Giannis

by Mirin Fader

  And then… it was too late. After standing backstage with a European teenager and practicing the pronunciation of Giannis’s full name, NBA commissioner David Stern walked out into the lights and announced: the Bucks would select Giannis at number 15.

  Giannis hugged Thanasis, then walked up to the podium, shook Stern’s hand, and flashed a wide smile. He looked so eager, so excited. So young, so baby-faced. He was only eighteen. Giannis doesn’t remember much about what happened after that. He remembers being so nervous, saying, “Thank you so much,” and hearing Stern say, “Look over here, look over there, look over there, good luck with your journey!” as camera lights flashed. Giannis was so proud of himself. He had been through so much to get to that point.

  When Giannis’s name was called, Thanasis waved a Greek flag in the air, which was his idea, according to Josh Oppenheimer, the Bucks assistant coach and close friend. Oppenheimer calls Thanasis “Giannis’s Flavor Flav” because he is always hyping up and celebrating his baby brother. Thanasis felt waving the flag was the right way to do that, despite Giannis’s reservations. “Giannis did not want Thanasis to wave the Greek flag,” Oppenheimer says, given that Greece had taken a while to grant them citizenship. “Let’s claim them for us,” Thanasis told Giannis that night, according to Oppenheimer.

  “Giannis was angry and bitter for how the family and other immigrants had been treated,” Oppenheimer says, “but Thanasis knew if he didn’t [wave the flag], there would be more struggle after.”

  Giannis was proud to be Greek—and to have made it this far. He never expected to be drafted. Thanasis stood next to him, smiling when Giannis smiled, laughing when Giannis laughed.

  But the Hawks were not laughing. They were deeply disappointed. Angry. Someone in the Hawks draft room threw a large plant. A beverage also flew through the air.

  The sadness lingered with Ferry. “For a while,” Ferry says. Still does. “How do you not feel that way when you watch this kid play?” It took a few weeks of coaxing for him to even agree to talk about Giannis and the draft on the record for this book, as it’s still a sore subject with him. “We got through this [the interview] without me crying,” Ferry says, managing a laugh.

  But another person in the Hawks draft room felt that as a group they hadn’t done enough to fight to move up for Giannis. To convince upper management that Giannis was worth giving up anything for. “Maybe we had the highest evaluation on him, but I do know we underevaluated him,” that person says. “Ultimately, we loved the player, but we weren’t convinced enough. That’s the truth.

  “It was a huge leap to say the kid could be an all-star,” he continues, “which we thought he could be, but to go from that to being one of the best players to ever play the game? We didn’t see that. It’s just the reality; we didn’t get it done.”

  To Villar of Zaragoza, it was bittersweet. On the one hand, he was happy for Giannis. Proud. On the other hand, he was sad that he was missing out on a great player. A player he’d believed in when very few had. “Five months ago, he was playing second-division Greece, and now he’s in the NBA,” Villar says.

  Hammond and the Bucks were thrilled. The reality, of course, is that had any GM known then that Giannis would grow two more inches, sprouting to nearly seven feet, he wouldn’t have fallen to number 15. And even being picked at number 15 was seen as a stretch; he went two, three, picks earlier than some scouts would have thought.

  “It really was one of the oddest drafts in the history of the draft,” Simmons says. “The fact that Giannis became by far the biggest gem out of that draft? If we had listed thirty predictions for that draft, that would not have been in the thirty.” Simmons thought it was a smart pick but that it signified the Bucks were going full rebuild. “That’s the kind of pick you took if you didn’t really care what happened the next couple of years.”

  There has been a bit of revisionist history about the 2013 draft in the years since. Giannis wasn’t anybody’s outright number 1—maybe with the exception of Atlanta. Regarding the teams now claiming to have had more interest than they actually did then, Simmons says, “I think those teams are completely full of shit. I think they do that every draft. There’s always some hero. There’s eight to ten people in the draft process for every team, so somebody could say in a meeting, ‘I really like Giannis.’ Then over the years, it becomes ‘Oh, I told everyone we should trade for Giannis!’”

  After the Bucks selected Giannis, he did his first media interviews. He was both shy and sure of himself at the same time. “It’s a wonderful feeling,” Giannis told a TV reporter that night. “I can’t describe how I feel. It’s a dream come true.

  “I know I’m not ready. I have a lot of work ahead of me,” Giannis said in a conference that night. “But I’m not afraid. I will give everything on the court, in the gym. And I will prove to the Milwaukee Bucks that they made the right choice.”

  Then Craig Sager interviewed him. Slowly enunciating every syllable of Giannis’s last name—“Ahn-te-toe-koon-poh”—Sager let each one hang for an extra second. He asked Giannis whom he modeled his game after.

  “People say I play like Kevin Durant,” Giannis said, “but you don’t look at other players. You just look at yourself. How are you going to improve? I hope I improve. I work hard. I will get ready to play into the NBA.”

  “You have your choice,” Sager said. “You can stay in Europe and maybe come to the NBA later or come right away. What are you going to do?”

  “Right away in the NBA,” Giannis said, looking him in the eye.

  * * *

  Giannis and Thanasis returned to their hotel room that night and celebrated by jumping on the bed, giggling like kids. They started praying, promising that their little brothers were going to have a better future than them—that they would go to private schools, receive proper educations. Then they Skyped their parents and Kostas and Alex, telling them their lives were going to change. Everything would be all right.

  A group of about fifty friends, teammates, and coaches in Sepolia had joined Charles and Veronica to watch the draft. “Everybody would cheer, like we had made a buzzer-beater,” Saloustros says. “We couldn’t believe it. It was surreal.” They all stayed up to the very end, around 3:00 a.m. Greece time.

  Tzikas and his wife, of Kivotos Café, were working fifteen hours that day, so they couldn’t attend, but they saw clips of the draft the next day at 5:00 a.m. They broke down crying. “We were very proud,” Tzikas says. “The family of the Antetokounmpos is second family for us.”

  Rahman Rana, Giannis’s close friend, was so happy for him he couldn’t put it into words. He felt like he himself had made it too. “At least one of us was living the dream,” Rana says.

  Others were shocked. A Greek African player made it. A Greek African player who was undocumented all his life. He beat the odds.

  * * *

  The next morning, Giannis, Thanasis, and Saratsis boarded a charter plane for Milwaukee. Hammond was waiting for them at the airport. The headlines that day characterized Hammond’s choice as a bold move. A gamble.

  “Mystery Man Worth Shot; Giannis Antetokounmpo Is a Project, but Has the Potential to Be a Star,” said the Wisconsin State Journal.

  “Playing it safe was a real possibility. Hammond decided to roll the dice on the youngest player in the draft,” said the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

  “No team swung for the fences quite like the Bucks,” said USA Today.

  “Give the Bucks credit: They aren’t afraid to take a chance. It may be several years before we know whether the Bucks wasted their pick or struck gold with Antetokounmpo,” said ESPN.

  The pick was risky. And a little odd. No one in Milwaukee media had even heard of Giannis before. The pick seemed to be a departure from Kohl’s “just be competitive” mandate, as Hammond seemingly drafted a player for the future—a player who needed time to develop rather than contribute right away to help lock in another lackluster season and number 8 playoff seed.

&n
bsp; Hammond acknowledges that there had been safer picks, but none with Giannis’s upside. The Bucks had needed a guard, but Hammond didn’t feel the need to select a traditional point guard. Though Giannis’s Greek coaches viewed him as someone who could play multiple positions, including point guard, Hammond viewed Giannis as more of a wing.

  Scotty Stirling, longtime NBA scout and former NBA vice president of operations, once told a young Hammond, in Hammond’s first year working in the NBA, that the way to determine a player’s position is “You are what you guard.” So while Giannis handled the ball like a point guard, had a great feel for the game like a point guard, he couldn’t guard a Kyrie Irving kind of point guard. Therefore, Giannis would start out as a wing. A mobile, versatile wing. When Hammond talked about Giannis with staff, his voice lifted a note higher. Sometimes he almost squealed. Giannis was his new project.

  When Giannis landed in Milwaukee, the two made small talk. Hammond then broke the unfortunate news to the rookie: “It gets really cold in Milwaukee.” Giannis nodded, but he didn’t own a winter coat.

  * * *

  Hammond dropped Giannis and Thanasis off at the Pfister Hotel, where Kohl had breakfast every morning. The Bucks had booked Giannis and Thanasis in two separate rooms. The brothers didn’t understand why anyone would do such a thing. That seemed crazy to them. Way too extravagant. So Thanasis stayed in Giannis’s room, and they slept in one bed. Just as they always had.

  Hammond joined them in the morning, spotting Kohl with JoAnne Anton, Kohl’s assistant, in the hotel coffee shop. “Giannis, there’s the owner of the team, right there,” Hammond said, waving Kohl and Anton over. Anton smiled and then started speaking Greek, as if it were the most casual thing in the world to do. Hammond was floored: he had no idea Anton was Greek, let alone fluent. This has to be right, Hammond thought. What are the odds?

  They all headed to Giannis’s introductory press conference. Beat writers weren’t sure what to make of Giannis, this tall lanky teen walking into the media room. They asked him how to pronounce his name, and he sounded it out slowly, phonetically. For many, it was the first time hearing his name. Some were skeptical. “There was no buzz on this guy,” says Tom Oates, former Wisconsin State Journal sports columnist of thirty years. “I thought, Man, that kid is going to get broken in half.”

  Giannis was immediately endearing: baby-faced, humble yet confident. “He had a sense of humor,” says Lori Nickel, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s sports columnist. Everyone laughed when Giannis was asked about his biggest challenge: “It will be a little bit difficult, but I will have my family together with me, and it will be easy.”

  CHAPTER 5

  AMERICA

  Six days later, Giannis returned to Greece for a brief visit with his family and friends. He went to a club with Kamperidis, Rana, and some other former teammates to celebrate. The DJ gave him a shoutout: “Giannis Antetokounmpo, drafted to the NBA!” Giannis smiled shyly. It was the first time he really let himself dance in public. He knew how to dance, but he and his teammates were always so focused on basketball that experiences like this were rare. “We were not used to this life,” Rana says.

  Samaras, Greece’s prime minister, invited Giannis and his family to visit him at Maximos Mansion, the official seat of the prime minister since 1982. The Antetokounmpos couldn’t believe it: the mansion. Invited by the prime minister. The same government that dragged its feet on granting Giannis and Thanasis citizenship.

  The mansion was in downtown, near Syntagma Square, a short distance from the store Giannis and his buddies used to frequent to play video games. The building was built in the old classical style, with an imposing terrace and garden. Maximos was a rich Greek entrepreneur, after all.

  Walking up the ten steps to the mansion’s entrance was exciting. Strange. “Now I go to the palace. People used to draw pictures of us as monkeys,” Oppenheimer remembers Giannis telling him. “He hasn’t forgotten that.”

  When the Antetokounmpos arrived, around 3:00 p.m., Samaras gave Giannis a gift: a copy of Axion Esti, a revered holy icon of Orthodox Christianity. Historically, it has been associated with a string of legendary miracles, and it has strong emotional connotations among the Greek Orthodox. Samaras hoped it would keep Giannis safe in America. “I told him that it was my personal gift to him, with the wish that the Holy Mother would always protect him,” Samaras says.

  Samaras could tell the family was shocked to even be there. He tried to make them feel at home. He asked if they’d like any coffee or orange juice; they preferred water. They were polite but reserved. Samaras was impressed by Giannis but equally impressed by his parents. “They are among the most decent people I have ever met,” Samaras says. “They won my heart.”

  Samaras said at the time he was proud to see Giannis get drafted and wave the Greek flag, eager to see how he’d represent Greece. Giannis was grateful but understood the hypocrisy. “Now that I am in the NBA, they can use me for the national team,” Giannis later told Sports Illustrated. “Now they want to accept me.”

  Of course, not all did. Shortly after Giannis was drafted, Nikolaos Michaloliakos, Golden Dawn’s leader, said on national television, “If you give a chimpanzee in the zoo a banana and a flag, is he Greek?” And when Giannis visited the mansion, Michaloliakos called for Giannis and his family to be arrested and deported, saying that Giannis being drafted by Senator Kohl was part of a plot by a “fanatical Jew and Zionist but also a big and active antifascist activist.”

  Rana, watching this on TV, was terrified for Giannis. Scared that Giannis would make a mistake, or get injured, or not play well, and give the racists even more ammunition. What will the Greek people say about him? Rana thought. Oh, he’s just another Black kid? Will they still acknowledge him as Greek?

  Giannis said he wasn’t angry. Couldn’t control what others thought about him. “I can’t click a button on them so they change their opinion,” he told Sports Illustrated. “Some guys say, ‘He’s Black. Greeks are not Black.’ You try to explain to them that it’s not about the color. If I’m not Greek, what am I? My parents grew up in Nigeria, but I have never been there. If I am not Greek, I don’t know what I am.”

  He let the slurs go. Focused on the task ahead: representing Greece’s U-20 team that summer in Tallinn, Estonia, rather than competing in the NBA Summer League. Giannis didn’t expect reporters to follow him in Estonia at hotels, at practices, at games, but “suddenly everybody cares about him,” says Kostas Missas, the U-20 national-team coach. “He didn’t like this so much.”

  * * *

  One morning, Kamperidis, Filathlitikos teammate and now fellow U-20 teammate, came up to Missas at breakfast, looking weary. “Coach, I couldn’t sleep last night.”

  “Come on,” Missas said. “Why?”

  “Giannis was doing push-ups and sit-ups all night.”

  Missas confronted Giannis about it. “I’m sorry, Coach,” Giannis said. “But that’s the only way I’m going to play in the NBA.”

  First, though, he had to crack the U-20 lineup. His teammates didn’t know what to make of him. They had been playing at the highest levels; he hadn’t. “He wasn’t the best player back then,” says teammate Ioannis Papapetrou, now a star for Panathinaikos, “but you could see the potential and work ethic.”

  Giannis wanted to play, sure, but he also wanted to collect the five euros Missas promised each player for each win. After four wins, Giannis asked Missas, “What’s going on with the euros? That’s four games, twenty euros!” Missas laughs, remembering how serious Giannis was: “Twenty euros to him then was one hundred million dollars.”

  Giannis didn’t play much but contributed in key moments—for example, in the final eleven seconds against Germany, when he scored four points and drained two critical free throws, even blocking a shot. “He made the difference for us,” says Petros Melissaratos, U-20 teammate. “He was working harder than anyone.”

  That impressed Larry Drew, his new Bucks coach. Drew had traveled
to Estonia to meet Giannis, to let him know that he really cared about him. “I wanted him to know that this was not just about basketball; this was about him as a person,” says Drew, now an assistant coach with the Clippers.

  One play in Estonia in particular captivated Drew: Giannis grabbed a rebound and dribbled full court, faking out the first defender before muscling through defenders in the lane, then dropping a crisp bounce pass to an open teammate.

  Soon after, Giannis participated in a question-and-answer session with Sport24.gr, a Greek website. One reader asked a question that sounded absurd: “How many years before you get an MVP?”

  “Haha, too soon for that,” Giannis said. “First, I got to earn playing time, gain experience, and get adjusted to the new lifestyle.”

  “We are expecting so much from you. What do you think you need to improve in?”

  “My goal is to become one of the best, and in order to do that, I need to improve in everything.”

  He did one final interview with Triantafyllos, the sports journalist turned coach, who drove him home after. “It’s your first time going to live in America,” Triantafyllos recalls saying to Giannis, staring ahead at the road. “Are you scared?”

  “Look,” Giannis said. “This year I will get one million dollars. This money will help me and my family for the rest of our lives. Why should I be scared?”

  * * *

  Hammond made sure that every Bucks staffer was prepared for Giannis’s arrival. Someone would always need to be there for the rookie. Hammond enlisted Ross Geiger, the assistant video coordinator, to look out for him on a daily basis.