Giannis

by Mirin Fader

  Another time, in the players’ lounge, some players and staffers were talking about NBA players who spent their entire careers with one team. Giannis blurted out, “I love Milwaukee! I wanna be in Milwaukee forever! I’m going to be here for twenty years! By the time I’m done playing in Milwaukee, everybody will be sick of me!”

  Raduljica rolled his eyes. “I’m already sick of him,” he said quietly, walking out of the room.

  “Everyone was laughing,” says Michael Clutterbuck, Bucks director of basketball analytics from 2013 to 2017. “Giannis was just young and naive and didn’t understand the way of the business.”

  Staffers contemplated how best to portray Giannis over social media, concerned that his joy for discovering new American things could be perceived in a negative light. “There was a sensitivity, on the business and marketing side, to portraying him as being overly naive,” says Theodore Loehrke, former Bucks senior vice president and chief revenue officer. The Bucks didn’t want him to seem unsophisticated. “There was a conscious effort not to play up the smoothie thing,” Loehrke says, “even though it was a fun story. We just wanted to make sure that people understood him as a person and not as a caricature of a Coming to America story.”

  * * *

  There was also a very serious side to Giannis, a burning desire inside him to prove that he belonged. He wanted to be great. He didn’t care that his first regular-season game was against the New York Knicks and Carmelo Anthony, at that point one of the best players in the league, at Madison Square Garden.

  Giannis, the youngest player in the league at eighteen years and 328 days, asked Drew if he could guard Anthony.

  The morning of the game, October 30, 2013, Giannis kept exclaiming to Butler, “The Knicks! The New York Knicks! Carmelo Anthony!” Giannis kept looking around, as if he was trying to freeze the moment. Remember every detail. It was still shocking to him that he had NBA socks. An NBA uniform.

  One Greek journalist, Nick Metallinos, living in New York at the time, arrived a few hours early just to catch a glimpse of Giannis. He was standing on the baseline when Giannis noticed him and walked over. Metallinos told Giannis, in Greek, that he was Greek too. Giannis showed respect by speaking in the plural: “τι κάνετε” (How are you?). Giannis was floored—another Greek, speaking Greek, in New York City.

  He turned his attention back to the court and began shooting around. Butler sensed the rookie was in awe of Carmelo and probably had nervous energy. “Don’t go for the shot fakes,” Butler told Giannis. “Stay down on defense.”

  “Giannis was hyped; he was ready to go,” Henson says. “He didn’t know any better. He’s like, ‘Carmelo? It’s just another guy to me.’”

  Giannis quickly found out how strong, how powerful, Anthony was. Anthony finished with nineteen points and ten rebounds. Giannis played only four minutes, forty-three seconds. He didn’t attempt a field goal. Didn’t grab a rebound. He finished with one point: a free throw. But Anthony saw how badly the rookie wanted to shine. Giannis worked hard to deny Anthony the ball. He always had a strong sense of where the ball was going to be. And if he wasn’t near it, he’d give everything to get to it.

  “He was scrappy,” Anthony says. “I knew, ‘OK, he’s not backing down. He wants it.’ You saw his competitive nature and how he wanted to be great.

  “He was a raw, raw talent. You could tell he just had so much upside to him,” Anthony says. It was clear, though, that Giannis had a ways to go physically. “I don’t think he knew how to use his body at that point in time.”

  The Bucks lost, 90–83. Giannis was quiet after the game. It didn’t help that public announcers fumbled his name throughout the game, as journalists would for the next couple of months, with some variation of the following:

  “Gee-Ahnnis.”

  “Antenna-koompo.”

  “Ant-tekoompo.”

  “Ahntay-ti-koonpo.”

  Sports Illustrated declared that his “five-syllable surname has flummoxed every P.A. announcer in the NBA.” The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel said, “You still struggle to consistently pronounce the name without stammering.” Yahoo said, “Man, this is going to be rough.”

  “The Greek Freak” nickname began to stick; Giannis was freakishly athletic and talented, able to handle the ball surprisingly well for his size. Ted Davis, the Bucks radio play-by-play announcer, coined the nickname “the Alphabet,” but Giannis liked Greek Freak. To this day, Giannis doesn’t know where the nickname came from, though; neither do those closest to him.

  Earlier in the season, at the state fair in Wisconsin in August 2013, the Bucks digital team had Giannis play a game with fans to see if they could pronounce his name. “Everyone was saying it wrong,” says Mike Grahl, former Bucks vice president of digital platforms, now the chief marketing officer with the Timberwolves.

  A woman in a pink tie-dye shirt said, “Gee-ah-nay-us Ant-te-toe-kenopio.” It got worse as others made dozens of cringeworthy attempts:

  “Giannis Antay-ti-no-no-koo-poo.”

  “Jannis Ante-to-kwampo.”

  “Ate-no-koonopoe.”

  “Guiness Ante-kwanpo.”

  “Giannis Anten-te-ko-no-poh-poh-poh.”

  Grahl remembers how Giannis smiled, didn’t seem bothered, despite participants laughing after each attempt. “He embraced it, being the optimistic, fun free spirit that he is,” Grahl says.

  The Bucks weren’t sure whether to call him the Greek Freak at first, unsure whether the rookie found the name offensive. Eddie Doucette, the legendary Bucks broadcaster and a Wisconsin Broadcasters Association Hall of Fame inductee, who had been with the team since its inception in 1968 until 1984, didn’t like the nickname Greek Freak. He still doesn’t. “I personally think ‘the Greek Freak’ is defamatory,” Doucette says.

  He would know. He’s an expert at creating basketball terminology, like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s “skyhook,” and bestowing nicknames on every Bucks player. “I wanted to make basketball fun for people,” says Doucette, now eighty-three. His best nicknames? The Cement Mixer (Dick Cunningham), the Greyhound (Bob Dandridge), and Captain Marvel (Greg Smith). He was responsible for so much of the new basketball lingo that he’d get calls from teachers complaining that their students were “talking a different language,” shouting, “Bango!” when shooting wads of paper into trash cans.

  So although Doucette is no longer with the organization, he has an idea for a new nickname for Giannis. “Who’s a bigger cheese in Milwaukee, or even in the state of Wisconsin, other than Aaron Rodgers?” Doucette says. “When he’s [Rodgers] out of season, it’s all about Giannis and the Bucks. If there isn’t a bigger cheese than Giannis, why not call him the Big Feta? Everyone loves a piece of feta cheese.”

  * * *

  Most days, Giannis was exhausted. He’d spend hours on the court in practice, hours in the weight room, then hours at night, by himself, trying to become stronger. “He wanted to become someone who earned his stripes, not be given his stripes,” Cleamons says.

  It was frustrating, though, that the results weren’t showing. And he was barely getting off the bench during games. A few minutes here, a few minutes there. He had a nice game against Miami, scoring a then season-high eleven points; then he struggled again, scoring just two against Oklahoma City. He was inconsistent. And so were his minutes.

  That was partially because he was a liability on defense. He was late on defensive rotations because he was overrotating. He’d reach, hack somebody. Foul. He wasn’t used to the speed of play. The awe-inspiring things he did—a monster block, a near impossible finish at the rim—would be erased by out-of-sync moments. He’d try to bump somebody, only to fall down himself, his arms and legs sprawled on the court. He’d look at referees, like, Where’s the foul? But the whistle wouldn’t blow. The Bucks were losing nearly every game, and Giannis was a no-name.

  When subbed out, Giannis seemed visibly frustrated. Butler and Ridnour would try to coach him through, tell him to relax. “You�
��re going so fast—just calm down,” they’d say. “Breathe.” Drew was patient with Giannis, giving him some leeway with mistakes. “Our biggest concern was his development,” Drew says.

  But Giannis was hard on himself, beating himself up to the point that he’d start crying. In front of the team. One home game, Drew took Giannis out in the fourth quarter, mainly because it was a possession game and the Bucks were about to play defense. Drew called a time-out. Giannis sat next to Drew and stared him down. Then Giannis’s eyes started to get watery. “I could see his eyes welling,” Drew says.

  After the play, another time-out was called, and Drew put Giannis back in the game. Drew tried to explain to him that sometimes players are subbed out during these situations, but the rookie couldn’t be consoled. “No, you leave me in the game,” Giannis told his coach. “You leave me in there offensively; you leave me in there defensively.”

  Drew loved that Giannis wasn’t afraid to say that. It reminded Drew of another player he had coached: Kobe Bryant. Drew recalls the Lakers’ first-round playoff series against Portland in 1997, when Portland’s Isaiah “J. R.” Rider manhandled LA’s guards, including eighteen-year-old Kobe, winning game 3. Afterward, Drew told players they had given their best efforts. Kobe just stared at Drew, angry.

  “LD,” Kobe said, “I swear to you. That will never happen again.” Drew asked him what he meant, and Kobe talked about how Rider physically beat him up. “That will never happen again,” Kobe repeated. Sure enough, the Lakers won game 4 and moved on to the Western Conference Semifinals, and the following fall for training camp, Kobe’s body had been transformed. He put on a ton of muscle. Drew thought of that whenever he saw Giannis berate himself. “Kobe was the ultimate competitor, and I saw that same competitive drive in Giannis,” Drew says. “He’s driven.”

  When Giannis would cry, Drew realized that the kid wasn’t quite a man yet. He didn’t yet know how to control his emotions. “He’s still a kid, and he’s going to have kid reactions to some things,” Drew says. “That’s something we had to understand.”

  Even in late summer, when Giannis first came to Milwaukee, when playing casual games of one-on-one with his new teammates, he’d make a mistake, or someone would get the best of him on a possession, and he’d run out, just take off, stopping in the tunnel area. He’d ball his fists up, trying to control himself. “The emotion was such that you would say, ‘Yeah, he might be having a meltdown in there,’” Bender says.

  Giannis always sprinted right back, didn’t let the emotion affect his play, but he couldn’t stomach not living up to the expectations he set for himself. “He was always working—almost too hard,” Henson says. At the end of practices, the team would usually scrimmage, and if Giannis didn’t feel like he’d made the shots he wanted, he’d go to a side basket and shoot.

  Drew would come to check on him. “I missed too many shots, Coach,” Giannis would say apologetically. “I gotta make those shots.”

  When Giannis would miss a free throw, he would be so upset with himself—“like it was the end of the world,” Butler says—that Butler had to tell him, “Don’t be so hard on yourself.”

  “But it’s free!”

  “You gotta have a short memory. On to the next play.”

  Hackett noticed Giannis crying in the weight room on several occasions when the two were alone. Hackett wondered if his public display of emotion might be a cultural difference. Boys and men in the States are oftentimes taught to hold in their emotion. “We won’t let it out, especially as a Black male,” says Hackett, who is Black. “We’re going to hide it. But he could probably care less.”

  Giannis wasn’t raised to hold in his emotions on the court in Greece. “He used to cry after every game,” says Zivas, his former Filathlitikos coach. But when Giannis came to America, some of his coaches and teammates were taken aback by it; it’s just not something one sees in the hypermasculine NBA.

  “You can’t cry,” Hackett told Giannis. “Just don’t do that.”

  But the more it happened, the more Hackett sensed how badly the rookie ached to be great. Anything less was a failure. Because failing wasn’t just failing in the weight room. Failing would mean failing his family. And failing his family would mean returning to Greece. And returning to Greece would mean hustling on the streets again.

  “He would think about it, like, ‘I’m a rookie; I’m hours away from my family; my whole family is left behind; did I want to just come here to go through the motions? No,’” Alex says. “Did we go through two-hour bus rides, go through all that stuff, to go over to America to just be average? No. That’s not how it goes.”

  Even right before games, Giannis would go through a full on-court workout, asking Oppenheimer to hit him harder with giant cushions. “Sometimes it felt like we had to shut the gym down in order for him to stop working,” Butler says.

  Giannis would return to the practice court right after games. He wasn’t able to let go of his mistakes. He’d grab a ball and try to outshoot his disappointment. Once, Giannis had finished his own workout and was taking off his sneakers when Butler teased, “Bet you can’t dunk with no shoes on.”

  Giannis called for the ball, white socks and all. Starting at the three-point line, he took two gargantuan steps and hammered the ball home so hard the rim shook.

  * * *

  Though he was hard on himself, he was also sure of himself. Those closest to him could tell he knew he was going to be really good. Every so often, he’d tell Wolters, the Bucks rookie, about his master plan: “Next year I’ll be averaging ten points a game,” Giannis said. “I’ll keep getting better and better, and then the next year after that, I’ll be averaging closer to twenty.”

  Then he’d tell everyone, “I want to be the best. I’m going to be the man.” And they laughed, like, OK, kid, sure. Those are lofty goals. “He really believed he was going to be one of the best players in the NBA,” Oppenheimer says. No matter how far-fetched his goals seemed at the time, Giannis used to randomly say to teammates or staffers, “I am the Greek Freak! I am the Greek Freak!” Then he’d flex his muscles, as if to prove it.

  He would have a modest stat line after a game, and riding in the car with Geiger to Applebee’s afterward, Giannis would say, “Yeah! Yeah! Did you see that? Yeah, I’m the Greek Freak!”

  He used to tell Cody Ross, “Cody, I am the LeBron James of Greece.” Giannis understood the influence James had in America; he planned on being the Greek equivalent.

  The first time Giannis met Chris Wright, the Bucks forward, Giannis said, “I’m Giannis. The Greek Freak. The Greek Freak, bab-ayyyyy!” When Giannis met Greg Signorelli, an athletic-training intern that year, who ended up staying six years full-time, Giannis said, “You can call me champ. I’m the champ!”

  People still couldn’t pronounce his name—some didn’t even try—but the first name Giannis stuck more than anything. “He became a first-name household name,” says Lori Nickel, the sports columnist, “almost like Madonna or Pele.”

  Skip Robinson, the Bucks staffer, noticed the influence Giannis did have when he walked into a room. Shoulders back. Chin up. “He walks proud,” Robinson says. “He walks like a king.”

  * * *

  But the king needed a driver’s license.

  After several months of staffers driving him everywhere, Giannis decided he wanted to learn how to drive. One afternoon, Dave Dean, the vice president of basketball operations, was sitting in his office, listening to Giannis and a driver’s education instructor read the rules of driving. Giannis was so excited he belted out every instruction. “Oh, that is… hydroplaning!” Then he’d get quiet, listen—then belt out another revelation. “Bald tires are bad!” Giannis was convinced he knew it all. “I want to take the test right now!” he said. “I am ready!”

  He still had a lot to learn. Geiger, Hammond, Dean, and Jon Horst, then director of basketball administration and current Bucks GM, decided to teach him rather than have him continue driver’s school.
Geiger spent the most time with Giannis, letting Giannis drive his Subaru. Giannis would stuff his six-foot-nine frame into the small station wagon, cranking the seat all the way back. His knees still perched over the steering wheel as he drove. It was an old car; Geiger had gotten it when he was sixteen, and the engine made a loud noise when it started. But that didn’t matter to Giannis: he was thrilled. A little too thrilled.

  Geiger would have to remind him to focus. “See the car on your left?” They’d approach a stop sign, and Giannis wouldn’t slow down, and Geiger would think, Does he see it? Does he know he has to stop? Or when Giannis wanted to turn, he wouldn’t turn on his blinker. They’d get closer to the turn, and Giannis could sense Geiger getting nervous, with a serious face.

  “Indicator, indicator!” Giannis would say, flashing a big smile. “I know. I know. Don’t worry, Ross. I got this!”

  Geiger taught him to pump gas too. And when Geiger would insist on helping, Giannis would say, “No, I’m pumping my own gas.” That made him feel cool, responsible. Like he was a real adult, handling adult things.

  Hammond, Dean, and Horst would sometimes take Giannis for a spin in the team car, a Ford Edge. Giannis pushed the seat so far back that Dean and Horst barely had room to sit in the back seat. They’d all practice parallel parking in the practice facility. Giannis’s teammates refused to get in the car with him, though. They felt he drove too fast. Once, Henson was headed to the airport after a game and saw an SUV zoom past him, weaving in and out of traffic. “I’m like, ‘Is that Giannis?’” Henson says. Henson got to the airport, called Giannis: “You can’t drive like that. What are you doing?”

  Giannis had to learn how to drive on ice and snow. Once, a Bucks staffer and Giannis went to the grocery store, and Giannis wanted to drive them home. The staffer was in a rush and didn’t want to let Giannis drive his car. Giannis got out of the car, in freezing snow, opened Google Maps on his phone, and started walking home. It would take about two hours, but Giannis was stubborn. He’d rather walk than sit in the passenger’s seat. A couple of blocks in, the staffer caught up with him. “OK, you win. You can drive.”