once, when he was sitting on a train, a ticket attendant told him he should leave the country. He remembers white Greek girls clutching their purses tighter when he walked by on the streets. “You see it every day,” Godwin says. “It still happens. You might sit on the train and somebody will just stand because he doesn’t want to sit with a Black guy.”
So even though Giannis was starting to gain attention for his basketball skills, Godwin wasn’t surprised to hear Giannis faced the same treatment he had. “Giannis was treated like the way they treat all Black people here. If you’re not famous, if you’re not a famous Black dude, it’s just tragic. They’d be like, ‘Why is this Black dude here? Why is he breathing the same air as me? Oh, this guy is Black; he’s going to stain my chair.’”
Godwin went to nearly every game Giannis played back then. He’d just sit in the stands, marveling at how someone who looked like him had a chance to make it out of this gym, this city.
“I was always watching him,” Godwin says. “He doesn’t know that he was my motivation.”
Godwin’s older brothers were friends with Giannis and Thanasis, so Godwin got to tag along to the workouts. He and Alex became teammates, playing for Zivas and the younger Filathlitikos team. All the boys would hang out after practice, playing pickup games before resuming training. Thanasis and Giannis would insist on giving Godwin the rice they had even though it was their only meal for the day. “They had one rule: even though we don’t have, we have to share,” Godwin says.
Even Charles was kind to Godwin, once telling him, “If you love something, keep doing it. Keep working at it.”
“[Charles’s] work ethic—he tried to give it to me,” Godwin says, “even though I wasn’t his child.”
One day, Godwin mustered up the courage to say to Giannis, “I’m going to reach you one day.” He really wanted to tell Giannis that he was his inspiration, but this was all he could manage.
“Just keep grinding,” Giannis replied.
With Giannis’s encouragement, Godwin practiced harder. Giannis could understand him in a way that others couldn’t, not just because he was Black but because he was undocumented.
“It was a period of, like, fifteen years that we didn’t have any rights,” says Afolayan, the Nigerian Greek rapper who goes by MC Yinka, who played for Velliniatis. Afolayan was once detained by police for eight hours. He eventually got an ID that allowed him to travel, but it took years. “It was a marathon to go through for your papers,” Afolayan says.
White nonimmigrant Greeks didn’t have to live with the gnawing fear that Afolayan, Godwin, Giannis, and every other child of Black migrants did: at any moment, their parents could be deported.
* * *
As a child, Giannis feared that one day he would wake up and his parents would not be there. Police may have stopped them. Taken them. Deported them.
When Giannis was a teen, if he came home from school and his mom was late, his mind would run wild with possibilities, running through every awful scenario as if it had already happened. He’d think, Is this the day my mom, my dad, is going to get deported?
Giannis wasn’t worried about himself getting deported, because he didn’t actually have a passport. Not a Nigerian passport, not a Greek passport. He couldn’t get deported, because on paper, he didn’t belong anywhere.
It was terrifying, contemplating what if. He’d cling tighter to his brothers, but they had similar nightmares too. What to do in the aftermath: How would they know where their parents were? How would they take care of themselves? Who would they call? Where would they go? The anxiety would seize them.
Anytime he and Rana were walking down the street and they’d see a policeman, Giannis’s sweet, goofy disposition would vanish. He’d grab Rana, also undocumented and fully aware of the perils of being a person of color in Greece, and say, “Let’s go! Let’s go! We have to go! Police will stop us! Police will beat us up! Are you crazy!” Giannis would make them completely change course, no matter how much it delayed their trip, Rana recalls. All it would take was one encounter for him or his parents to devastate their lives.
Giannis and his brothers were lucky in that they had friends. But it was much harder for their parents to make friends. They always had to be cautious of where they were, what they were doing, who they were with. They couldn’t trust a lot of people, because they were illegal immigrants. Giannis was aw
are that people could call the cops and say, “Come get them.” A neighbor could tell the cops that their home was making too much noise, the cops would show up and ask for their papers, and that would be the end.
His family did get stopped by police a few times. When that happened, Veronica would say she left her papers at home. The cops always took pity on her and let her go. Giannis felt God was with his family.
The boys learned they were stateless at a young age, watching their friends receive IDs and passports. As kids, Giannis and his brothers would ask their parents, “Why don’t we have passports? Why don’t we have IDs? Why can’t we travel as our friends do?” They couldn’t understand what was happening.
Charles and Veronica tried to not show worry. “They were the best at making you feel like there was never anything wrong,” Alex says.
They instilled a sense of Nigerian identity in their boys as well. Not just by cooking fufu and other favorite Nigerian dishes but in their manner of dress. Veronica loves fashion, loves braiding her hair in black and white, and often wore her favorite outfit—a white traditional Akwa-Ocha dress of the Ubulu-Uku people of the Delta State, Nigeria.
But not having papers started to affect Giannis on the court.
Once, Filathlitikos had to travel for a game to Thessaloniki, a port city on the Thermaic Gulf of the Aegean Sea. They would have to fly. Giannis was excited for the chance to travel for games but in the end couldn’t go because he didn’t have an ID or passport. The team had a practice that morning, and before leaving for the airport, Saloustros told him, “I’m sorry. Next Saturday, you’re going to play again. Don’t worry about it.”
But Giannis was devastated. Saloustros kept telling him that it was OK, he would get to play again in a week, but Giannis couldn’t be consoled. He started crying. Saloustros embraced him, assured him that this would not harm his chances of playing professionally. “You’re going to play a lot of games in your career. It’s just one game.”
It wasn’t just one game to Giannis. Not knowing what else to do, he grabbed a ball and started dribbling, started shooting, as his teammates left for the airport. Giannis stayed on the court for almost two straight days. Tried to outshoot his pain.
But he wasn’t the only one. Etinosa Erevbenagie, a Black Greek basketball player and friend of Giannis’s back then, also struggled with not having papers. He migrated to Greece from Nigeria with his parents when he was nine. Like Giannis, he dreamed of playing A1 Division basketball in Greece.
He and Giannis played against each other, as Erevbenagie played for Panathinaikos’s youth team. Erevbenagie, one year younger than Giannis, was explosive on the court. He had court vision, intelligence. Erevbenagie didn’t have Giannis’s length—he stood about six feet even—but he was skilled and had a passion for the game. “Basketball gave me an identity in a white man’s world, which is Europe,” Erevbenagie says.
He considered himself African Greek, fully immersed in both cultures, but it wasn’t long until he started being treated differently than his white Greek peers. When he was thirteen, during a game, parents started shouting racist things from the stands. He didn’t quite understand what they were saying at first. But he remembers the feeling. The pain, the humiliation. “The feeling that I was being attacked for arbitrary reasons, which is the base for racism,” Erevbenagie says. “It was really hurtful.”
His coach told him to not worry about it, that those parents would be watching him play ball somewhere prestigious one day. But not having papers made it difficult as Erevbenagie began to pursue that dream. At the time, he and Giannis faced similar obstacles: they had talent and determination but didn’t have opportunity. Their parents worked seemingly every hour of the day, but it didn’t seem enough to pay the bills.
Erevbenagie thought Giannis was talented. “He had this tenacity and aggressiveness,” Erevbenagie says. “Like, ‘I’m gonna bully you. I’m not gonna back down from anything.’” They started to feel a sense of kinship playing pickup ball outside. The two had mutual Black Greek friends, which brought them closer. “All Africans of our generation, in Athens, we knew each other,” Erevbenagie says.
Every time something happened during pickup—a funny moment, a loose ball, an argument over a foul—the two somehow would catch eyes and make a face or communicate in Nigerian Pidgin, an English-based Creole language commonly used in Nigeria. For example, “How are you?” would be “How you dey?” in Pidgin.
It had a specific purpose for Erevbenagie and Giannis: “So white people wouldn’t understand what we were saying,” Erevbenagie says. Given that there weren’t many Black Greeks in Greek organized basketball, finding another Nigerian Greek basketball player like Giannis who could communicate in Pidgin made Erevbenagie feel seen. Understood. “I could relax a little bit,” he says. “These words were spoken from the heart.”
Especially when the two would say the phrase “See yourself” to each other during games. Anytime one found himself in a funny, awkward situation, the other would say it, which meant “Look at what you did—are you happy?” The more they hung out, the more Erevbenagie realized that Giannis would do things that reminded him of Nigerian mannerisms or behaviors. “It was like, ‘Oh, don’t get it twisted; we are both Nigerian and Greek.’”
Communicating in Pidgin with Giannis made Erevbenagie feel connected to his own African heritage, something he didn’t always feel while constantly navigating white spaces. “Like it or not, I am cut from my roots,” Erevbenagie says. “Having that reminder of home, of that language, it was special.”
* * *
Zivas was a coach who was compassionate, welcoming, to immigrants. “He was a guy that loved minorities,” Gkikas says. “If it was other teams, they would have kicked them out.” Gkikas remembers Thanasis telling him about a coach. “[The coach] said that he was a monkey, that he would never make it. ‘You are not for basketball; go play something else.’
“They were not interested in building up some Black guy they know whose background is bad,” Gkikas says, referring to the family’s financial situation. “Nobody would invest so much time as Zivas did.”
Zivas let Giannis be a playmaker, and that wasn’t an easy sacrifice. The team would lose some games while Giannis adjusted, but Zivas was focused on Giannis’s development and not necessarily wins or losses. That allowed Giannis to make mistakes, to learn.
Zivas wouldn’t give up on Giannis. He understood what Giannis’s family was enduring. The fear they carried with them. He continued to ask Giannis before every practice, “Did you eat today?”
“In every other team, Giannis would have quit basketball because the coaches would have told him, ‘Come on, man—why you skip practice? Because they were hunting you with rocks?’” Gkikas says, referring to Golden Dawn.
Sofoklis Schortsanitis, a legendary Greek basketball player, nurtured Giannis too. Known as “Baby Shaq” or “Big Sofo” for short, Schortsanitis was born in Cameroon to a Greek stepfather and a Cameroonian mother. The family moved to Kavala, Greece. Schortsanitis eventually sprouted to six feet ten, 345 pounds, and played for the Greek national team, helping Greece capture a silver medal at the 2006 FIBA World Championship and a bronze medal at EuroBasket 2009.
He was a member of the historic Greek team that stunned the star-studded USA team of LeBron James, Carmelo Anthony, and Dwyane Wade in the 2006 FIBA World Championship semifinals. It was an embarrassing loss for the US, whose coach, Mike Krzyzewski of Duke, couldn’t even refer to the Greek players by name afterward, using only their numbers, claiming he didn’t want to disrespect anyone by mispronouncing names.
Giannis and his family watched that game. Giannis was eleven, mesmerized by this player who looked like him. Baby Shaq. Giannis was surprised. A Black guy was part of that! We can do it! And to beat America? Sofo gave Giannis hope. Maybe he, too, could be a professional athlete and represent Greece.
Sofo had met Thanasis after returning to Athens after his first year playing with Maccabi Tel Avi
v. Thanasis asked Sofo to help him practice, and given that Sofo dislikes working out alone, he obliged. Later, Thanasis asked if he could bring Giannis. Sofo was shocked when he first saw Giannis; the kid was so focused he looked almost sullen.
Sofo had also played for Olympiacos, one of Greece’s most storied A1 teams. Playing in A2, Giannis wanted to be like Sofo and jump to A1. “Sofo was like a god to Giannis,” says Stefanos Dedas, the Greek coach now coaching Hapoel Holon.
Sofo was different from many Greek players, not just because he was Black but because of his size. He was much heavier than his opponents and could post anyone up. Joining the national team was historic. “It was a big thing,” says Fotios Katsikaris, Giannis’s former Greek national-team coach.
Giannis and Sofo became friends. He encouraged Giannis to keep working. Giannis was in awe of how beloved Sofo was. “Sofo was a fan favorite,” says Stefanos Triantafyllos, a former Greek basketball analyst who is now an assistant coach with Olympiacos. “Everyone loved him.”
Well, not everyone.
“We don’t think that Schortsanitis is Greek, according to the ideals of the Greek race,” Elias Panagiotaros, Golden Dawn’s public-relations representative, told the local Extra 1 channel in 2012.
The host responded, “Are you racists, or do you just fight illegal immigrants?”
“Believing that races are distinct is not a bad thing,” Panagiotaros said.
“Forgive me, but this is the doctrine of the Aryan race.”
“For God’s sake. What do you want us to be? We shouldn’t confuse Pekingese dogs with Labradors. God made them like this, and they should remain as they are. Being black, yellow, or red is their honor, but we don’t regard them as Greeks. They are not Greeks.”
Michaloliakos, Golden Dawn’s leader, doubled down when asked about Sofo. “Greeks have never been Black.” Soon, Michaloliakos would target Giannis too.
* * *
Stubborn. That’s the only way Giannis’s family and friends know how to describe the mentality Giannis was developing on the court. “It’s a family trait,” Alex says. Stubborn meant that Giannis wouldn’t give up, even if he was losing badly. Even if he was still not physically capable. Stubborn meant that he believed himself equal to every person on the court.