by Mirin Fader
Namoc tried to comfort him: “Look, man—you have a bunch of new pairs. I can get you more. Don’t even worry!”
Giannis’s voice grew shaky, his eyes pleading, as he said, “Is there any way… any way you could fix them?”
“Bro,” Namoc said. “Just get a new pair… We’ll get you a new pair…”
Giannis would wear only two pairs his entire rookie season. He was given plenty—eighty-two, to be exact, a pair per game. Though he didn’t want to wear them, Giannis wanted to take all eighty-two home with him. Oppenheimer found the rookie shooting on the court one day to confront him about that choice. “They’re not going to fit in your apartment,” Oppenheimer told him. “Why don’t you leave some here? Wear a few here and there at practice?”
“No, Coach,” Giannis said, leaning closer to Oppenheimer, lowering his voice as if he were about to spill a secret. “I want them all at my house.”
“Why?”
“I want my house to look like MTV Cribs.”
Truth is, he was saving the shoes for his brothers. Hoping they’d one day obtain visas, one day be able to come to Milwaukee. Run up the court, know the exhilarating feeling of breaking in a brand-new shoe.
* * *
The Bucks approached the new year with a tough stretch of road games in Phoenix, Oklahoma City, Toronto, Houston, and San Antonio. Giannis wasn’t playing consistently, but he moved to the wing as Ridnour moved into the lineup at guard.
Giannis was extra giddy for the Oklahoma City game, on January 11, 2014. There was his idol: Durant. Giannis studied him before the game, pulling up a chair, tracking Durant’s movements, from his fingertips to his toes. He was captivated by how serious Durant looked shooting. Not smiling, not once.
The first time the two teams had met, back in November, Giannis was terrified. Oh my god, he thought to himself as the game started, I’m guarding Kevin Durant!
He was still in awe this time around. Durant guarded Giannis tightly the whole night, harassing him when he brought the ball up court. Durant finished with thirty-three, leading his team to a 101–85 blowout win, but the rookie held his own: thirteen points, eleven rebounds, and five assists, two blocks, two steals. He played his heart out. He even posterized Kendrick Perkins, who had seventy pounds on him.
Durant was impressed. “He’s just sneaky athletic; he’s quick. He’s very long in that wing position. He plays extremely hard,” Durant said after the game. “I can definitely roll with a player like that.”
Giannis beamed afterward, telling his teammates, “Kevin Durant said I’m going to be good! Kevin Durant said I’m going to be good!”
Then Giannis fell into a slump. The Bucks suffered a bad loss to the hot-shooting Raptors. Giannis managed a solid line of eleven points and seven rebounds but got a technical foul in the third. Drew reminded him to be patient. He wasn’t going to play well every night; he had to come to terms with that.
But Giannis couldn’t. He was frustrated with himself. He wasn’t playing as much as he would have liked. So he did the only thing he knew to do, the thing he did most nights: head to the gym. Take his frustration out on the rim. Shoot and shoot and shoot until his arms felt like jelly.
The Cousins Center was his refuge at night. Deep into the morning too. “I’d see him in there in the middle of the night,” Sergo says.
The court was comforting. Giannis would often tell Oppenheimer, in all seriousness, “I could sleep here.” And sometimes he did. Just like he had back in Sepolia. Shutting his eyes, shutting out his troubles.
Whenever he’d finish his workout, he made sure to clean up all the water bottles around the Cousins Center court, even ones he had not left behind. Trash he hadn’t left either. He always did things like that; telling the staff that he would empty out his own ice bucket, he would wrap his own ice bags. He didn’t want anyone to feel obligated to wait on him, pick up after him.
So on those lonely nights, back in the gym by himself, he’d take one last look at the court, making sure nothing was left on the ground, before turning off the lights.
What if we all went to sleep and woke up and we were back where we started?
CHAPTER 7
HOPE
Around midnight, after players had left the Cousins Center practice facility, Sergo, the longtime Bucks staffer, would grab a ball and shoot. He loves heavy-metal music, so one night he blasted Metallica.
Suddenly, a frail old man walked onto the court. “Can you turn that down!” the man asked Sergo. Turned out, the man was a priest. The Cousins Center was located in the back of the offices for the Catholic Archdiocese of Milwaukee. Every day, a group of ten to twelve priests would play basketball before Bucks players arrived for practice, a routine dating back to the mid-1980s.
By Giannis’s rookie year, some of the priests were fifty, sixty, seventy, even eighty years old, defending hard, crashing into the lane, sporting bright-colored shirts, official NBA headbands, and elbow pads. Sometimes they’d play shirts versus skins, not caring who was watching.
They lived for these games. Sometimes three-on-three, sometimes even five-on-five, full court, for about an hour. “Play could get intense,” remembers one priest, Rick Stoffel. “We could have some arguments about ‘You fouled me!’ ‘No way that was a foul!’”
They’d slap hands, point to the passer on the assist. Every possession mattered. The best shooter was a priest named Jerry Brittain. He was also known for having the boniest elbows—he could knock someone out with them. “I’m not particularly big. I’m not particularly well coordinated, so I was an in-your-face defensive guy. Right up against you,” says Brittain, who still plays every day now at eighty-four.
Hammond was friendly with the priests, giving them Bucks T-shirts. Once, Hammond asked the priests to stand together for a photo.
“Why?” one priest asked.
“I’m going to post it in the Bucks locker room,” Hammond said, according to Stoffel, “and let our players know that these are the people waiting in the wings to take their places if they don’t play up to standard.”
If the Bucks were practicing in the morning, the priests would stand in the doorway, looking at the players as if to say, “It’s time to get off the court. We’ve got the court now.” There was a mutual understanding, though, that if a Bucks player wanted to shoot, the priests had to leave. Not with Giannis, though. He respected elders, especially clergy, as his mom had taught him. “When Giannis would come out,” Sergo says, “he didn’t say to the priests, ‘Get out of here.’”
Since these interactions usually happened during the day, Sergo found it odd to see a priest in the gym so late at night. Sergo apologized profusely to the priest and promised to turn Metallica down. Well, sort of: “I kept the music at a numbing level. Not a mind-numbing level.”
That was life for the small-market franchise: it didn’t exactly have state-of-the-art facilities like other NBA teams. Its gym, well, its church with a gym, had an old swimming pool the nuns would often use, one time making a couple of Bucks players wait to do pool rehab for fifteen minutes until they finished their own swim.
Sometimes former Marquette coach Rick Majerus would swim there. Naked. Scott Williams, the assistant coach, “saw his big white ass doing laps in the pool” and asked him to put on shorts. “Hey, man,” Majerus said, “you’re just lucky I wasn’t doing the backstroke.”
The court wasn’t slippery, but it wasn’t polished either. It was functional. Fine. Even with the occasional roof leak. Players would huddle at half-court, and a few drops would trickle down on someone’s head. Staffers would have to place small plastic trash cans strategically on the court to catch the water while players ran up and down in drills. One leak had disastrous consequences, as Middleton injured his hamstring while slipping on a wet spot.
“The place looked like it had been there since the forties,” Ridnour says. Anyone could walk in. There was little security, except for a mannequin named Art, dressed like a policeman, sitting at the fron
t window. Art looked terrifyingly real. He’d scare players who hadn’t been there before.
It was eerie. One light would flicker on and off. Hallways were dark and narrow, including a tunnel that was no more than five feet high; one had to practically double over to get through. The ventilation system hadn’t been used in years, so any noise, from the wind outside to a door creaking open, could be heard. Some players thought the place was haunted. They’d hear a door suddenly swing open when no one else was around.
“It was creepy. It was a really weird place,” Wolters says. “And priests playing at lunchtime? Like, what? It’s the NBA, and we have priests playing there!”
The Bucks didn’t operate like most modern NBA franchises. It was more like a mom-and-pop shop, with one of the smallest staffs in the league. It has always been like that. Sharpshooter Jon McGlocklin, who had scored the first-ever basket in Bucks history in 1968 with a baseline jumper against the Chicago Bulls, used to have to find high school gyms to work out at during off-seasons. “We didn’t have anything,” says McGlocklin, who went on to become the Bucks color analyst from 1976 to 2018.
He made $10,000 a year as a rookie. He negotiated his third NBA season contract in a phone booth in Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. The Bucks still flew charter, as did every other NBA team. He could barely fit his six-foot-five frame in the showers on the road, had to sleep crossways in order to fit in the beds. Only one thing mattered: “It wasn’t about money, because we didn’t have any money,” McGlocklin says. “It was just about winning a championship.”
John Steinmiller, Bucks executive vice president of operations, who has been with the organization for more than fifty years, was the lone publicity department contact for five years in the 1970s. There were only ten full-time staffers in the front office. Every ticket had to be dealt with by hand.
The Bucks were still making the most of what little they had when Giannis joined in 2013. There were hardly any sales staffers. So few people attended games that ticket representatives would secretly hand out free tickets to staffers’ family members.
The Bucks’ main challenge, it was argued, was Kohl’s unofficial mandate: “Just be competitive. Just get to the playoffs.”
Kohl was a short, bald, soft-spoken man. He never married. He was extremely wealthy but preferred to buy his suits off the rack and his reading glasses from Walgreens. He drove a modest early-2000s Buick sedan. When he ran his family’s grocery stores in the 1960s and 1970s, he sometimes bagged groceries when lines were too long.
He never wasted words. Buying the Bucks for $18 million in 1985, he felt that a small-market team needed to operate frugally to avoid financial collapse. So for years, the Bucks ambled along, clearing a low bar, never aiming to set it higher.
“Nobody in the organization ever talked about winning a championship,” says a former Bucks employee. “Every decision made on the business side and basketball side was kind of in survival mode. It gave you short-term buzz, but there was no view of ultimately building a championship franchise.”
The Bucks had the league’s lowest average attendance in 2013–2014, Giannis’s rookie year. There were so few fans walking around the city wearing team gear at the time that marketing staffers, in hopes of luring fans to games, would walk around the city and hand out wooden tokens that could be redeemed at the Bradley Center. “I’m proud of and embarrassed by this at the same time,” says Theodore Loehrke, former Bucks senior vice president and chief revenue officer. “That’s how dire the state of Bucks fandom was at the time.”
It was frustrating supporting a franchise that often traded away promising young players, not wanting to make big splashy moves to land superstars in order to improve. There were talented players, like Michael Redd and Brandon Jennings, but there were so many head-scratching moves it was hard to feel confident the team could land talent who might… stay.
Trading away superstar Ray Allen is a wound that still hurts Bucks fans—a wound that made losing in game 7 of the Eastern Conference Finals in 2001, and dissolving the Big Three of Allen, Robinson, and Cassell, even more painful.
The draft was equally dispiriting. Dan Bilsky, a Milwaukee native and die-hard Bucks fan, threw his remote control at his TV, shattering the device, during the 1998 draft, when the Mavericks selected Robert “Tractor” Traylor and traded him to the Bucks in exchange for Dirk Nowitzki and Pat Garrity. Bilsky was furious the Bucks didn’t select Paul Pierce. “I stormed upstairs and out of my house,” Bilsky says. The draft has always had a sad aftertaste for Bilsky, who remembers experiencing the Bucks’ first lottery pick of his lifetime, when the Bucks picked Todd Fitzgerald Day at number 8 in 1992. When Day was drafted, cameras picked up his reaction, which was one of disappointment. “Oh, man. Milwaukee. Damn,” Day appeared to have said.
It didn’t help that the Bradley Center, where the team played, resembled an old warehouse, with its drab exterior and concrete walls. It looked like it was on the verge of falling apart, though it was built in 1988. The roof leaked, and the occasional cockroach could be spotted around the locker room and hallways. It was freezing inside because there was ice underneath the court; the arena had been built to lure a hockey team. But fans could sit courtside for fifteen dollars.
“It was an old, dilapidated arena, but it was our old, dilapidated arena,” says Doug Russell, sportscaster at Milwaukee’s 97.3 the Game and 1130 WISN.
Workers would put the basketball court over the ice instead of letting the ice break down and refreezing it. One 2013 preseason game in particular, against the Raptors, the surface of the court was so slick from the ice below that players slipped all over the court. Referees had to cancel the game with 5:58 left in the first quarter, the score 14–9. “Welcome to the circus,” one longtime staffer remembers telling a new intern.
The arena was so cold that walking from the bus to the court and into the locker room was “the walk from hell,” Sergo says. One game, it was so frigid that Bucks staffers began handing out hot chocolate and coffee to fans, informally calling it “The Hot Chocolate Game.”
The Bucks didn’t have an indoor parking garage, so staffers would start players’ cars in the fourth quarter so they’d be warm when players came out. However, on multiple occasions, players who were not as fastidious about maintaining their vehicles would pull up with the gas gauge pointing to empty, and the cars would run out of gas before the game would come to an end.
Giannis became accustomed to the cold. He would always be the first one at shootaround, sounding chipper. His breath would be visible as he shouted to his teammates, “Morning! I’m making all my shots today! I’m ready!” Despite the cold, coming from where Giannis came from, the Bradley Center was perfect. A dream come true.
* * *
The Bucks’ lack of a modern NBA arena, one that could attract thousands of fans, stood at the heart of the franchise’s biggest challenge: whether or not it could survive in Milwaukee. The threat of leaving was omnipresent, something Wisconsinites were always forced to reckon with. Especially heading into Giannis’s rookie season.
He arrived at a seminal moment, when the team needed a new arena if it was going to stay in the city. “We have to find a way, and we will find a way,” Kohl said at a press conference before the 2013 season, regarding finding a new facility. “The question is when and how.” Kohl acknowledged how urgent the matter was for the organization to catch up to its counterparts: “Milwaukee and Wisconsin need a twenty-first-century sports-and-entertainment complex.”
But as the 2013–2014 Bucks flatlined into a franchise-worst record, the threat of leaving the city seemed more pressing. Something needed to change. Milwaukee needed a savior who could transform the team into something fans could be proud of again. Abdul-Jabbar was Milwaukee’s last great hope. And then he left. To a bigger city, to the Los Angeles Lakers, after demanding a trade.
Leaving, leaving, leaving.
It set a precedent that would be felt for decades to come: that stars don’t belong in M
ilwaukee. They might start there, but they will eventually leave. “Milwaukee is a city that’s had its soul snatched a lot of times,” says Myron Medcalf of ESPN, a Milwaukee native. “It’s like, we’ll produce you, but you’ll never claim us years from now.”
“As a fan,” Medcalf says, “you felt like you were less than. You weren’t Los Angeles, you weren’t New York, and you weren’t Chicago with this young dude named Michael Jordan. It was just like, ‘Nobody’s going to want to come here. And if they do, they definitely don’t want to stay here.’”
To love the Bucks was to contend with a decades-old wound of being abandoned. First in basketball, when the then Milwaukee Hawks left for Saint Louis after playing four seasons in Milwaukee from 1951 to 1955. Then in baseball, when the then Milwaukee Braves left for Atlanta in 1966, just over a decade removed from long lines of snake dancers whirling down Wisconsin Avenue celebrating the arrival of the team in 1953, and even a World Series title in 1957.
That left a hole in the heart of Wisconsinites. Many called the owners who took the team to Atlanta “carpetbaggers.” Fans felt rejected and betrayed, insecure and heartbroken. Then Milwaukee mayor Henry Maier said that the loss felt like a “black eye.” It was, in the words of Bud Selig, who, four years later, brought the Brewers to Milwaukee, “a terrible, terrible trauma.”
But watching Giannis fly up and down the floor all those decades later was to feel something other than trauma. For Milwaukee basketball fans who have continued to love its team through years of agony, Giannis represented possibility. Hope. Excitement. He wasn’t yet the Messiah, not even close to the player Abdul-Jabbar was, but the fantasy of what Giannis could become was tantalizing. To watch him was to wonder, Could this goofy, nearly seven-foot wunderkind from Greece rescue this small-market city from oblivion?
* * *
Around that time, an online group called Save Our Bucks was created by a longtime fan and season ticket holder who chose to remain anonymous under the Twitter account @Paulpressey25. The group was born out of a Bucks forum on RealGM.com and included four other key members: Paul Henning, Kurt Leitinger, Paul Cousins, and Engel Martin. They loved the Bucks. They rallied for ownership change after years of mediocrity under Kohl. “The Bucks were always a kind of running joke after a while,” says Henning, a Milwaukee native. Henning hated seeing how far his beloved franchise had fallen since his childhood, when he’d watch Moncrief, his favorite player, encapsulate everything the city was: hard-nosed, hardworking.