Giannis

by Mirin Fader

  What makes you more special than me? God made us both, he’d think to himself, remembering Thanasis’s words: “Nobody is untouchable. The tallest towers in the world can still get torn down.”

  And he’d grind and grind, motivated by the belief that he was worthy. He’d tell his brothers that too. “If God made us the same, therefore we’re equal. The only thing that truly makes me better than you is my mindset. If my mindset is a constant point of stubbornness, then you can’t really beat me.”

  “What’s the best part about Giannis? Stubborn,” Alex says. “What’s the worst quality about him? Stubborn.” Giannis had that same tunnel vision as a child. “It was, like, cute stubborn,” Alex says. If the boys were playing a game and they’d get to the final round, Giannis would have to be the winner, or they’d have to start over.

  His teammates started noticing: Giannis was no longer a punching bag. A beanpole. Now he would push back when pushed. Sometimes he’d throw the first punch.

  Around that time, Giannis was playing one-on-one with Nikos Pappas, one of the best players in the area, who’d later become a star for Panathinaikos and now plays for Stelmet Zielona Góra. “I bet you’re not going to score,” Pappas said before the game.

  Giannis responded, “No, that’s not happening.”

  Well, it did. Pappas destroyed Giannis. It was ugly. But Giannis was so stubborn he wanted to keep playing and playing until he got a point. He never did. Pappas won 33–0. It was humiliating for Giannis, struggling in front of all his friends. “He was crying after the game,” says George Kouvaris, a Greek sports journalist for Gazzetta.gr.

  In another instance, Giannis was facing a player who was about fifty pounds heavier than him. The guy was torching him. Giannis started crying because he was losing, but he battled and battled. “Giannis almost started a fight because he couldn’t accept that he could be beaten like this,” Gkikas says.

  Gkikas took Giannis to the side. “Come on, bro. Don’t lose yourself in this situation, OK?” Gkikas told him. “Don’t let this take you down. Don’t be crazy like this. You cannot act like this.”

  “You are right,” Giannis said. “This was my fault.”

  Giannis calmed down. Took a few breaths. Wiped his eyes. But it wouldn’t be the last time he wanted so badly to succeed that he cried.

  Crying wasn’t weird or out of the ordinary. That was just how passionate Giannis was. How frustrated at himself he’d get for his inability to master a move or a dunk, and he’d do it again and again and again until it was perfect. Sometimes he felt like he wasn’t measuring up to the player he wanted to be. “He’s been hard on himself since he was a kid,” Alex says.

  He would cry after many games too. He would ask Zivas for the stat sheet, and if he saw too few rebounds, too many missed shots, and especially if his team lost, he’d retreat to the corner and shed a few tears.

  * * *

  One day, Giannis was absent from class. An afternoon philology course at 53rd High School, a public school in Sepolia. The classroom building was a three-story courtyard structure with a clear view of the adjacent basketball court.

  His teacher, Alexandros Mistilioglou, surveyed the room looking for him. Then he realized there was probably only one place Giannis could be. Mistilioglou looked outside, and there was Giannis, alone, shooting in the sun. The other students started shouting for him to come inside.

  “What to do here if he comes?” Mistilioglou said to his students. “Maybe this ball will save him one day and he will achieve something.”

  In letters, he will not find a solution, Mistilioglou thought. In basketball, maybe.

  Mistilioglou had Giannis as a student in his second and third years of high school. He thought Giannis was prudent, mature. Humble. Kind. He never complained, always smiled. But he didn’t seem to apply himself much as a student.

  Mistilioglou could sense that Giannis’s family had financial issues. He knew that was part of why Giannis was missing class. One afternoon, Giannis came to the school and stole candy from the office, sneaking as many pieces as he could. Mistilioglou saw but didn’t say anything. He could tell that Giannis’s mind was always somewhere else.

  “Surely poverty prevented him from being a good student because he did not even have the basics to live,” Mistilioglou says.

  Giannis was reserved. So reserved he was hard to read. He hardly said a word, but he was popular. “The other children loved him,” Mistilioglou says. “The teachers loved him.”

  They always had, even as a child in grade school years before, at 62nd Elementary School, a two-story modernist stucco structure with deeply recessed white windows.

  Afrodite Pandi, the assistant principal of 62nd, remembered Giannis and his brothers as being modest, shy, focused on sports. Respected and well liked, never causing trouble. Ioanna Zacharopoulou, an instructor of language, math, history, and environmental studies who taught Giannis in the fourth grade at 62nd, remembered Giannis as being ambitious.

  “Giannis is very Greek,” says Basileios Motsakos, who taught mathematics at the high school. But in some ways, he didn’t fit in. Giannis’s high school physics teacher, Vlasis Drakoulakis, used to make Giannis show the length of his hands by placing his fingers next to a protractor. Giannis’s nails would extend over. Students would laugh and laugh at the sight.

  It wasn’t his fault he was long limbed. Different. But sometimes that stung.

  * * *

  In some ways, Giannis’s life was improving: Filathlitikos helped him and his family move to Zografou so they could be closer to the gym. Many locals were helping him, making sure he had some food. Giannis started to believe a different life was within reach. That if he worked hard enough, if he had a little bit of luck, he could make it.

  But he couldn’t relax. He couldn’t let anyone see weakness in him. He would teach his brothers that what separates players, what separates people, is the ability to recognize when the mind relaxes. “It’s human nature,” Giannis would tell his brothers. But the mind has to return to “killer mode,” as he calls it, as soon as possible.

  Giannis told them they needed to be stubborn. He would think of his parents while working out. Think of the food he would share with his brothers. Think of how Veronica would plead with Charles to eat. “Charles, you gotta eat also,” she’d say. But he’d shake his head. “No, let my kids eat first.”

  Giannis didn’t want to let him down.

  “Giannis was one hundred percent focused,” Saloustros says. “He thought, Even if I’m going to be chased by Golden Dawn, even if I will be hungry, even if I don’t have shoes to wear, I’m going to be the best.”

  Veronica needed him to be. She had some health issues, partially because of the cold and damp in their home. Giannis, now about seventeen, was scared. Charles made sure the family was OK, but Giannis tended to his brothers even more, making sure they were on time for school and practice.

  Veronica went to the hospital to get checked out, and although visitors weren’t allowed to stay overnight, Giannis hid in the bathroom until everyone left, then came out and slept on a chair outside her room. He wasn’t going to leave her.

  He was growing ever more determined. He told his parents he was going to make it in basketball to make sure they had a better life. Make sure that Veronica didn’t have to walk on eggshells, afraid of being stopped by police. Afraid to make friends.

  “I’m going to make it for you,” Giannis told her, “so you can be better and enjoy life more.”

  She struggled some days while recovering. Little Alex would come near her bed and sing to her in his sweet voice. He’d gotten his singing voice from her, after all. He had enjoyed doing theater and plays in school, and if singing would make her feel better, at least for a few hours, he would do that.

  “He made a song, and he was singing it for me,” Veronica says, smiling. “Even how many years later, I remember this. I tell him, ‘Alex, do you remember when you sing for me? When I was not feeling OK, when we were i
n Greece?’ He knew Mommy was not feeling fine.”

  Giannis prayed that his mom would be OK. He started paying even closer attention to Alex, who was just starting to play basketball more regularly himself. Alex was chubby and slow at first. He once hit the side of the backboard on a corner three. They’d laugh at how he’d be out of breath after playing just a few minutes. “We used to make fun of him,” Giannis says. “Everybody had a skinny frame, my dad and my mom and older brother, and Alex used to be chubby, and he used to be slow and couldn’t keep up.”

  Sometimes little Alex struggled to hop over the gate to the court itself. It would be locked during summers, so the only way to play was to climb over. It was eleven feet high. Alex was terrified of heights but hopping over was a rite of passage. “When you was able to climb the gate on your own, that was a big thing for us,” Kostas says.

  Alex would struggle to climb over, time and time again. He’d cut his arm on the gate’s wire, which more than once left him bloody and scarred. “You see this?” Alex says, pointing to his arm. “It’s kinda faded away. It would skin me.” He is still proud of those scars.

  But back then, he was simply trying to not embarrass himself. Trying to let his brothers know that he wasn’t weak, that he could handle whatever they asked him to do. So he’d climb the gate, day after day, failing to hop over on his own. His brothers had to help him. The day he finally climbed over by himself, he was so proud of himself. His brothers were proud too. “OK!” they screamed. “Alex, you coming!”

  He was still a runt, though. Still a half step or two behind his brothers. But he had heart. A lot of heart. He’d dive on the floor. Pull shirts. Foul if he couldn’t catch someone on a fast break. He’d cry when he’d lose. Friends called him emotional, but he was just passionate, like his big brother Giannis. He had handles but couldn’t shoot. He’d pull from the corner, swear the ball was going in, lean back like it was going in. Clank. The ball would ricochet off the top of the backboard.

  He didn’t stand much chance in the family’s two-on-two games: Kostas and Alex versus Giannis and Thanasis. Alex wanted Thanasis on his team because at the time Thanasis was the strongest and most athletic. But those were the teams; those were the rules. Giannis and Thanasis would always win.

  “Alex couldn’t really hang,” Kostas says, “but he was really competitive.” And nervous. So nervous for his first game in Greece that he passed the ball off every time he caught it. Wouldn’t even look at the basket. “Terrible,” Alex says. “I tried to overdo it because I was so scared to mess up… because I knew I was going to be playing basketball for a long time.”

  Because of his brothers. Because he didn’t want to disappoint them. Because he wanted to be them. Because even though the world didn’t know about them yet, they were already famous in Alex’s head. They were his heroes. His motivation, his measuring stick. He’d watch Thanasis hammer a thunderous dunk and wonder if he’d ever possess that kind of athleticism. He’d watch Giannis jab step with such force, such precision, and he’d question whether he’d ever attack with that kind of tenacity. He’d watch Kostas time a blocked shot so perfectly on a fast break and wonder if he’d ever be quick enough, smart enough, to defend like that.

  But Alex was driven. Mesmerized by the way Kostas spun a ball on his index finger, eight-year-old Alex spun and spun, day after day, failing so many times his fingernail broke off one afternoon. He kept trying. Wouldn’t stop until he could spin.

  * * *

  Giannis would need a passport to play for Olympiacos and Panathinaikos, Greece’s two top teams, since they traveled all over Europe for EuroLeague games. If either team signed him, it’d have to count him as a foreign player since he was not recognized as Greek. Foreign slots are usually reserved for talented, experienced players, as well as American players who might not quite be NBA caliber but who are elite nonetheless. Handing a foreign spot to someone as inexperienced as Giannis? “They didn’t want to do that for a young kid,” says Kostas Missas, Giannis’s U-20 national-team coach.

  Those spots are highly coveted given that both teams were usually in the hunt for a EuroLeague crown. Plus Giannis was still essentially unknown. His A2 games weren’t televised. He wasn’t seen as a standout. “Giannis was not much more than a nobody at that point in time,” says Nikos Papadojannis, a Greek journalist who has covered basketball since 1987 and a current columnist at the Greek website Gazzetta.gr. He’s covered Giannis and Thanasis for years.

  “Don’t for a second think that anyone in Greece thought Giannis would be a star, let alone immediately,” Papadojannis says.

  Trigas, the former Panathinaikos U-18 assistant coach, remembers the older squad having interest in Giannis. “The coach of Panathinaikos really liked him, but it wasn’t easy, because of his papers problem,” Trigas says.

  A formal offer was never made. Even if Giannis did have papers, he wasn’t necessarily good enough or strong enough to play in A1. “In Greece, we lack patience,” Trigas says. “We need instant gratification. No matter how big a talent is, nobody would make patience.”

  Greek teams usually wait for a player to develop before allowing him to move up. “To invest, let’s say, a young guy in a EuroLeague team, it’s a very big risk for the team,” says Kostas Kotsis, the Greek Basketball Federation general manager. “The first priority is to get the win, not to invest.”

  So Giannis stayed in A2. The level of play was poor. Players were thirty, thirty-five years old. Some would smoke cigarettes outside before games. Many were overweight, out of shape. “The level is not good at all,” says Katsikaris, the former national-team coach.

  Still, Giannis improved by playing in that league. Refs hardly called fouls, so players had to find more creative ways to score while getting pushed around. “They will beat you up,” says Ioannis Papapetrou, a friend of Giannis and current captain of Panathinaikos. “For a kid that is young, to be able to play with thirty-year-old guys that are experienced, he needs to find a way to survive. I think that really helped Giannis realize he needed to get much stronger.”

  Few showed up for A2 games. But when the team traveled to road games outside Athens, that’s when fans started to notice Giannis. And shout racist epithets at him. “When we go on the road, that’s when there was a race problem,” Zivas says. “The worst time was in Trikala.”

  * * *

  Trikala B.C. wanted revenge after Filathlitikos had beaten them by 17 in the teams’ first meeting earlier in the season. Trikala had every advantage: the club had more money; it was a bigger club.

  Fans became rowdy during warm-ups, shouting insults, even spitting onto the court. Then Kamperidis heard remarks directed at Giannis. “People were saying racist things,” Kamperidis says.

  Giannis tried to act as if he didn’t hear them and continued to warm up hard. Filathlitikos started the game off cold. Trikala took a big lead, and the crowd shouted louder. Then fans started making monkey noises. Louder and louder.

  “It wasn’t something new,” Zivas says. “He was used to it.”

  Filathlitikos continued to play terribly, eventually losing by more than thirty points. Players were dejected, hardly said a word. Giannis didn’t want to talk about it.

  CHAPTER 4

  FOUND

  Kornél Dávid started hearing the name Giannis from local scouts in Europe around November 2012. Dávid, an NBA international scout, wasn’t sure what to make of the chatter. Some whispers turn into conversations, but most remain whispers. Many prospects fizzle out. But it struck Dávid, then working for the Phoenix Suns, a bit odd that he was just now hearing about a prospect who was already seventeen.

  Some prospects are identified as early as thirteen. Giannis had only started playing basketball regularly around that age. “His name came up later than usual,” says Dávid, who ironically now serves as an international scout for the Bucks. “Guys are usually playing in youth tournaments or European championships for U-16 or U-18.”

  Dávid’s own NBA playing c
areer included stints with the Cavaliers, Raptors, Pistons, and Bulls. As the only Hungarian to play in the NBA, he knew what it took to succeed in the league. But Giannis? Well, he seemed far away from competing at that level. Really far away.

  Sometimes Giannis looked like a track star, ready to accelerate and leap up to the rim; other times he looked hesitant, lost, getting rid of the ball quickly, shying away from contact. But Dávid saw things he liked: Giannis’s six-foot-nine frame, his athleticism, his basketball IQ.

  Dávid couldn’t understand why Giannis’s opponents in the A2 Division looked like washed-up rec-league players with potbellies and stubbled chins. Why none of Filathlitikos’s opponents could even touch the backboard, let alone hammer home with authority. And he wondered why Giannis wasn’t playing on a bigger club in A1, like Olympiacos or Panathinaikos. “Later on,” Dávid says, “I find out it is because he does not have citizenship. And he started late.”

  For the time being, though, Dávid was intrigued by the tall, lanky kid. He decided to come to Greece to see him in person. You never know, Dávid thought.

  * * *

  Dávid couldn’t find the Zografou gym at first. It seemed tucked away, almost hidden. Finally, when he found it, he thought he was in the wrong place because it looked like a high school gym. Tiny, dinky. “Dirty,” says Dávid, figuring the last paint job must have occurred ten years prior. “It was a terrible place.” And it was uncomfortably warm, since there was no air-conditioning. The smell of sweat hung in the air.

  Dávid sat down on the creaky stands and looked around. There weren’t any fans, and the jerseys didn’t have numbers and were all different colors, so Dávid wasn’t even sure if he was watching a real game. Giannis’s teammates looked much older than him, and Dávid saw a few smoking cigarettes outside before tip-off.