Giannis

by Mirin Fader

  “MVP! MVP! MVP!” the crowd chanted, though it was little solace to Giannis, who had poured all his pain, all his anger, onto the floor. And when the buzzer sounded, he was empty again. Hurting again. Basketball was only a refuge for so long.

  He returned to the locker room and picked up a Sharpie, scribbling on the game ball, “This is for Daddy. We got a win tonight.”

  His dad was with him. In his sneakers, in his jersey. In his locker, his water bottle. Giannis sat back in his chair, giant ice bags attached to his knees, and stared blankly ahead. His teammates sensed he wanted to be left alone. Giannis looked exhausted, almost in a daze, staring at the ground. It was lonely, having a career night without the person who would have loved to see it.

  * * *

  Giannis always wanted a big family. Kids running around. Thanasis always imagined all the brothers having big families too. All in a big living room—kids left and right, wives, Veronica—enjoying the holidays there together. And though Charles would not be there, they’d feel he was there, with Veronica holding everyone together.

  When Giannis was interviewed for 60 Minutes about a month or so after Charles’s death, he told host Steve Kroft that he wanted to raise humble kids, in the way that Charles had raised him and his brothers. He told Kroft he wanted eight kids. Kroft asked him why he wanted eight—then asked, jokingly, if he wanted to go for ten kids so they could have enough to play five-on-five. Giannis laughed. “I just want as much as possible,” he told Kroft. “If my girlfriend accepts—I don’t know if she wants eight kids. But that’s what I want.”

  “Well, she knows now,” Kroft said.

  “She knows. Probably, she’s gonna leave me. She’s like, ‘Uh-uh. I’m not having eight kids with you.’”

  Kroft tried to ask him about his dad’s death, but Giannis just wasn’t able to talk about it. “He was really sad,” Kroft says, “but he talked about it as if it was something in the past.” Kroft remembers Giannis as being upbeat, kind. He had a great sense of humor. “There is something really magnetic about him,” Kroft says.

  It was Giannis’s first time really opening up to someone in the media. Allowing cameras to be around his family for that long. Giannis hadn’t heard of 60 Minutes before. He (and his agents) usually turned down requests.

  Giannis was a bit hesitant to open up at first. He didn’t talk much about how, or why, his family came to Greece in the first place. It was almost like he was protecting something. He wanted to keep boundaries elsewhere too. “He was a little self-conscious about his driving,” says Draggan Mihailovich, a producer of the segment. Giannis didn’t want them to film him inside his car. They settled on a clip of him pulling out of his driveway.

  But once Kroft and Mihailovich told him the film crew had gone to Greece to see his old neighborhood, Giannis loosened a bit. “You went to Greece!” he said, beaming. Suddenly he couldn’t stop talking, wanting to know where they’d gone, what they thought of Sepolia. They showed him B-roll of the old Filathlitikos gym. He saw his old coach, Takis Zivas. “Look at him!” Giannis said. “He’s still in his old shoes!”

  Something about seeing where he came from—rather than talking about it—allowed Giannis to let them into his sacred space: the gym. He invited them to watch him work out at ten o’clock at night. Giannis wouldn’t skip his workout, insisting he couldn’t let anything—not even 60 Minutes—interfere with his routine. That was because, as he’d reveal in the aired segment, in a rare moment of vulnerability, “I’m really scared of failing.”

  * * *

  About midway through the season, Giannis had to face a different kind of loss: Kidd was fired in January 2018. The Bucks simply underperformed, failing to move into the upper echelon of the East and beyond. They had been inconsistent. Some nights they looked amazing, other nights terrible. The defense was uninspiring, the offense paltry, the record simply not good enough at 23–22.

  The firing seemed inevitable, as some players were frustrated with Kidd’s harsh, old-school coaching style and discouraged by his tendency to blame the Bucks’ youth for the team’s problems, often pointing the finger at players rather than himself. One Bucks source at the time claimed—with more than a little understatement—that he was “driving the team a bit hard.” Even Giannis didn’t always see eye to eye with Kidd’s methods.

  Giannis had reportedly called Kidd before the Bucks had notified him of his firing and tried to save Kidd’s job. However, Giannis was uncomfortable that Kidd had revealed this private conversation to the media.

  It was tough for Giannis, dealing with a coach being fired again. But not just any coach—a coach who believed in him. Trusted him. Kidd was the first to put the ball in Giannis’s hands and say, “You can be a point guard.” He was the first coach to think Giannis could be more than an all-star someday; he could be a superstar, a franchise player. In many ways, Kidd helped Giannis grow up. See his own powers. But that was the business. Nothing Giannis could do would change the situation.

  Joe Prunty, the Bucks lead assistant coach, took over as interim coach for the remainder of the season. “It was tough,” Prunty says. “There’s a personal side to it. When it happened, it was ‘All right, we have to regroup. This happened, but we have a job to do.’ But obviously it was a big change.”

  Giannis continued to thrive, keeping defenses on their toes despite his lack of a jump shot. In February 2018, he had caught an alley-oop from Middleton, leaped over six-foot-five Tim Hardaway Jr. for a dunk that went viral. He finished second in all-star votes behind LeBron, and he was named a starter for the 2018 all-star game. “It’s over my imagination,” Giannis said during All-Star Weekend in Los Angeles. “I always had a feeling maybe I can make it in the NBA, but I never thought I was going to be 23 years old, be in my second time in the All Star, having a chance to win the MVP, carrying a team on my back. That’s over my imagination.”

  He played hard during his all-star team’s practice, surprising Mike D’Antoni, his coach for the game. Practices weren’t really supposed to be practices. “It’s a glorified photo op,” says D’Antoni, now an assistant coach with the Nets. “And Giannis coming in, stretching, getting ready for practice, while other guys are definitely on vacation, they’re like, ‘Oh my gosh. This guy is serious.’

  “Being different is sometimes hard,” D’Antoni says, “but he was different in a good way. You could just tell his desire to be great.”

  He didn’t stop pushing himself as the Bucks struggled over the next month, falling to eighth in the East. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel wrote, “This team has had more ups and downs than a fifth-grade class at a trampoline park.”

  * * *

  Meanwhile, off the court, Giannis and Mariah were getting closer. Giannis knew she wanted a dog—a goldendoodle, specifically. He wanted to surprise her with one, but there was only one breeder in Wisconsin that had the exact goldendoodle she wanted. And there was another problem: the breeder was about four hours upstate, in Stanley, Wisconsin. Given the Bucks’ demanding schedule, he didn’t have any time to drive and get the dog.

  He asked Bucks management for help, who then tasked Chris Rodriguez, a basketball operations intern at the time, with the assignment. It would be the most nerve-racking one in his two-year apprenticeship with the team from 2017 to 2019. Rodriguez didn’t tell his fellow interns about the assignment, fearing word could spread and ruin Giannis’s surprise.

  The plan was to leave at ten in the morning on that day, April 9, pick up the puppy, then arrive by game time so Giannis could give Mariah the puppy after the game.

  Rodriguez had never been that far upstate. “All I saw were cows and fields and horses,” Rodriguez says. He arrived at the breeder but was told the goldendoodle was actually at another location. Trying to find the second place, he got lost. His GPS stopped working as he drove into an even more rural area. He pulled into a farm’s driveway, calling his mom, his friends, asking them to help with directions.

  He started stressing out as h
is service grew even more faint. The stakes were high: What if he got lost? And worse, what if he let down one of the best players in the NBA? Rodriguez kept driving, finally finding the breeder about forty minutes later. “It was the most Amish-looking place you have ever seen,” Rodriguez says. “They were wearing bonnets.”

  He tucked the puppy into his back seat, but she was so hyper she kept trying to squirm out of the box she was in, and she peed and pooped all over the box. The stench was so unbearable Rodriguez needed to roll down his window, but he feared she’d jump out of the car. He settled on leaving the window halfway down as he tried to calm the puppy. “It’s OK. We’re almost there,” he said to her as if she could understand. “We’ll be there soon.”

  Arriving back at the Bucks arena, he had to cover his nose, the car smelled so terrible. The puppy smelled so terrible. Well, at least we made it, he thought. After the game, he spotted Giannis and handed over the puppy.

  “Oh my god,” Giannis said, covering his nose. “She smells so bad!”

  “Ah, yeah,” Rodriguez said sheepishly. “Sorry. That’s what I’ve dealt with the past eight and a half hours.”

  Giannis gave him a pair of Nikes and a nice tip, even though players aren’t necessarily allowed to do so. That was huge for the intern: “We make nothing.”

  Giannis then surprised Mariah with the puppy; she melted at the sight of the fluffy little bundle. They named the puppy Mila. She was theirs.

  * * *

  The Bucks faced the Celtics in the first round, hoping to finally break through. They hadn’t won a playoff series since George Karl and the Big Three in 2001. But the Bucks quickly found themselves down 0–2 to Boston to begin the series.

  Milwaukee bounced back to win the next two games to even the series at 2–2, but they lost game 5 and faced elimination. Again. Giannis was limited to sixteen points on ten shots in that game, looking exhausted. He took responsibility afterward, saying that he had to be more aggressive.

  Rebounding from his lackluster game 5, he showed up big, helping win game 6 and forcing a game 7. He gave everything, playing forty minutes a game, trying to physically will his team to victory, but it wasn’t enough. He didn’t have the support. The Bucks looked young and inexperienced, and the Celtics advanced to play the 76ers.

  Pushing the series to seven games was a big milestone, and so was finishing above .500 in back-to-back seasons for the first time since 2001, but the season was largely a disappointment—bouncing out of the first round again. Failing to live up to expectations again. Giannis thought about game 7 all summer. So did his teammates.

  “We weren’t refined,” Brogdon says. “We had a bunch of guys that were talented, but we didn’t really have a direction on how to play together.”

  The clock was ticking to figure that out, to prove that the team could contend for a championship with Giannis in his prime, as the team had three years before Giannis could become an unrestricted free agent. “Fail,” the Washington Post wrote at the time, “and it might take another 40 years to get another player of his talent level to join the franchise.”

  The Bucks hired a new coach, Mike Budenholzer, from the Hawks, to help turn things around in the postseason, to break the curse of three first-round exits over the last four seasons. His first task would be getting Giannis more support and maximizing his gifts.

  Giannis had leaped into MVP consideration. Winning the award had been a goal of his. But when it didn’t happen, Thanasis sensed his brother’s disappointment. “I know you played like the MVP. I know you was chasing it,” Thanasis told him. “At the end of the day, you’re the MVP of life.” Giannis realized he had gone the distance to make sure his family was OK. More than OK. He was taking care of his brothers, his mom, his girlfriend. His youngest brother was receiving a private school education. Thanasis was right.

  “It doesn’t matter if you didn’t get it,” Thanasis said.

  Giannis worked harder than ever, still with that same goal of winning MVP. He had the chance to work out with his idol, Kobe, that summer. Giannis prepared question after question, writing them down in his notebook to bring with him. He showed up for the 2:30 p.m. workout at 11:00 a.m., getting shots up and treatment before Kobe even walked in. He wanted to show Kobe he wasn’t there to mess around. He wasn’t there for a social media post. He really wanted to learn. Listen, improve. And he took pride in beating Kobe to the gym by more than three hours.

  After the two shot jumper after jumper—350 to 400 shots, all the same shots, making 20 at one spot—Giannis was a bit shy about asking Kobe so many questions, telling him he didn’t want it to feel like an interview.

  “No, no, ask me whatever,” Kobe said.

  “Are you sure?”

  Kobe nodded. Giannis opened his notebook and began asking how to prepare, how to constantly improve. Kobe told him that day that he had to think outside the box. “You always gotta be a kid,” Kobe said.

  “Be a kid?” Giannis said. “What do you mean?” This whole time, Giannis was trying to show that he was big and strong. Mature. A man. A mean man, at that.

  “No, what I mean is, a kid uses fantasy. You can see a kid being creative, playing with two rocks and playing around with them. When you’re a kid, you always wanna learn. You ask questions: Why do I do this? Why am I sitting in the passenger seat? Why am I going to school today? You’re always asking questions. Be a kid.”

  That stayed with Giannis. He told his brothers immediately after what had happened. Kostas especially soaked it up, as he had just been drafted with the sixtieth and final pick by the 76ers in the 2018 NBA draft and was immediately traded to the Mavericks. Alex became a team captain at Dominican, heading into his junior year, and was starting to gain the attention of college and NBA scouts.

  The brothers continued to go back and forth to Greece, where Giannis was now considered a hometown star. An icon in his home country. Kids idolized him. Wore his jersey. Greeks constantly affirmed their love for him. How proud they were of him. His home court, where he spent all those years playing outside growing up, was dedicated to him. The Athens-based artist Same84 painted a giant mural of Giannis on the court. The length of his body covers the space, his green Bucks jersey accented by a blue background. Another mural of Giannis leaping into the air, cocking the ball back behind him as if about to dunk, was painted on a tall cream-colored apartment building next to the court, above a car wash.

  “For Greece, Giannis is basketball,” says Nick Calathes, the Greek star and Giannis’s national-team teammate. “There’s going to be a movie about it one day. He came from nothing. He hasn’t changed from then to now.”

  Many Greek Americans identified with him too, given that he had matured in America but didn’t leave his culture behind. Giannis constantly talked about how much he loved Greece.

  “It’s so much more than ‘Local kid makes good,’” says Katy Kostakis, a fan who grew up near Boston but whose aunts and other family members live in Sepolia. She has been to Greece many times. “It’s that him and his entire family made it. It just gives us such pride.”

  And hope. Especially for Black Greeks who grew up in similar circumstances.

  Favor Ukpebor, the young Black Greek basketball player who knew the Antetokounmpos growing up, started playing the same year Giannis was drafted. “After Giannis got drafted, more Afro-Greeks believed they could have a chance to play at the highest level of basketball.” Including him. “He made a huge impact on me,” Ukpebor says. “Almost every kid my age or younger started playing basketball because of Giannis. It was very rare to see a Black Greek kid go to the NBA.”

  But there are hundreds of Black Greek kids growing up today who may never receive the opportunities Giannis did. Whose citizenship will not be fast-tracked, the way Giannis’s was. These kids are not embraced, affirmed, the way Giannis is now. The sad truth is, as beloved as Giannis is, he is still a target of racism in his home country.

  CHAPTER 12

  IDENTITY

&nbs
p; About a month before Charles’s death, Giannis’s childhood court in Sepolia, the one with his mural painted across the surface, was vandalized with fascist and Neo-Nazi Golden Dawn symbols: a circle inscribed with a cross, painted in white over the portrait of Giannis’s face. It was large enough to be seen through the fence surrounding the court.

  The vandalism may have been in part triggered by Giannis’s decision not to play for the Greek national team earlier that summer in the 2017 EuroBasket tournament because of a knee injury. The Greek Basketball Federation condemned Giannis’s decision and accused him of lying about the injury, claiming there was nothing wrong with his knee and that the decision was part of a larger conspiracy by the Bucks and the NBA to keep Giannis from playing for Greece, despite the fact that Giannis had played for the national team for three straight years.

  “[This was] an organized and well-staged plan,” the Greek federation said in a statement. Then Takis Tsagronis, the federation’s general secretary, commented: “What the Bucks claim is not the reality; something else is happening.”

  Giannis denied the claims. Sitting out was one of the hardest decisions he had ever had to make as a professional athlete to that point. It was the biggest disappointment of his career, he said. Playing for Greece was his dream long before he even knew of the NBA.

  Local resentment reemerged later that winter, when Giannis sang the Greek national anthem in Cleveland along with Greek Americans who had come to watch the Bucks against the Cavs. “Enough with the black guy who pretends to be Greek,” wrote Evangelos Markopoulos, a Greek-born professor working in London at the time, in a public Facebook post that linked to the video of Giannis singing. He then referenced the EuroBasket tournament: “Enough is enough. We won’t forget what happened in the summer. He didn’t give a fuck about any of us, or the national team, or our flag.”

  By this point, in late 2017, several Golden Dawn members, including Michaloliakos, the party’s leader, had been arrested in the aftermath of the 2013 murder of Pavlos Fyssas, the local hip-hop artist. Four other members of parliament and at least fifteen other people were also arrested in the police crackdown that began that year. Charges included membership in a criminal organization, murder, racist violence, and weapons possession. One Golden Dawn member shouted, “Nothing will bend us! Long live Greece!” as he was arrested.