Giannis

by Mirin Fader

  The best times? Giannis would turn the volume up full blast in Geiger’s Subaru, rolling down his window, dancing to the people who would come up next to the car. They’d look over, and Giannis would shimmy harder. Geiger’s car didn’t have the best air conditioner, so Giannis would stretch his two arms out both the driver’s and the passenger’s windows, reach across Geiger’s face while the car was moving, and flap his wings like a bird to generate more air.

  “It was, like, unhuman,” Geiger says. And those pulling up next to them would laugh and stare. “He was this big kid, dancing, with humongous hands,” Geiger says. “These people would look over, like, ‘What is going on in that vehicle?’”

  * * *

  Another cold day in November, maybe fifteen degrees, Giannis didn’t have anyone’s car to borrow. It was a Saturday. Game day. Giannis had gone to Western Union to send his paycheck to his family but lost track of time.

  At the same time, a woman named Jane Gallop was shopping at Glorioso’s, an Italian grocery store, a block or two away, on Brady Street. When she got back in her Honda Fit with her partner, Dick Blau, she saw a very tall, very thin Black man running by. This guy looks familiar, Gallop thought.

  Gallop, a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, has been a Bucks fan since 1999. She loves the Bucks. In a flash, she realized: the man running by her was Giannis. And he was wearing a thin navy windbreaker and blue jeans in fifteen-degree weather. “My maternal response was ‘Oh my God, it’s way too cold to wear a windbreaker. He should be wearing a winter jacket,’” Gallop says. She turned to her partner. “Can we give him a ride?” They caught up to the rookie, rolled down the window, and asked, “Hey, do you want a ride?”

  Giannis paused. “Are you going to the Bradley Center?”

  “We’ll take you there.”

  Giannis hopped into the small car, said thank you twice, his usual practice. He sat sideways, head bent down in order to fit. He didn’t say much. They were all nervous in this incredibly strange moment. “I couldn’t think straight,” Gallop says. All she could say was “You need a winter jacket.”

  “Yeah. I don’t have any money. I just sent all my money to my parents at Western Union.”

  Gallop was fangirling so hard inside she forgot to ask for a photo and regrets not finding a store and buying him a jacket. She did manage to ask for an autograph. Giannis wrote it in both English and Greek and gave her and her partner a hug and thanked them again upon arriving at the Bradley Center.

  When Giannis found Hammond, told him what happened, the general manager was horrified. “If you ever need a ride,” Hammond said, “you call any one of us. Don’t get in the car with a stranger.”

  Giannis didn’t know any better. After all, this was America. And all he was thinking about was getting money to his family. Wishing they were in Milwaukee with him.

  * * *

  Lately, though, his teammates and coaches had started to sense that something was off. The bright, charismatic Giannis was not as smiley, not as bouncy. He had lost some sparkle. His laugh seemed manufactured, as if it took effort from somewhere deep down. His tweets, filled with exclamation points about his newest smoothie discoveries, masked deeper pain. Pain that few understood: he felt alone.

  CHAPTER 6

  LONELY

  Each morning, Giannis would take one last look at the master bedroom in his apartment. He’d make sure the pillows were perfectly fluffed, just in case his parents might somehow arrive in the States later in the day. He’d head to the Cousins Center for practice, hope humming inside him.

  Maybe today my family will be approved, he’d think, walking from the parking lot into the building. He’d lace up his sneakers next to his cubby, which was always immaculate, organized, as if his parents might turn up and inspect it.

  Then he’d find Hammond. “Any word on my family?” Giannis would ask. “How long until they will be here?” Before Hammond could respond, two Giannis questions blossomed into two more: “What about this month? Is there anything else we can do to get them here?”

  Hammond assured him that the organization was doing everything it could to bring the family to America—and he was being sincere. Immigration officials had denied the family’s visa request twice by this point, but Kohl and his assistant, JoAnne Anton, kept pushing. Hammond told Giannis that he didn’t have an answer yet. Giannis would have to keep waiting, keep being patient.

  But every day without his family pierced him. Made him rethink everything he’d endured up to this point. He wondered if it was all worth it: the grueling hours in the weight room, adding at least thirty pounds of muscle in mere months, getting smacked in the paint day after day, crumpling to the floor.

  “It killed him,” Alex says about Giannis being away from the family. “He was calling us all the time. He missed us and was constantly thinking about how he was going to bring us over there.”

  The dream Giannis had constructed in his head, mesmerized by the braids of Iverson, the jumpers of Durant, didn’t look like this, didn’t feel like this. He had always imagined being here but never once considered his family would be there.

  Without him.

  He had never been without any of them for more than three days, unless he was traveling for a youth tournament. He had never not slept side by side with his brothers. He’d never not had to take two buses with them, just to run up and down a court for a few hours, coming home to their parents, who would ask, “Did you make the most of your time today?”

  He was more than homesick, more than frustrated. For the first time in his life, he was deeply lonely. Lost.

  * * *

  Most days, Giannis kept to himself. Milwaukee was still a new city; he didn’t know what to do or where to go. He missed the old food back at Kivotos Café, complaining to Tzikas that the food on airplanes and in hotels was mostly processed. “All he wanted was some homemade food,” Tzikas says.

  Giannis would Skype with his family early in the morning or late at night because of the eight-hour time difference. The internet made them feel near, but after logging off, he’d realize they were so very far away. Everything had changed so quickly. He was sending them most of the money he was making, hardly concerned whether he had enough for himself.

  One night over Skype, around November 2013, frustrated with his family’s inability to obtain visas, Giannis told them, “I’m going to do this for as long as I have to, but if y’all can’t come, I’m coming back.”

  His brothers were floored. They didn’t know whether he was just frustrated or genuinely at a breaking point, genuinely considering giving up. But he meant it: he might leave the NBA. “Obviously we didn’t want him to come back,” Alex says, “but it meant the world to know that he’s loyal to us.”

  Giannis relayed a similar message to his agents, telling them that the only reason he wanted to play in the NBA was to provide a better life for his family. Without them, what reason was there to remain in America? “Take me back,” Giannis said. “I’d rather be with my family than just being over here.”

  His agents were trying to help with the visas as much as they could. With the family having been declined twice already, the situation was growing more tenuous by the day.

  Giannis felt a little guilty. Guilty at all he was enjoying, all he was learning, when people back home still didn’t have much. Wherever he was, his mind often traveled: here, there. Here, there. America, Greece, America, Greece.

  He always played hard, never sacrificed a possession. That was never in question. “He didn’t just show up and let his God-given ability take over. He worked at his craft,” says Bender, the assistant coach. “There’s a saying: ‘Good, bad, go to the next play.’ He probably never even heard of that expression before, but God, he was an example of that. A poster child of ‘Good, bad, go to the next play.’”

  Giannis could compartmentalize well, from years of masking his pain. Pretending that his stomach was not growling. Pretending that he wasn’t unsure wh
ere he and his family might be sleeping the next month. But Milwaukee was a different challenge. “Being scared to walk in the streets because, you know, the culture is totally different over here,” Giannis later told 60 Minutes. “I was scared. I was lonely.”

  He was supported. Cared for. He had Geiger taking him for late-night chocolate milkshakes to make him smile; Oppenheimer battling him in shooting contests every day; Coach Drew texting him regularly, making sure his rookie felt valued; Robinson showing up in his Escalade to take him to the mall, just to get him outside his head.

  Then there was Hammond, checking in on how he was feeling every day. He was the perfect GM for someone like Giannis because he was compassionate and patient. He didn’t expect Giannis to play perfectly right away. But when Giannis would do something exciting on the court, Hammond would scream, “Oh mannnnnnn! That’s a bad, bad man right there!”

  Hammond was a different kind of GM. He had empathy for players. His Midwest upbringing, his subtle humor, made him relatable. He gave interns rides home. He talked to anyone shooting late at night. He came to staffers’ rec basketball league games on Sundays. If someone needed to attend a wedding, they could expect Hammond to say, without hesitation, “Go!”

  No job was too small for him; if players left bottles on the floor, he’d pick them up. It wasn’t uncommon to see him wiping up the floor, wet from the leaky roof, with a towel. On snowy mornings, he’d shovel snow and lay down salt near the practice facility entrance, all in dress shoes, slacks, and a dress shirt. He related to Giannis because he knew what it was to dream big—and to suffer.

  The Zion, Illinois, native had survived a near-fatal motorcycle accident in 1971, suffering injuries that prevented him from playing at either of his dream schools, Illinois and Notre Dame. Then, attending Greenville College, he would mourn the loss of his best friend, Scott Burgess, who died of a brain injury after colliding with a player in practice.

  Hammond continued to grind, starting as a high school basketball coach in Pawnee City, Nebraska, before becoming a small-town college basketball coach at Southwest Missouri State. He worked his way up in the NBA in various teams’ scouting departments, eventually ascending into management with the Pistons.

  And even with a limited budget with a small-market team in Milwaukee, Hammond wanted everyone on staff to feel valued. “His words to me were ‘I want these players to walk into this locker room and feel like it’s a Hollywood premiere in here,’” says Mike Sergo, Bucks staffer of more than twenty-five years, who also serves as the equipment manager for the G League affiliate Wisconsin Herd. “The TVs had to be on SportsCenter. Every towel had to be folded. Nothing could be lying in the laundry bins when players walked in.”

  Had Giannis been drafted to a big-market team like Miami or LA or NY, he might not have had as much one-on-one support that would help him stay afloat when he was so down.

  One road trip, Brandon Knight sensed that Giannis was withdrawn, barely leaving his hotel room. Knight caught Giannis in the hallway, on the way to his room to Skype his family. “Yo, what are you doing?” Knight said.

  “Oh, I am just going to my room,” Giannis said.

  “Come here—get your hair cut, man.”

  “My hair cut?”

  “Yeah! A bunch of us are getting them in a different room. Come on.”

  Giannis agreed, though a bit reluctantly. When he sat down in the chair, greeting the barber, he grinned wide. This was so exciting: a special hotel haircut with American teammates. For a moment, his sadness softened. He had teammates who cared about him.

  But then he returned to his room, to the reality in front of him: this was not really home. His teammates weren’t his family. Milwaukee was nice, but it didn’t have the scent of fufu floating through the air, enveloping him like a warm embrace.

  It was a strange feeling: clutching more cash in his palm than he ever thought possible, feeling emptier than he ever thought possible.

  * * *

  To make matters worse, the Bucks were awful. Will-we-even-reach-double-digit-total-wins-this-season awful. They were a young team, with many players in their early twenties. Team morale was at an all-time low. “I was so excited to get traded to Charlotte halfway through,” Ridnour says. “It was just depressing. Everything was bad.”

  All hell broke loose when Sanders broke his thumb, getting into a fistfight in a nightclub, throwing a champagne bottle, adding to the perception of the Bucks as completely dysfunctional. It was humiliating for Sanders, who had just signed a four-year $44 million contract extension. With a seven-foot, seven-inch wingspan, he was at one point one of the best shot blockers in the NBA. He could cover the length of the floor in six strides, and in his prime, when he dunked, backboards would shake for thirty seconds, or so it seemed. He turned out to be the Bucks’ biggest disappointment that year, getting suspended for drug use by the end of the season.

  “What an absolute waste,” says Scott Williams, Bucks assistant coach that season.

  Injuries mounted. D. J. Stephens, a reserve, remembers someone saying on the bench, “There’s sixty million dollars just sitting there at the end of the bench. Can’t even play because they’re hurt.” He had to laugh—things were so bad.

  “Whole season was a blur,” Cleamons says. “We suffered. And I use the word suffered.”

  “It was chaos,” says Pachulia.

  It didn’t help that it was the year of the Arctic polar vortex, the coldest on record in two decades in Milwaukee. The temperature dropped below zero twenty-four times, and the wind chill was characterized as “life-threatening,” with values as low as sixty degrees below zero. Experts warned of potential frostbite to anyone who stepped outside with uncovered skin.

  One day, Williams was coming back from practice and the battery mechanism on his garage door failed, and he thought to himself, I have to get out of this car, or I will literally die. They’ll find me on the sidewalk literally frozen. Williams used to show up first at practice just because he wanted to get the prime parking spot to avoid the windchill walking from farther away. “We didn’t have underground parking,” he recalls.

  The cold was a big adjustment for Giannis. He didn’t own warm clothes at first. He had only the Bucks sweat suits, which he wore every day. Ilyasova gave him a pair of jeans, as did Mayo and Butler. But he would wear just a light down jacket or sweatshirt and sweats on those frigid Milwaukee days. Sometimes Giannis would hold on to Geiger’s arm when walking because he was shivering, wearing Nike slides with socks rather than snow boots.

  One night, as they were leaving the Cheesecake Factory near 11:00 p.m., a heavy snow was falling, the beginning of a blizzard. Inches and inches of snow had already piled up outside as Giannis and Geiger headed to the car. Geiger drove, going just thirty miles an hour on the freeway with headlights on, fog lamps on, air-conditioning running to clear the windshield. The windshield wipers furiously whipped back and forth, but the snow pelted down so hard Geiger couldn’t see. At all. He was scared. What if something happens to Giannis? he thought.

  Geiger pulled over.

  “Don’t pull over,” Giannis said. “We keep going.”

  “Dude,” Geiger said, “I can’t see.”

  “OK, bro. Where’s that towel?” Geiger always kept a towel in his back seat to wipe melting snow off the leather seats.

  Giannis grabbed the towel. “Open the window.”

  Geiger opened the passenger window. Giannis, still buckled into his seat, took his right arm, towel in hand, and lunged forward and stretched his massive wingspan all the way over to Geiger’s side, serving as a human windshield wiper, cleaning each side every thirty seconds. Geiger could see enough to make it home.

  “We can’t ever do that again,” Geiger said.

  * * *

  Giannis was still growing. He had sprouted more than an inch—from 6'9" to 6'10 1/4"—from the start of training camp to December 2013. But by that point, he was struggling on the court, roughly halfway through his rookie se
ason. He tried to stay upbeat, bringing cupcakes for the team on a road trip for his nineteenth birthday on December 6.

  But he just couldn’t slow down on the court. All that energy, all that go, churning inside him, threatening to detonate. He’d foul someone inadvertently. Turn the ball over off his knee on the fast break. He was trying so hard to be somebody that sometimes he seemed all over the place.

  “His mind was going a million miles a minute,” Ridnour says. Giannis had to succeed. He had to be great. Now. But he wasn’t anywhere near great. Anyone watching could tell he was going to be really good at some point. Some future time. He was a Project with a capital P, a player who excited, who frustrated. Who dazzled, who disappointed.

  He was so young and so earnest, especially on the defensive end, never walking back to the other end after a turnover. It was hard to chastise him, because every error he made contained something delightful: He’d leap to the basket in two dribbles. He’d snatch the ball out of the air and zoom downcourt, finishing coast-to-coast. He’d pull off an unchasable chase-down block.

  He just couldn’t put all his skills together yet. His body wouldn’t allow him to. He felt like he was making at least twenty mistakes a practice. One night Giannis shined; the next night he looked lackluster. Confused. Against the Celtics, he dropped a pass out of bounds, and instead of taking responsibility, he responded with a welp shrug, like, “Who me?”

  Up. Down. Up. Down. He couldn’t catch a rhythm. Drew would remind him he had to focus on being more consistent. Giannis knew his coach was right, but it was easier said than done. Because the team was losing so much, Giannis was allowed to play through his mistakes. That meant, however, his youth was on full display; he couldn’t hide from his weaknesses.