Giannis

by Mirin Fader

  * * *

  After the workout, Giannis’s agents drove Hammond around Athens. Sitting in the back seat, Hammond told them, “I don’t know what’s going to happen to this guy. But his life is about to change in a major way.”

  Alex could sense that too. Finally, Alex thought. He always knew Giannis was good, and now others were realizing it too. It was really happening. This was the opportunity they had all been praying for, working for. “Giannis was a kid. A kid nobody knew. But I knew him,” Alex says. He smiles, remembering how the scouts would introduce themselves to him and his family.

  Kostas remembers Hammond coming up to him and Alex and saying, “Hey, you guys are talented. Where are you from?” Kostas and Alex didn’t speak much English then and didn’t know what to say. Kostas managed, “We just play basketball.” Kostas laughs remembering his gaffe—his nerves, his excitement. “I ain’t got no answer for Hammond,” Kostas says. “I remember just seeing these scouts in these little plastic chairs and thinking, Who are all these American guys?”

  And Hammond seemed tickled with both of them. He watched Alex shoot at the little rim on the side. “Oh maaaan,” Hammond said in his thick midwestern accent. “He’s gonna be good!” General managers weren’t allowed to talk to players, but Hammond whispered to Giannis when Giannis passed by his table to go to the bathroom or get some water, “You look good! You look good! Keep going!”

  Giannis was a little nervous. Everything he wanted, everything he needed, hinged on his performance in these practices, these games. He tried to ignore the magnitude of the moment and just play. And once he started warming up, the nerves dissipated.

  “He was focused,” Kamperidis says. “He knew that everybody came to see him, but he was giving one hundred percent of himself every day.” He told himself to have fun. Be present. Be himself. “He was not intimidated at all,” Kostas says. “It’s basketball at the end of the day.”

  Giannis was friendly, acknowledging the scouts with a nod and sometimes more. Eric Taylor, an assistant coach at Saint Francis University in Pennsylvania, who came to the gym to watch another player, remembers Giannis coming up to him and shaking his hand, looking him in the eye. “Nice to meet you,” Giannis said to Taylor. “Thank you for being here.”

  Giannis was grateful that scouts came to see him but worried about what they thought of him. One game, Giannis didn’t think he played well. Kostas came up to him in the locker room, seeing that Giannis was on the brink of tears. He looked angry too. “Why you mad?” Kostas said.

  “Man, the scouts came from the NBA,” Giannis said, “and I didn’t play good.”

  “You scored thirty! You won the game!”

  “No. No.”

  Another time, Giannis scored twenty-one points and grabbed ten rebounds. He cried afterward, thinking of all the things he should have done better. “He knew what he was capable of,” Alex says. “That’s why he was upset at himself.”

  Giannis couldn’t afford to slip. Relax. Not with everything he had dreamed of being so close. But when he would return to the court with Thanasis, the two of them shooting alone, after all the scouts had left the gym, he didn’t have to perform. He could just have fun.

  One of those times, Thanasis was practicing dunking when he told Giannis to stand above the circle. Thanasis was going to try to jump over him. Giannis, wearing a tattered Derrick Rose Bulls jersey, covered his eyes. Sure enough, Thanasis leaped over him, his legs splitting into the Jordan logo, clearing Giannis’s six-foot-nine frame to throw the ball down. They just laughed and laughed.

  * * *

  The more the scouts watched, the trickier they found evaluating Giannis. The level of play was so poor that it was difficult to envision him against NBA-caliber players. Zivas himself hardly looked like he was a coach; he once showed up on a motorcycle wearing faded jeans, a T-shirt, and black sneakers. “I had a scout tell me, ‘It’s a freaking high school game. It’s a joke.’ And he [the scout] left,” says one former NBA assistant GM who came to Greece to watch Giannis. “Another coach told me, ‘We should be college coaches watching this high school kid. He’s so far away. Three years minimum.’”

  Giannis was not dominating play in A2. And he was still rail thin, maybe 196 pounds. Scouts weren’t sure what position he would play. “He was a super skinny kid who could dribble well, had a couple of highlights, but wasn’t that effective of a player yet,” says Austin Ainge, Celtics director of player personnel, who came to Zografou with his father, Danny Ainge, to evaluate Giannis.

  “The talent was obvious,” Austin says, “but there was a long way to go. If we would’ve known he could grow three inches and gain forty pounds, that would’ve made the evaluation easier.”

  The Celtics staff came back to Greece at the end of March, traveling to Volos, about a five-hour bus ride from Athens, for a road game. As Danny took his seat in the crowd, fans started screaming at him, hurling foul names at him in Greek.

  That kind of hostility is normal in Greece, where basketball is religion, especially during Olympiacos and Panathinaikos rivalry games. Flares are often thrown on the court. “At first I was scared shitless,” says Nick Calathes, a legendary Greek American basketball player who played for Panathinaikos. He now plays for Barcelona. “It’s wild. Everybody in the gym would be arrested if this was in the NBA.”

  Kyle Hines, an American forward formerly of Olympiacos, who is friends with Thanasis, has been hit with a firecracker, a piece of a broken sink from the bathroom, and a lighter. “Every game is a game seven,” says Hines, who now plays for Olimpia Milano. “Here, when you come out the womb, you’re an Olympiacos baby or a Panathinaikos baby.”

  Former Lakers guard Josh Powell, who played for Olympiacos and is also friends with Thanasis, has been hit with quarters and poked with knives. He remembers a brawl with two hundred policemen before a game. “I’ve played in the NBA Finals, but I’ve never experienced anything like playing in Greece,” Powell says. “We’ve had people attempt to rob us.”

  In 1993, a Panathinaikos fan named Giorgos Karnezis, twenty-five, was stabbed to death in the Glyfada suburb near Piraeus on his way home from the rivalry game for the Greek A1 Finals (game 4). He was spotted wearing Panathinaikos colors, and his car was stopped by Olympiacos fans, and one of them stabbed him. Another instance, in 2007, in Paiania, near Athens, Panathinaikos and Olympiacos fans arranged to meet for a fight, almost four hundred showing up. A Panathinaikos fan, Michalis Filopoulos, twenty-two, was stabbed and beaten to death. The government suspended professional sports for two weeks after.

  So it wasn’t unusual for fans to taunt Ainge in Volos. It was hilarious why they did: they had mistaken him for a rival Greek GM. When they found out Ainge was with the Celtics, they started chanting, “Lakers! Lakers!” Finally Ainge realized what was happening and started cracking up.

  Giannis’s teammates couldn’t believe Ainge had come not only to Volos but back to Zografou the next day to watch practice. Gkikas was nervous but summoned the courage to walk up to Ainge and say hello. During five-on-five, Gkikas turned down a wide-open three. “The three-point line isn’t for decoration,” Gkikas remembers Ainge telling him after. “You have to shoot the ball.” That was one of the best moments of Gkikas’s young life.

  But the Celtics moved on from Giannis. “I thought he was absolutely a worthwhile project,” Ainge later told the Boston Herald. “But never in a million years did I see him becoming a potential best-player-in-the-league type of player.”

  The Bucks weren’t fully convinced at that point either; Giannis wasn’t at the top of their draft board for their selection at number 15. But the Hawks, picking at number 17 and number 18, were dead set on Giannis.

  Danny Ferry, the Hawks GM, became enamored with Giannis when he visited Zografou in February. Ferry, the number 2 pick in the 1989 draft and former Cavs GM, liked how hard Giannis played. How much energy he had. How much love he seemed to have for the game. His competitiveness. His focus. His humility. That he t
ried to make the right plays but didn’t force things. He did things a coach can’t teach: dishing simple passes, diving on the floor, running back after a mistake.

  “His physique was special,” Ferry says. “You saw crazy amounts of talent. You could see traces of LeBron or Magic because of the size and versatility he possessed. His court vision.”

  Ferry is cautious about making those kinds of comparisons because even though he did see a great deal of potential in Giannis, he had no conception at the time that Giannis would morph into one of the best players in the world. “No one predicted this,” Ferry says.

  Ferry was still unsure how Giannis’s game would translate in a more competitive setting, but he thought Giannis could become an NBA starter, maybe even an all-star. Ferry was all in on drafting Giannis and felt like he would fit in with the Hawks’ hardworking, high-character players like Al Horford and Kyle Korver.

  By April 2013, Ferry told his senior staff to travel to Greece, and several went: Hawks international scout Lojze Milosavljevic, assistant GM Wes Wilcox, director of basketball operations Mike McNeive, and assistant coach Kenny Atkinson.

  * * *

  Giannis didn’t know much about what was happening behind the scenes with Atlanta or Milwaukee. He was too busy beating himself up over a championship loss. It was the biggest game of his life. April 27, 2013, against Nea Kifissia B.C. A chance to move into A1, as A2 teams have the opportunity to leapfrog divisions the last game of the season. Twenty NBA scouts showed up to the small arena, Zirineio Indoor Hall, sitting in a section to the far left in a space adorned with ribbons. Young twelve- and thirteen-year-olds watched, one beating a drum. The place could accommodate four hundred people, but so many people were squeezed into the stands that one could feel the body heat of the person next to him.

  With two months to the draft, this was a critical game for Giannis to showcase his skills. Kifissia was the more experienced team, but Filathlitikos wasn’t intimidated. The game went back and forth, neither team backing down, all the way into overtime.

  Filathlitikos eventually lost in triple overtime, 89–81, preventing them from moving to A1. Defenders shut Giannis down: he made a three-pointer and a free throw but wouldn’t score more than four points. He struggled to gain a rhythm, managing to grab nine rebounds, eventually fouling out after thirty-eight minutes. “Scouts were a little disappointed, but they understood the pressure he was under. They still saw his potential,” says Dedas, the former Greek coach. “Americans see potential; we wait for players to be perfect.”

  Filathlitikos’s players, including Giannis, cried afterward. “Giannis couldn’t handle it,” Saloustros says. “Nobody could handle it.” It still hurts Zivas to talk about it. His voice is barely audible when he says the refereeing of that game was “unfair.”

  Giannis and his brothers were inconsolable. The game had larger consequences for them. “That game could have really changed our lives,” Alex says. “Seeing them lose, seeing their reactions, how emotional they were, it really got to me.”

  Given that Giannis played with both the men’s and the junior team, he had a few more games left with the younger squad. He scored thirty-five points in his next outing but sprained his ankle. His coaches told him not to play in the next game. It was too risky. Giannis was devastated, sitting out when so many scouts had flown in to see him. But he had a future to protect.

  “It was maybe the first time he was starting thinking like a pro,” Saloustros says, “and no longer a kid.”

  There was still that nagging problem, though: Giannis couldn’t turn pro without citizenship papers.

  His agents and coaches and the Greek Basketball Federation had been lobbying aggressively on his behalf, especially Giannis Ioannidis, legendary Greek player and later coach of Olympiacos as well as the Greek national team. Ioannidis, largely considered the best Greek coach of all time, was serving as the deputy minister of culture responsible for sports at the time. He approached Giannis’s citizenship just as he would a problem on the court: with care and precision, trying to break it down step-by-step.

  Antonis Samaras, then Greece’s prime minister, remembers Ioannidis telling him that Giannis could have an international career, with the Zaragoza contract hovering in the background, but that getting papers was “taking forever.”

  Samaras vaguely knew who Giannis was. “I kept hearing rumors about this young kid of Nigerian descent that was playing basketball somewhere in the second division, and rising fast.” But there was so much red tape; it would be a “Herculean task,” Samaras says.

  When characterizing the government’s response to Giannis’s request, Samaras avoids the question. He mentions the history of immigrants coming into Europe. How thousands were coming into Greece in transit, trying to move through to the rest of Europe at that time. “At a time when many deep structural changes were happening in the country,” Samaras says, “the public sector could not serve the average Greek citizen, let alone the flood of illegal aliens.”

  But Giannis was not an “illegal alien” that was “flooding” into the country. He had lived there all his life. And he had the potential to play in the NBA. Still, the process seemed stalled at times. “We pushed a lot to get the Greek passport,” says Kostas Missas, the U-20 national-team coach. “We tried to get the passport for Thanasis first [in 2012], but we couldn’t do that.”

  Thanasis had been invited to the national U-21 team of Greece two summers before. He participated in the preparation camp, but because he didn’t have a passport and couldn’t travel outside of Greece, he never played in any official or friendly game. Giannis felt slighted because Thanasis hadn’t received his papers, causing Thanasis to lose out on making younger national teams.

  The boys were in limbo and had been for a while. Panos Prokos, the Athens lawyer who had given Giannis’s family more time on their rent payments, had been working behind the scenes on behalf of Giannis and Thanasis too.

  Prokos had a friend named Giannis Palatos, a basketball lover who hadn’t missed a national-team game in thirty years. He also was a marketing executive who was involved with hoops, trying to organize basketball teams in the southern suburbs. Palatos was good friends with two prominent men in the basketball community: George Vassilakopoulos, then general secretary of sports (and current president of the Greek Basketball Federation), and Kostas Politis, legendary basketball player and coach, largely for Panathinaikos.

  When Prokos sensed how determined Giannis and Thanasis were to succeed in basketball, he called Palatos in front of the family and asked him to do anything possible to help the kids gain citizenship. Palatos hadn’t heard of the boys at first but immediately called Politis. Palatos remembers Politis knowing who the boys were and recalls Politis responding, “Yes, indeed, there is a family with a kid who plays basketball, Thanasis, but they also have a great talent, the younger one, Giannis, whom I will help as much as I can.” Palatos urged him to stay on the case, as he did with Vassilakopoulos.

  Meanwhile, Willy Villar, Zaragoza’s sporting director, was working with Giannis’s agents to see if there was a way to gain Spanish citizenship. Villar told them he would do whatever it took to get Giannis to Spain, whether that was lobbying the Greek government, the Spanish government, or the Spanish Basketball Federation. “At the beginning, it was difficult to convince the Greek government to get him papers,” Villar says. “It was very, very difficult. A lot of problems to get it.”

  The Greek government continued to drag its feet. It was 2013, and the NBA draft was coming. “The Greek Basketball Federation tried to move mountains in its way to get Giannis a Greek passport,” says Stefanos Triantafyllos, the former Greek sports journalist turned coach. “‘Forget it. We don’t want to risk going to elections because of some guy that plays basketball’ was the state’s (unofficial) answer to the federation requests.”

  Other local writers speculated what would happen if Greece didn’t give Giannis papers: “It would mean that beyond any shadow of doubt, that
Greece eats her own,” one writer wrote at the time. “And Greek basketball has lost the biggest talent it ever laid its hands on.”

  Local players could see the bureaucracy at work too. “Kids like Giannis were never promoted by their own country,” says Tasos Garas, who played in the same circles as Giannis back then. “Almost no one in Greece ever believed in this two-time NBA MVP. That’s unbelievable.”

  Time was running out: without a passport, he wouldn’t be able to apply for a US visa to participate in the NBA draft, or go play for Zaragoza. Ioannides was trying his best to push the government, recognizing that Giannis was a unique talent. George Koniaris, the Greek Basketball Federation’s lawyer, kept pushing too. But what was largely underreported was that the Greek government began to speed up the process only once they realized that not only did Giannis have NBA potential but that Giannis and his team had reportedly turned to the embassy of Nigeria, hoping to gain citizenship there.

  Giannis had applied for a Nigerian passport in September 2012, though his preference still was for Greek citizenship, because, as Giannis told Gazzetta.gr in 2013, “I could become formally Greek.”

  The possibility of him playing for Nigeria’s national team—and not Greece’s national team—and playing for Zaragoza as a Nigerian player may have added more pressure. Still, it was the potential NBA career that largely motivated the government to finally fast-track Giannis’s (and Thanasis’s) citizenship, given that Giannis performing well in the NBA could benefit Greece. “The fact that he had a realistic prospect of playing in the NBA helped a lot,” Samaras says.

  Villar realized that too. That Giannis’s potential to become a star changed the government’s tune. “Once they recognized the potential of Antetokounmpo, the process was very quick,” Villar says.