Giannis

by Mirin Fader

  The trial was thought to be the biggest case against fascism in Europe since former Nazi leaders were prosecuted in Nuremberg in 1945. That didn’t, however, stop Golden Dawn from winning seventeen seats in an election earlier in January 2015, and it didn’t stop sympathizers from intimidating immigrants, posting racist slurs on social media, or desecrating Giannis’s court in Sepolia. The backlash wasn’t surprising, given that Giannis embodied everything Golden Dawn disdained: diversity, immigration, Blackness.

  * * *

  Even when Golden Dawn had targeted Giannis as a rookie, calling him a chimpanzee, Giannis continued to profess his love for Greece. In January 2017, the same year his court was vandalized, he refused to sign a Greek flag handed to him by a fan in America after playing the Knicks because he felt it would be disrespectful to write on the sacred flag.

  He told reporters at the 2017 all-star game that he’d rather win an international gold medal than an NBA MVP award or title because it would be more meaningful to him, because it would mean he would be representing an entire country. His country. “Whatever I do,” Giannis said that day, “I try to make all Greeks proud.”

  He completed his three-month mandatory military service, along with Thanasis, the summer before, in 2016. He daydreamed about winning an NBA championship and celebrating with his Bucks teammates by taking them to Mykonos, one of his favorite places, imagining them smoking cigars on the island.

  He regularly traveled back and forth between the United States and Greece, embracing his full identity: his Greek side and his Nigerian side. He has long been accustomed to people seeing only one side of him. When he was a child, some Greeks doubted that he was Greek because he was Black. Then as an adult, in America, he encountered the opposite, with some people telling him, “You’re not African. You’re Greek. You’re the Greek Freak.”

  Nikos Zisis, his national-team teammate, remembers how some people had said Giannis shouldn’t play for the Greek national team back in 2014 because, in their words, “he’s not Greek.” That always bothered Zisis, not just because he knows the pride Giannis feels for Greece but because it is a fact that he was born in Greece. Went to Greek schools, Greek churches. Christmas caroled to his heart’s content in Greek coffee shops. “He represents with the best way possible as a Greek citizen,” Zisis says.

  Giannis regularly gave back to his old neighborhood in Sepolia, with food and charity, not forgetting where he came from. Yet to some Greeks, no matter how much he inspired or gave, ascended and accumulated, he would never truly be Greek. They would only see him as Black.

  Adonis Georgiadis, who currently serves as the country’s minister of development and vice president of the New Democracy party, and who is one of the country’s most powerful right-wing politicians, spoke sarcastically about Giannis on TV in 2018, deliberately mispronouncing his name: “Akenotoumbo, Akenotoumbo… Doesn’t he play as a Greek? Don’t they say he is Greek? He has Greek nationality. The guy was born somewhere in Africa.”

  A mural of Giannis, located in the Palaio Faliro Municipality outside Athens, was also vandalized with Nazi symbols. Giannis, painted in his Bucks uniform, flexing his muscles and roaring, was tagged with swastikas and the letters SS on his right arm in black paint. His head was covered in graffiti too. “We have a far-right element, enormous racist element in our society,” says Nikos Papadojannis, the Greek journalist. “And that stems from the fact that this society was never really diverse.”

  Greece was under foreign occupation for much of its history, mostly under Turkish rule. And historically, most Greeks are, and have been, white. Some Greeks have treated even white non-Greek immigrants—from countries like Bulgaria and Albania—with disdain, in addition to the much more vulgar, and violent, disdain for immigrants of color.

  In 2017, hate crimes had more than doubled from the year before. In 2018, young Greeks beat and stabbed Pakistani migrant workers. A Jewish memorial was also desecrated. Krypteia, a Neo-Nazi group, set fire to the Afghan Community Center in Athens. Many Muslims were fearful, especially Muslim women, some of whom had their hijabs pulled off.

  That same year, Golden Dawn attacked a social center for immigrants near Piraeus. Six men dressed in black, wearing motorcycle helmets and holding crowbars and torches, shouted, “Today you are going to die! You can’t have this place in Piraeus!”

  Eleftheria Tompatzoglou, a lawyer representing the family of Pavlos Fyssas, the Greek rapper killed by Golden Dawn in 2013, was inside the center and was one of the victims. She’d need seven stitches for a scalp wound after the attack. As she touched the blood at the back of her head, she heard the men shout, “Blood, Honour, Golden Dawn!”

  Meanwhile, Giannis was becoming a global phenomenon. A Greek phenomenon. A symbol of hope around the world. And the more he rose, the more some Greeks denied the racism that he encountered. That he still encounters.

  “When they saw the success of Giannis, they forgot everything,” says Tzikas, the Kivotos Café owner. “Racism is global, but we don’t see that we have the problem, the white people. It’s very bad.”

  When talking about how much they love Giannis, some Greeks fail to remember the racist insults hurled at him at Trikala back when he was an NBA prospect. The intimidating presence of Golden Dawn. The glances of customers at Kivotos Café, watching Tzikas give the Antetokounmpos an apple every morning.

  Why are you giving to the little Black kids?

  Zisis has noticed the shift in the way people talk about Giannis since his time on the national team. The revisionist history that causes people to deify Giannis. “Now, it’s easy to be fond of Giannis. It’s very easy,” Zisis says. “But back then, there were many people that weren’t accepting him. And there still are.”

  That’s the less-talked-about part of Giannis’s story, one swept under the rug: “Not even one percent of Greek society dislikes him or comments anything bad about him being Black,” says Trigas, the former U-18 Panathinaikos assistant coach. “Maybe [now] everybody forgets about his black skin because you’re watching his dunks.”

  * * *

  One afternoon early in his rookie year, back in 2013, when Giannis was getting acclimated to Milwaukee, teammate Caron Butler pulled him to the side and explained what it meant to be Black in America. Butler told him not to wear a hooded sweatshirt because of the way Black boys and Black men can be racially profiled—or even assaulted or killed.

  The year before, in 2012, Trayvon Martin, an unarmed seventeen-year-old Black high school student, was shot and killed by George Zimmerman, a twenty-eight-year-old white and Hispanic man. Butler explained mass incarceration to Giannis too. Wisconsin had the highest percentage of incarcerated Black men in the country, and more than half of all Black men in their thirties and forties in Milwaukee had been incarcerated at some point in their lives, according to a 2013 study from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee.

  Butler, who is from Racine, Wisconsin, wanted Giannis to be alert. “I wanted him to have a pulse on everything,” Butler says. There was much for Giannis to learn, such as the fact that Milwaukee had the highest rate of segregation between Blacks and whites of the 102 largest metropolitan cities in the country, according to the 2010 national census.

  Even Peter Feigin, Bucks president, in 2016 told the Rotary Club of Madison that Milwaukee was “the most segregated, racist place I’ve ever experienced.”

  That segregation still manifests itself in nearly every facet of society, including eviction rates. In a city of fewer than 105,500 renter households, Milwaukee landlords evict roughly sixteen thousand adults and children every year, many of them Black people, especially Black women. In a typical month in a Milwaukee eviction court, three in four people are Black, and three in four of those people are women. Black women make up 9 percent of Milwaukee’s population and 30 percent of evicted tenants.

  Myron Medcalf, the Milwaukee native who works for ESPN, whose childhood home was on Twenty-Sixth and Hampton Street, remembers an increase in violence happ
ening in the city in the late 1980s. He had felt safe growing up, but in 1988, a neighbor named Michael was jumped for his Starter jacket. He nearly died, stuck in a coma for two months. Every night, the local news broadcast updates on Michael’s condition. “I just kept thinking that was Chicago. Or some other place. That wasn’t Milwaukee,” Medcalf says.

  But it was. And Black men in particular would be targeted. Killed. Medcalf, who is Black, went to the funerals of seven teenagers before he was seventeen, including that of his fifteen-year-old cousin. Medcalf remembers every phone call. Each body he saw, like the one laid out in front of his church, chalk surrounding the victim’s figure.

  “Milwaukee swallowed up a lot of people,” Medcalf says. “There are educational challenges, if you look like me, specifically. It’s a city that can breed a sense of despair, a sense of ‘This is as good as it gets.’ It’s a place where people don’t necessarily see a lot of folks achieve their dreams.”

  Giannis was absorbing so much so quickly. He would listen to his Black teammates talk about their experiences of racism in Milwaukee, like six-foot-nine John Henson. Henson went to a jeweler to browse watches in 2015. When he rang the doorbell, an employee locked the door and told him to go away. They wouldn’t let him in and hurried to the back of the store. Police were dispatched.

  Jabari Parker felt he was racially profiled when he was pulled over in his car numerous times, driving through the Milwaukee suburb where he lived. Another teammate, Josh Powell, once went with two of his friends to a Milwaukee restaurant, where a waiter refused to serve them and told them to leave. And later, Sterling Brown, another teammate, was arrested by Milwaukee police officers, who tased, tackled, and stepped on him after a minor parking violation. Brown brought a civil rights lawsuit in federal court for excessive force, eventually settling with the City of Milwaukee for $750,000 in 2020.

  America was the first place where Giannis saw a Black man driving a nice car. It shocked him. What’s going on here? he thought to himself, watching it drive past him. It caused him to reflect: Does my country [Greece] give people of color enough opportunity?

  Many Black Greeks, including those who knew him as a child, were still contending with that question. Still living in Greece, seeking papers, not able to have the same opportunities as Giannis.

  There was a brief glimmer of hope for migrants in Greece in 2015, when the leftist party Syriza was in power and the landmark Law 4332 was passed, which gave children of immigrants born and/or raised in Greece the right to Greek citizenship. But the law was undercut in 2020 when the alt-right anti-immigrant New Democracy party imposed new hurdles, including difficult exams about Greek life, language, and culture, effectively denying citizenship once again to children of migrants who were born in Greece.

  Emmanuel Godwin, the Black Greek player who looked up to Giannis while they were growing up, who was in the crowd watching Giannis proudly carry the Greek flag on Independence Day, is still trying to gain citizenship despite having been born in Greece. He applied for papers four years ago. “They don’t care,” Godwin says. “How can I be born here and I still don’t have papers? How can you do that?”

  Sometimes Godwin wishes he was where Giannis is. Playing professional basketball in America. Having a passport. “I still look up to him,” he says. Godwin still keeps in touch with the family, sending Giannis funny memes, texting Alex. Godwin is still playing, currently for A.O. Eleftheria Moschatou. But without a passport, a shot at even EuroLeague seems unlikely. But he keeps working, dreaming. And he keeps tabs on Giannis: “Now that he’s made it, everybody’s like, ‘Oh yeah, I used to help him! He was my favorite guy! I love him so much!’” Godwin says. “I’m like, ‘Wow, look at these people, man.’ This is crazy. It’s really sad.”

  Etinosa Erevbenagie, the former Panathinaikos youth-team player who used to speak Nigerian Pidgin with Giannis back in the day, watched his own basketball dreams dissolve largely because he couldn’t gain citizenship. He didn’t have a realistic chance of getting recruited to a higher club because there are only two spots for foreign players, which he was considered, despite feeling Greek. “I considered myself Nigerian Greek,” he says. “But in terms of the official documents, I was just Nigerian.”

  Anytime his agent spoke on the phone with a potential team, the team would tell the agent that Erevbenagie was certainly talented enough but then ask about his documents. “Then everything would just stop,” Erevbenagie says. He can hear the conversations, still stuck in his head. It’s not you, but it’s you. It’s not the papers, but it’s the papers. He managed to play in Spain and in lower-division Greece but was never able to move up.

  He often thinks about what kind of career he might have had if he had been able to have his papers fast-tracked the way Giannis had. What kind of life he might have now. “Everything would be different,” he says. There’s pain in his voice. It was frustrating, not being able to change his circumstance. “I cannot fight against the system,” he says.

  He took refuge in his studies and now aspires to become a psychologist, motivated by the small percentage of Black mental-health professionals in Greece. He feels lucky to have found a route outside of basketball but hurts for his younger sister. It hurts every time he has to explain to her she is excluded from certain activities, places, opportunities, because even though she was born in Greece, she is considered African.

  What he wants for her, and for the next generation of Black Greek kids, is “to be able to dream. I want them to have access to things I didn’t. I want to create an environment for younger generations to not just think about surviving but to actually dream. And breathe.”

  When he says that word, he takes a breath. He is happy that Giannis was able to dream—and make it out. Genuinely, Erevbenagie is happy for him. Would never say anything disparaging about him. He just hopes that Giannis will speak up more to help others make it too. “Not everybody is Muhammad Ali or Colin Kaepernick, and that’s OK. Perhaps Giannis didn’t have the confidence or language when he was younger, but now that he’s maybe older, he can finally talk about this,” Erevbenagie says. “I know deep down that Giannis knows that he has a huge platform and there is a lot left to be said and done.”

  * * *

  Back in 2013, as an eighteen-year-old, Giannis was asked by Gazzetta.gr if he ever experienced racism. Giannis said, “Never! I have never felt that ever! Everyone regards me as Greek and I am very happy for that!” And in a feature in the Greek publication ΕΓΩ!Weekly that same year, Giannis commented, “No, never, at least not from my friends or classmates at school. Only from fans of opposing teams during games. That will unfortunately always happen.”

  Thanasis, however, has spoken more candidly in recent years. In a 2019 interview with the Greek Sunday newspaper Documento, Thanasis said, “I was born in Aretaieio Hospital in Athens. I say this so that no one thinks that they brought us from somewhere or that we came from the moon.”

  Thanasis continued: “How is it possible that someone who was born here, went to kindergarten, school, university, received a Greek education, is not considered Greek?”

  At the beginning of Giannis’s career, journalists speculated about the family’s origins. Oluwafemi Adefeso, a Nigerian sports journalist living in Lagos, Nigeria, and founder of African Basketball Conversation, a premier symposium about hoops in Africa, was scrolling the website Eurobasket around that time when he saw the name Giannis Antetokounmpo. Then he looked at a picture of Giannis. The name seemed strange to Adefeso; he didn’t think it sounded or looked Nigerian. “Not many [Nigerian] people could relate to him at first glance,” Adefeso says. “You’re like, ‘Oh, this guy is brown-skinned and is Greek, so he’s definitely not fully Greek. He has to be some sort of, how we call it, half-caste.’”

  Adefeso wondered, Maybe his mom is African and his dad is Greek? “That’s what a lot of people thought,” he says. “There was a little bit of not being really sure where he’s really from and if he’s truly a full-blooded Nigeria
n. So it took a while to become aware and accept him.”

  When Giannis started to become Giannis, and Adefeso learned more about Giannis’s two Nigerian parents, he wished that Giannis would play for the Nigerian national team. He continued to cheer him on, as he did other players of African descent who play for other national teams, like Serge Ibaka of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, who plays for Spain’s team.

  But Adefeso wished there was a deeper connection between Giannis and Nigeria. “People love him as Nigerian, but they are not overly hysterical about how great he is, because the connection is really not there,” Adefeso says. “A lot of people want that connection.”

  Giannis inched a bit closer to that connection in 2015, when he played in the NBA’s inaugural 2015 Africa game in Johannesburg, South Africa, for Team Africa against Team World. The six thousand available tickets at Ellis Park Arena sold out in nine minutes. Giannis was in Africa for the first time, and he brought his family with him, making the trip even more meaningful. Giannis and his brothers understand a little bit of the Nigerian languages Veronica and Charles used to speak to them.

  Giannis had fun, even going on a safari and to South Africa’s Lion Park, petting lion cubs. Still, he was extremely focused on the game itself. He was polite, unusually quiet. Intense. Every drill in practice he sprinted as if it were a real game. Luc Mbah a Moute, Giannis’s teammate on Team Africa, walked up to him and said, “You getting ready to play in the finals, huh?” Giannis just nodded. Meanwhile, their coach, Gregg Popovich of the Spurs, was laughing, having a good time, looking laid-back (no joke).