CHAPTER 5

AMERICA

Six days later, Giannis returned to Greece for a brief visit with his family and friends. He went to a club with Kamperidis, Rana, and some other former teammates to celebrate. The DJ gave him a shoutout: “Giannis Antetokounmpo, drafted to the NBA!” Giannis smiled shyly. It was the first time he really let himself dance in public. He knew how to dance, but he and his teammates were always so focused on basketball that experiences like this were rare. “We were not used to this life,” Rana says.

Samaras, Greece’s prime minister, invited Giannis and his family to visit him at Maximos Mansion, the official seat of the prime minister since 1982. The Antetokounmpos couldn’t believe it: the mansion. Invited by the prime minister. The same government that dragged its feet on granting Giannis and Thanasis citizenship.

The mansion was in downtown, near Syntagma Square, a short distance from the store Giannis and his buddies used to frequent to play video games. The building was built in the old classical style, with an imposing terrace and garden. Maximos was a rich Greek entrepreneur, after all.

Walking up the ten steps to the mansion’s entrance was exciting. Strange. “Now I go to the palace. People used to draw pictures of us as monkeys,” Oppenheimer remembers Giannis telling him. “He hasn’t forgotten that.”

When the Antetokounmpos arrived, around 3:00 p.m., Samaras gave Giannis a gift: a copy of Axion Esti, a revered holy icon of Orthodox Christianity. Historically, it has been associated with a string of legendary miracles, and it has strong emotional connotations among the Greek Orthodox. Samaras hoped it would keep Giannis safe in America. “I told him that it was my personal gift to him, with the wish that the Holy Mother would always protect him,” Samaras says.

Samaras could tell the family was shocked to even be there. He tried to make them feel at home. He asked if they’d like any coffee or orange juice; they preferred water. They were polite but reserved. Samaras was impressed by Giannis but equally impressed by his parents. “They are among the most decent people I have ever met,” Samaras says. “They won my heart.”

Samaras said at the time he was proud to see Giannis get drafted and wave the Greek flag, eager to see how he’d represent Greece. Giannis was grateful but understood the hypocrisy. “Now that I am in the NBA, they can use me for the national team,” Giannis later told Sports Illustrated. “Now they want to accept me.”

Of course, not all did. Shortly after Giannis was drafted, Nikolaos Michaloliakos, Golden Dawn’s leader, said on national television, “If you give a chimpanzee in the zoo a banana and a flag, is he Greek?” And when Giannis visited the mansion, Michaloliakos called for Giannis and his family to be arrested and deported, saying that Giannis being drafted by Senator Kohl was part of a plot by a “fanatical Jew and Zionist but also a big and active antifascist activist.”

Rana, watching this on TV, was terrified for Giannis. Scared that Giannis would make a mistake, or get injured, or not play well, and give the racists even more ammunition. What will the Greek people say about him? Rana thought. Oh, he’s just another Black kid? Will they still acknowledge him as Greek?

Giannis said he wasn’t angry. Couldn’t control what others thought about him. “I can’t click a button on them so they change their opinion,” he told Sports Illustrated. “Some guys say, ‘He’s Black. Greeks are not Black.’ You try to explain to them that it’s not about the color. If I’m not Greek, what am I? My parents grew up in Nigeria, but I have never been there. If I am not Greek, I don’t know what I am.”

He let the slurs go. Focused on the task ahead: representing Greece’s U-20 team that summer in Tallinn, Estonia, rather than competing in the NBA Summer League. Giannis didn’t expect reporters to follow him in Estonia at hotels, at practices, at games, but “suddenly everybody cares about him,” says Kostas Missas, the U-20 national-team coach. “He didn’t like this so much.”

* * *

One morning, Kamperidis, Filathlitikos teammate and now fellow U-20 teammate, came up to Missas at breakfast, looking weary. “Coach, I couldn’t sleep last night.”

“Come on,” Missas said. “Why?”

“Giannis was doing push-ups and sit-ups all night.”

Missas confronted Giannis about it. “I’m sorry, Coach,” Giannis said. “But that’s the only way I’m going to play in the NBA.”

First, though, he had to crack the U-20 lineup. His teammates didn’t know what to make of him. They had been playing at the highest levels; he hadn’t. “He wasn’t the best player back then,” says teammate Ioannis Papapetrou, now a star for Panathinaikos, “but you could see the potential and work ethic.”

Giannis wanted to play, sure, but he also wanted to collect the five euros Missas promised each player for each win. After four wins, Giannis asked Missas, “What’s going on with the euros? That’s four games, twenty euros!” Missas laughs, remembering how serious Giannis was: “Twenty euros to him then was one hundred million dollars.”

Giannis didn’t play much but contributed in key moments—for example, in the final eleven seconds against Germany, when he scored four points and drained two critical free throws, even blocking a shot. “He made the difference for us,” says Petros Melissaratos, U-20 teammate. “He was working harder than anyone.”

That impressed Larry Drew, his new Bucks coach. Drew had traveled to Estonia to meet Giannis, to let him know that he really cared about him. “I wanted him to know that this was not just about basketball; this was about him as a person,” says Drew, now an assistant coach with the Clippers.

One play in Estonia in particular captivated Drew: Giannis grabbed a rebound and dribbled full court, faking out the first defender before muscling through defenders in the lane, then dropping a crisp bounce pass to an open teammate.

Soon after, Giannis participated in a question-and-answer session with Sport24.gr, a Greek website. One reader asked a question that sounded absurd: “How many years before you get an MVP?”

“Haha, too soon for that,” Giannis said. “First, I got to earn playing time, gain experience, and get adjusted to the new lifestyle.”

“We are expecting so much from you. What do you think you need to improve in?”

“My goal is to become one of the best, and in order to do that, I need to improve in everything.”

He did one final interview with Triantafyllos, the sports journalist turned coach, who drove him home after. “It’s your first time going to live in America,” Triantafyllos recalls saying to Giannis, staring ahead at the road. “Are you scared?”

“Look,” Giannis said. “This year I will get one million dollars. This money will help me and my family for the rest of our lives. Why should I be scared?”

* * *

Hammond made sure that every Bucks staffer was prepared for Giannis’s arrival. Someone would always need to be there for the rookie. Hammond enlisted Ross Geiger, the assistant video coordinator, to look out for him on a daily basis.

Geiger picked Giannis up from Chicago O’Hare International Airport in September, about two weeks before training camp, showing up in a limo that the Bucks had rented. Neither Geiger nor Giannis had been in a limo before. It was awkward. Weird. Giannis was quiet. Tired. Geiger tried to ask Giannis about music, but Giannis managed only a few words, mostly looking out the window.

Milwaukee was so different from New York. Giannis saw so many houses, trees. Lots of green. That surprised him, because he thought all of America would look like New York, with skyscrapers on every corner.

They finally arrived at the Pfister Hotel, where Giannis would stay for a short time. Everything was white, immaculate. The bed had so many pillows. Extra fluffy. He was grateful, but it felt strange, like the room belonged to someone else. Why are they spending this kind of money on me? he thought.

He missed his brothers—missed sleeping next to them, warmed by bodies, not blankets. He tried to sleep, but this uncomfortable feeling gnawed at him. This was too nice, too much. He pulled the mattress off the bed and put it on the floor. He curled onto the mattress, shut his eyes, and dozed off.

* * *

On the eve of training camp, reporters asked Giannis about expectations to perform well. “I don’t feel pressure or anything else but my friends, my family, and basketball,” Giannis said. “Nothing else can pressure me. So they can’t touch me.”

They. He was referring indirectly to Michaloliakos. To Golden Dawn. Later, he admitted so. “Anything they say, even if it was in the past, people that say bad stuff about me or my family, they can’t touch me.” Perhaps realizing his words were too direct, he added, “I love my country. Greece is my country.”

He wouldn’t talk much about race or racism in the coming months. Years. He had made it, but he hadn’t made it. One comment could threaten his family’s safety back home. Especially the way things were back home.

That same month, antifascist hip-hop artist Pavlos Fyssas, known as Killah P, had gone out with friends to a café called Coral, in Athens, to watch a sporting event. About fifty people, many of them Golden Dawn members, armed with bats, surrounded him. Giorgos Roupakias, a Golden Dawn member, stabbed Fyssas twice in the chest, killing him.

Fyssas was thirty-four.

Samaras addressed Greece on national TV, condemning the murder. Protests against Golden Dawn began in Athens and spread to Barcelona, Brussels, Paris, Amsterdam, London, and Nicosia. This time many more people cared, because Fyssas was neither an immigrant nor a person of color; he was white.

* * *

That world seemed far away as Giannis lined up across the baseline with two of his tallest teammates, six-foot-eleven Larry Sanders and six-foot-nine John Henson, the first day of training camp. They stretched their arms out, fingertip to fingertip, comparing wingspans. Giannis looked giddy just being on an NBA court. Energetic. Three-cups-of-coffee energetic.

When pairing up players for a drill, Drew told him, “Giannis, you’re gonna be with O. J.” That would be O. J. Mayo, the former USC playmaker who was at one point the top prep player in America.

Giannis turned around, looked confused. “Who’s O. J.?”

Mayo smirked, cursed under his breath. “This dude don’t know who I am?” He’d have to show him. And he wasn’t the only one. Everyone took turns at Giannis in the next drill. A player from the opposite wing would drive hard to the basket, and the defensive player had to slide over and take the charge. It’s called the “Two-Nine Drill,” but it really should have been called the “Knock-Giannis-Over Drill.”

The rookie stood above the circle, legs slightly bent, arms high, looking like a very long toothpick. Teammate after teammate plowed into him, knocking him down as if he were hollow. Caron Butler, a six-foot-seven, 228-pound veteran from Racine, Wisconsin, who would work out in the snow in shorts and a tank top if you asked him, laid on some heavy bruises. “Weight room!” Butler would scream, banging into the rookie.

Then Zaza Pachulia, a six-foot-eleven, 270-pound center, had his turn. Then Stephen Graham, a six-foot-six, 215-pound guard and roster hopeful. “Just so he could get tougher,” says Graham, now a player-development coach with the Nuggets. “We all had to let him know: welcome to the league, rook.”

Graham hit Giannis so hard that Giannis slid across the baseline. He popped up but clutched his chest as if he had been wounded. “Oh my god,” Giannis said under his breath, wheezing.

Graham was worried. “I thought I broke his sternum or something.” Drew stopped practice to make sure rook was OK. The vets laughed. “Giannis wasn’t ready yet,” Graham says. “He looks like he’s pretty much a Greek god right now, but back then? There was no way he was going to make it. If you blew on him, he’d fall over.”

He was a super-skinny scrub but an endearing scrub: he got up quickly each time, not looking discouraged. Butler turned to Nate Wolters, another rookie, and smiled. “The kid’s gonna be special.”

* * *

At the end of the practice, Drew handed every player a playbook so thick that it would take hours to comb through. By dinnertime, Giannis texted Drew and told him he noticed an error in one of the offensive plays.

Drew blinked. The rookie had corrected him? His first NBA coach on his first day in the NBA?

But it would become clear: Giannis was studious. A stickler for the details. He wanted to make an impact. But for now he was a mere punching bag.

The next day, the veterans pummeled him again. They’d toss him out of the paint if he dared go inside. He was a teenager competing against grown men. “It was a very, very, very tough transition for him,” Drew says. “Most players would try to just go through him.” Giannis wouldn’t back down, using his length and quickness to compensate, but he looked like a puppy. Everything was happening so fast. “You could tell he was lost,” says Ersan Ilyasova, Bucks forward from 2006 to 2007, 2009 to 2015, and then 2018 to 2020.

Giannis’s coaches couldn’t get angry at him because they saw that he was trying so hard. But there was so much to learn: if he got a defensive rebound, he’d try to outlet the ball. Drew had to correct him constantly. “Push the ball! You have to push the ball. You’re too long, too athletic, to give it up. Go.”

Giannis’s body just couldn’t execute what his mind told him to do. His teammates mocked his thin frame, calling him Baby Giraffe. Gumby. Stop Sign. They told him he was built like Shawn Bradley, the uncoordinated seven-foot-six center who had most recently played for the Mavericks. Giannis didn’t know who Bradley was. Once he consulted Google and realized it was an insult, he fumed to himself.

Oppenheimer, the Bucks assistant coach, nicknamed Giannis Bambi. When Giannis would trip and fall on himself, players would howl in laughter. “There goes them Bambi legs!” Giannis knew Bambi didn’t sound like a good thing, but he didn’t understand what it meant. He was still learning English. “Coach,” Giannis asked Oppenheimer, “what is Bambi?”

“It’s a baby deer,” Oppenheimer said.

“No, Coach. No! I am not baby deer. No. I am not Bambi!” He started speaking in Greek, which he did when he’d get pissed off. But the veterans’ plan was working: they wanted to get in the rookie’s head, make him angry. “We were trying to get him to be that aggressive Giannis, the one y’all see now all the time,” says Chris Wright, a Bucks forward that season.

Even then, Giannis wasn’t soft. He was going to compete. But coming from Europe, being as skinny as he was, as young as he was, and speaking in a voice that was as squeaky as it was, he came off as adorable.

Giannis was scared of Geiger’s family’s goldendoodle, London, because the dog kept jumping all over him when he visited Geiger’s parents’ home. At one point Giannis refused to go in the backyard for a good couple of minutes before Geiger reassured him that London was harmless and just wanted to play.

He said he loved The Ellen DeGeneres Show. Justin Bieber. The classic Eddie Murphy comedy Coming to America. He seemed so innocent.

But Giannis was in no position to lead. He was just trying to crack the lineup, show that he was not Bambi. Show that he could absorb hundreds of plays in a new language. One practice, the team was practicing a common NBA play called “Floppy.” The coaches noticed that Giannis looked agitated. Oppenheimer pulled him to the side. “What’s wrong?”

“Coach, Coach, I know I am skinny. I know I need to get stronger,” Giannis said, “but, Coach, I am not floppy. I am not floppy!”

“What are you talking about?”

“Everybody, they just keep looking at me! Yelling at me, ‘Floppy, floppy, floppy, floppy!’”

“Giannis. ‘Floppy’ is a traditional NBA play. They’re just saying it so that you know it. They’re repeating it, trying to help you learn it.”

“Oh. So it is a play?”

“Yeah. It’s a play.”

“He really was a blank slate,” Oppenheimer says. “He knew nothing about the NBA other than superstars. Nothing about coaches. He knew nothing other than ‘I want to go straight at you, I want to prove myself, and no matter how many times I fall, I’m going to get up and go right back at you.’”

Giannis listened. Sought out advice. He was different from many first-rounders with astronomical egos. “He was like a piece of clay,” Oppenheimer says. “Whatever you told him to do, he wanted to do it. And if he couldn’t do it, he did it until he could do it.”

The two became close, as Oppenheimer was his first shooting coach. They’d stay for hours working on Giannis’s form and competing in shooting competitions. (Oppenheimer is known as the “Shot Doctor”; Giannis rarely beat him.)

No one spent more time in the gym after practice than Giannis. Jim Cleamons, Bucks assistant coach, who had previously coached Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant, winning nine championships over his coaching career, would notice how frustrated Giannis was with himself when he made a mistake. He’d labor on the same move over and over. “He had heart,” says Cleamons, who would often tell Giannis, “Giannis, you’re going to be a wonderful player someday; just don’t become Americanized.”

“What are you talking about?” Giannis said.

“I mean: Don’t become Americanized. Don’t forget those work habits. Don’t forget what has gotten you to where you are.”

Cleamons would see glimpses of greatness: a Eurostep or a dazzling finish. But Giannis was still adapting. His English wasn’t terrible; he just didn’t understand certain phrases or words, especially basketball terminology. Drew always explained concepts twice to Giannis, breaking down plays on a granular level. “I knew I had to be patient,” Drew says. Oftentimes, Giannis would respond with a blank face. And that’s when Drew knew the rookie had no clue what was going on.

He knew basic phrases like “pin down” or “back pick.” But he looked lost hearing more complex lingo like “pick the picker,” “flare with a rescreen,” or even “crashing the glass.” As a result, sometimes film sessions that were ordinarily one hour took three. “Giannis spoke more English than I did when I came here,” says Ilyasova, who came from Turkey. “When you come from a different country, it’s really hard to get transitioned.”

Sometimes Giannis would accidentally scream out the name of the play—“Red!” or “Blitz!”—so that he could remember what to do. Butler had to pull him aside. “Giannis, you’re not supposed to say the play out loud! You can’t tell the other team what our plays are! Keep it to yourself, man!”

There was so much to learn it was overwhelming. “I think his head was spinning,” says Wolters, the fellow rookie. “It’s hard enough to transition to the NBA when you do know the language.”

Sam Reinke, a Bucks team attendant that season, once asked Giannis what color shoes he wanted.

“Uh… gray,” Giannis said.

Reinke held up a pair of gray shoes. “You already have those; do you want a different color?”

“Black.”

“You have those too. Is there something else?”

Giannis was quiet for a minute. Then Reinke realized Giannis didn’t know the English words for other colors. Reinke pulled out two red shoes. “What do you think? Red?”

“Oh. Yes. Red.”

That stubborn part of Giannis, who wanted to get every move perfect, was the same way with learning English. He worked hard. He didn’t want anyone to feel sorry for him. “He understood it was only a matter of time before he got it,” says Alex, who would Skype his big brother constantly, asking him what America was like.

When Giannis would learn a new word, he’d get so excited he’d repeat it over and over, cracking his team up with his high-pitched voice and Greek accent. The day he learned the expression “Yo mama!” he ran around the locker room screaming, “Yo mama! Yo mama! Yo mama!”

Henson taught him what ice cubes were after Giannis asked, “What are those little square things?” Then Giannis kept repeating it: “Ice cubes! Ice cubes! Ice cubes!”

When he learned trash talk, specifically the word bitch, he’d scream “Bitch!” when he’d miss a shot.

Another favorite saying he adopted: “Where they at, though!”

He’d walk into the locker room. “Where they at, though!”

Walk onto the court. “Where they at, though!”

Walk into the showers. “Where they at, though!”

He’d watch American movies—specifically movies such as Friday or his eventual favorite, Coming to America—in order to learn English and to learn more about Black culture. He’d repeat his favorite line “Sexual chocolate!” in that high-pitched voice. Then he discovered TV shows like Martin and The Jamie Foxx Show. “These are staples in the African American community, so he put on all those to watch, to catch up,” Henson says. The movies also made Giannis feel like he had something in common with his teammates. “He would love to think he’s American,” Wolters says, “getting cool or whatever.”

One night, long after all his teammates had left after the game, Giannis took a long shower, taking his time icing afterward. The only other person left was Dave Weber, an equipment manager for the team from 2010 to 2017. Weber and Giannis were friends, but Weber kept making fun of Giannis’s thick accent. A few days earlier, Giannis had warned him, “Dave, if you make fun of me again, I will put you in that trash can!” referring to the large gray bin near the locker-room entrance.

So that night, Weber again poked fun at Giannis’s accent, testing the limits. True to his word, Giannis lifted him up and dropped him in the can. Fortunately for Weber, the trash can was empty. After letting Weber stew a bit, Giannis came back a couple of minutes later and pulled his friend out.

Giannis made his teammates laugh when he’d speak quickly; his cadence sped up the more excited he got about something. Luke Ridnour, the team’s point guard that season, would be explaining something to him, and Giannis would respond, “YesOKlet’sgo.” It always came out as one word: “YesIgotyou.” “YesOKnoproblemIwillrebound.”

“He was hearing you, but he wasn’t hearing you,” Ridnour says. “He’d go out there and mess up, and we’d talk to him again. He was frantic.” Still, he ran hard. Rebounded hard. Never gave lip. His answers always began with yes.

* * *

Geiger and Giannis were close friends. They’d hang out every day—go to the movies, watch basketball games, play video games. Geiger started viewing Giannis as his little brother, given that he was five years younger (though a foot taller), driving him around in his ’97 maroon Subaru Legacy Outback.

Once, on the way to Bucks practice, Giannis looked out the window, saw a man on the side of the street, and pointed. “Hey, do you see that guy over there?” Giannis asked Geiger.

“Yeah,” Geiger said, slowing down. “What about him?”

“He’s wearing bigger clothes. That reminds me of being back home.”

“Oh, really? Why?”

“Well, in Greece, I used to always give all my older clothes away. So there would be a lot of Greek people that I would see from time to time randomly just in my clothes.”

Giannis wasn’t able to forget those things. They reminded him of his purpose. Who he was. And nothing reminded him more of the gulf between his old life and his new life than moving into his first place, a three-bedroom, two-bath condo about two minutes from the practice facility.

Geiger took him to Walmart to get furniture. A treat—Giannis loved Walmart. It was cheap, and he could ride around the aisles in the shopping carts. The first time Giannis walked in, his eyes darted to the carts. Somehow Giannis stuffed his gangly legs inside the cart and rode around the aisles, squealing, “Ha! Ha, ha, ha! Look at me!” Geiger tried to get him to calm down; they needed to find bedding. But Giannis wouldn’t stop; his lanky arms would stretch to the tops of shelves, pulling down items without stepping off the cart, giggling like a kid.

Finally, they returned to Giannis’s place. Giannis showed Geiger the master bedroom. “This is going to be for my parents.”

“You’re not going to take the master?”

“No, man, my parents get the master.” They kept walking. Giannis next pointed out the room he planned for Alex and Kostas. Then the farthest bedroom. “This will be mine, but if they want to sleep in here too,” Giannis said, referring to his brothers, “that’s OK.” Even though there was no set date for his parents’ arrival in the US, he kept the master spotless for them.

A few minutes later, Giannis Skyped his family. “Look at this place!” he said. “This is our new place!” But Geiger knew the Bucks were having difficulties getting visas for the family—difficulties Giannis wasn’t aware of yet.

The rookie had so many new things to handle, like installing cable and internet. Given his precarious upbringing, Giannis didn’t trust the cable workers. He wanted someone from the Bucks to be there. Geiger was busy the morning of the installation, so Dave Dean, Bucks vice president of basketball operations, asked Daniel Marks, who worked in the scouting department, to come instead. Marks arrived at 9:00 a.m., and by 4:00 p.m., the installation was not completed. Marks was starving. He went into Giannis’s pantry and snuck three Oreos out of Giannis’s cookie jar, gobbling them quickly.

The next day, Giannis came up to Marks at the practice facility. “Hey, man, did you eat my Oreos?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, when I left, I had thirty Oreos, and I come back, and there’s three missing.”

Marks didn’t know what to say. He was shocked that someone would count their Oreos. A millionaire NBA player who counted his Oreos, at that. But of course Giannis counted his Oreos. It didn’t matter that he had made the NBA. Inside him was still the child always conscious of food running out.

* * *

The first thing Robert Hackett noticed about Giannis was his skinny 196-pound frame. It seemed apparent to the Bucks’ strength-and-conditioning coach that the rookie wasn’t eating three full meals a day. To get to know each other better, the two went to the Mayfair Mall in Wauwatosa to hang out. Hackett bought Giannis a chicken sandwich at the food court. Giannis devoured it in a couple of bites.

“This is the best thing in the world!” Giannis said.

Hackett laughed. “Dude, that’s not even really that good.”

Giannis couldn’t believe that one sandwich was only five dollars. He bought two more. “Man, we can eat dinner off of this!”

Hackett soon realized that he needed to make sure Giannis ate throughout the day. Load him up with strawberry protein shakes, his new favorite, and nutrition bars, making sure the rookie knew it was OK—more than OK—to eat throughout the day. Giannis struggled to put on weight at first because his body was still adjusting. He wasn’t used to eating that much or practicing at that intensity. He had never weight-lifted before, which was uncommon for a first-round NBA draft pick. Most prospects start weight lifting as early as freshman year of high school. “Everything was new to him,” Hackett says. “He was a sponge.”

Hackett had to teach him the mechanics of weight lifting: where to put his hands, his fingers, on the ninety-pound bar to bench-press. Giannis couldn’t even bench-press the lowest amount at first, 130 pounds. The first attempt, he struggled to lift the bar. Hackett was right behind him, telling him to keep his balance on both sides, but the bar just trembled.

Hackett taught him how to squat properly, without putting his knees over his feet. How to push his hips back. How to position his shoulders for the shoulder press. Giannis didn’t even know what a muscle-up was. Teammates Brandon Knight, Khris Middleton, and Chris Wright showed him, each completing five in a row. Giannis couldn’t get his chin over the bar, his feet still touching the floor. His teammates were laughing so hard as Giannis struggled, twitching. “He almost flipped over the bar,” Wright says. “He was just really uncoordinated, but you could just tell he was working at it so hard.”

Hackett tried to teach the rookie patience: he wasn’t going to get stronger in one day. But Giannis wanted results now. He wanted to get bigger now. During fitness tests, like the foot-quickness test, Giannis would ask Hackett what the top mark was. He needed to beat it.

He enjoyed spending all day working out. “He was possessed,” Hammond says. Giannis would lift his shirt up, parade around the facility, showing off. “Hey! I got abs!” (He had one ab.) He would also check himself out in the mirror after training sessions, looking at his pulsing biceps to see if they had increased in size. He’d flex his squiggly arms; then he’d turn back to his teammates to see if anyone was watching.

“Watch! Watch!” Giannis would say to anyone in the room. “I’m going to get bigger!”

* * *

Giannis loved electronic dance music and artists like Avicii and Alesso, but his teammates introduced him to hip-hop, rap—Drake, Rick Ross. Pachulia, a fellow European, who hailed from Tbilisi, Georgia, wanted Giannis to broaden his taste. “Giannis, you were raised in Europe,” Pachulia said. “You should listen to house music.” Pachulia played him Calvin Harris. Giannis started dancing, shaking his shoulders, but the team shut it down. Back to hip-hop. In quiet moments, Pachulia would turn on house music and whisper to Giannis, “Giannis, it’s our time now.”

Geiger would tell Giannis which songs were appropriate to sing in public and which were not. “He thought he could just sing whatever he wanted as loud as he wanted, dropping f-bombs,” Geiger says. Giannis enjoyed learning dance moves, practicing his Dougie in Cali Swag District’s “Teach Me How to Dougie.” The Bucks filmed Giannis dancing to Drake’s “Best I Ever Had” as the rookie ran his hands up and down his body, trying to look seductive. Giannis loved filming it. In between takes, he’d ask to redo certain moves. “You’ve done it five times,” said Geiger, watching. “How’s it going to get any better?” Giannis was a perfectionist—even in a music video.

Giannis was starting to develop a sweet tooth. He could eat anything, and it would go right through him. He and Geiger would eat candy at the movies, which they frequented because they thought it would help Giannis with his English. (Giannis loved gangster movies; he liked to act tough in the parking lot after seeing them, walking around shouting, in his most menacing tone, “Yeah! Yeah!”) They’d get popcorn, and Giannis would open his mouth, waiting for Geiger to toss a kernel. “Hit me, Ross! Hit me!” Giannis would sip a red or blue Icee and have such a sugar high, cracking so many jokes, Geiger would have to settle him down. Geiger had to explain to him that one had to be quiet during movies.

The two often ate at places that were open late after games, like Giannis’s two favorites: Applebee’s and the Cheesecake Factory (he considered Cheesecake his “fancy meal,” where he would get chocolate milkshakes). He fell in love with chocolate milkshakes and burgers. A true American meal.

Riding to his beloved Walmart in a limo (yes, a limo) made him happy. So did the toy machine at Red Robin. He enjoyed maneuvering the crane for a stuffed animal in between his shake and burger. Giannis would always insist on splitting the bill, even if they ate at McDonald’s.

Geiger took Giannis to the Cheesecake Factory for Giannis’s birthday. The waiter gave him a free slice of birthday cake. “Ross!” Giannis said, his smile growing wide, candles flickering in front of his eyes, “I think I got this because of my three magic letters: N-B-A!”

Geiger started cracking up. “No, man, that’s like a customary thing. They give you a dessert on your birthday! They come sing at the table.”

The first time Giannis went to Chipotle, he was astounded at the number of choices, the concept of putting so many items into one bundle. “I want everything,” Giannis told Geiger. Chicken, steak. Black beans, pinto beans. Guacamole. Cheese. He chose so many items that the server had to use two tortillas. It looked like a football, but in a matter of minutes, it was gone.

Soon Giannis discovered chocolate custard. Costco’s pizza and hot dogs. He loved Costco; it’s where he had his infamous first smoothie, a dual mixed-berry $1.99 smoothie that was so good he tweeted, “I just taste for the first time a smoothie… MAN GOD BLESS AMERICA ”

When Giannis had his first taste of peanut butter, trying out Bucks assistant general manager David Morway’s wife’s homemade peanut butter bars, he cooed, “Ooooohhhh” in delight. When Oppenheimer would order shrimp cocktails at dinner, Giannis would ask, “What is this? What are shrimps?” When shopping at grocery stores, Giannis would linger along the aisles, picking up item after item, just reading the labels, figuring out what everything meant.

The first time he tried pancakes, he became obsessed. He had pancakes for ten days straight. The first time he tried an Auntie Anne’s pretzel at the Southridge Mall in Greendale, he thought it was the most delicious thing. He couldn’t get over that they made it right there, so quickly.

People were starting to recognize him, walking around the mall with his pretzel. He was so delighted, so shy, he didn’t know what to say. He kept waving to people, so proud, thinking it was so cool to walk through Southridge.

People in Milwaukee fell in love with Giannis. And he was easy to love: a big kid in a small city, fascinated with every new adventure.

Giannis couldn’t get over the concept of a buffet—unlimited food for a fixed price. The first time he saw one, Drew told him, “Get whatever you want.” Giannis put some food on his plate, some of which he didn’t even recognize.

A few minutes after they sat down to eat, Giannis saw his coach get up and head back to the buffet. “Coach!” Giannis whispered to him, alarmed. “What are you doing? You can’t do that.”

Drew looked at him strangely. “It’s a buffet. You can do that. You can go as many times as you want.”

Giannis was taken aback. He felt the same when the team traveled to road games and he saw that there was food on the plane or in the hotel fridge. Or that a whole meal from Perkins Restaurant & Bakery, a Wisconsin staple, cost five dollars. Once, carrying a couple of frozen pizzas at Target, he went outside the store to find a basket before paying; security quickly stopped him. A fan kindly intervened, explaining Giannis’s mistake.

The first time he got his check from the Bucks, he asked Butler, “How do I get them to not take taxes out?”

Butler laughed. “Welcome to the NBA.”

When Butler and Mayo went to a local furniture store and picked out nearly an entire apartment’s worth of furniture and had it delivered to Giannis, he was truly touched. The veterans who kicked his ass for a week straight to begin the season really cared about him. Were looking out for him.

Giannis had to learn how to manage money. How to tip at restaurants. How to use AirDrop on his phone. And he had questions: Why did he have to pay taxes in America if he wasn’t American? Why was this street name so long? Milwaukee was his playground, and each day brought something exciting. Even something as small as learning that he could pause and rewind game film on a TV.

“He was just shocked that this was his life now,” Wolters says.

Before a game against the Jazz in Utah, Giannis’s coaches tried to explain to him that he might get tired because of the altitude. “Don’t panic,” they told him. “Your body will figure it out.”

But Giannis had to see it for himself. After pregame shooting, he walked up to Oppenheimer. “Coach,” Giannis said. “I want to see altitude!” Giannis then sprinted to the top of the stands. Stood there for five minutes, waiting for something to happen, to seize him.

One practice, Cody Ross, the video coordinator, remembers Giannis coming up to him and Oppenheimer, saying, “Guys, I need a haircut. I want a haircut like Cody.” Ross’s brown hair was always either smoothed back perfectly or freshly buzz-cut. Giannis wanted Ross’s best look: a low fade. “He was so concerned with having a cool American haircut,” Ross says. So he went to Gee’s Clippers, a Milwaukee haven for hoop heads, which gave him his first cut.

Giannis became close with Bucks assistant coach Nick Van Exel. They’d trash-talk each other. “You’re too small!” Giannis would say. At first he didn’t know who Van Exel, a storied point guard, was. Then he googled, came back to practice the next day, looked at Van Exel, and said, “Ah-ha! Ah-ha! Oh, I know. I know.”

Van Exel started laughing. “What do you know?”

“I know, Nick. Nick the Quick! Nick the Quick! Nick the Quick!” Giannis couldn’t stop repeating Van Exel’s nickname, proud of himself.

Giannis was eager to complete rookie duties. Butler would ask him to fetch some Mountain Dew or McDonald’s. “That was something just to keep him humble,” Butler says. “But honestly we didn’t have to humble him because he never took anything for granted.” He happily did the chores, like it was a big deal that Sanders entrusted him to get Dunkin’ Donuts for him at 6:30 a.m. before practice. Or when Ridnour asked him to get muffins or drop off laundry to teammates’ rooms on the road.

Butler, who was turning into a mentor, kept him on his toes. After Giannis played well against the Nets, in front of a large crowd of Greek Americans, he received a standing ovation. Butler looked at the rookie, checking to see how he handled the praise. Yup, rook’s feeling himself a little too much, Butler thought.

Afterward, teammates took Giannis out to a nightclub. Giannis thought they were celebrating his great performance, but Butler’s birthday was coming up, and the veteran had one wish: to humble the rookie. Butler asked Giannis to drop and give him thirty-some push-ups in front of everyone in the club—one for every year of Butler’s birthday.

Giannis didn’t flinch. He dropped to the floor, his chest rising and falling with every push-up. Everyone was laughing at him, including women nearby, but Giannis wasn’t bothered. “If you asked him to run through a brick wall,” Butler says, “he would really do it.”

Giannis was respectful of elders. He would call everyone Mister: Mr. Luke. Mr. John. Mr. Larry. He kept his locker clean and organized, taking pride in how it looked. “Everything he did, he did it with a level of enthusiasm that I haven’t seen,” says Bob Bender, Bucks assistant coach that season.

Most rookies would balk at being sent to freezing Milwaukee; Giannis loved it. He was grateful for this dream world where Skip Robinson, then Bucks vice president of community relations and player development, would pick him up in his Escalade. “Skip, this is niiiiice,” Giannis said the first time riding in Robinson’s car.

Giannis seemed to always be smiling. Hammond came up to him one afternoon and told him his smile reminded him of a certain legend. “Giannis, you know Magic Johnson? You know one of his greatest attributes?”

Giannis had seen highlights of Johnson, had wanted to model his game after him, but he didn’t really know much about him. So Giannis nodded when Hammond asked him about Johnson’s best attribute but didn’t truly know the answer.

“It’s not his dribble. It’s not his no-look pass,” Hammond continued. “It’s not his hook shot. It may not even be the championships. It’s his smile. Giannis, you got that. You got that warm smile. Keep that smile.”

There was an innocence to Giannis. A naivete. A goofiness, a sweetness. Much of what he said, did, was hilarious. When he learned to do a bicep curl, Reinke, the former team attendant, would be in the locker room with him, and he’d say, “Giannis, getting those muscles all big! You getting big for the women?”

“Oh yes!” Giannis said. “Very big biceps! The women love the biceps!”

Then he realized curls rhymed with girls, and a new saying was born. “Curls for the girls! Curls for the girls! The girls love the curls!” he’d say while looking at himself in the mirror doing bicep curls.

Another time, teammates called Giannis over for a cameo in a team video that would play on the jumbotron. They gave him a foam finger as a prop to use. “Giannis,” Oppenheimer screamed, “stick it up your nose!” Giannis tried to stick the foam finger up his nose, and when he tickled his nose with it, he giggled so hard he fell over against the wall. So did Oppenheimer.

Giannis was warm with whoever he encountered. On planes, when his teammates would sleep or have headphones on, Giannis would always be talking to the flight attendants, asking them about their day. “Flight attendants loved him,” Wolters says. “He just makes people feel good. People gravitate towards him.”

When the Bucks played the Grizzlies, there was a Bucks poster of him that said “Greek and Still Growing.” Giannis stared at the photo of himself on the poster. “Let me see—I think I am very handsome!” he mused. When he picked up a technical foul against Toronto and realized the tech came with a hefty fine, he ran to the referee and begged him to take it back.

Fans started calling him adorable. He would deepen his voice during an interview, letting them know he had to use his deep voice, his serious voice, because they were filming. He became an internet sensation. A social media darling. “His naiveté and willingness to be forthcoming about how exciting new experiences are for him have turned him into a mix between an athletic marvel and a cat meme,” a local writer told ESPN in 2014.

Kurt Leitinger, longtime fan and Milwaukee native, loved Giannis so much he named his car, a GMC Sierra 1500, Giannis. “I even had it lifted so it sits right around six foot eleven to seven feet tall and got ‘Giannis’ on my license plate.” He remembers a fan account on Twitter, @GreekFreakAlert, that would notify fans when Giannis checked into the game. “He made jaw-dropping plays where you couldn’t help but think, That’s not normal. That’s special,” Leitinger says. “Bucks fans believed in him right away.”

As Giannis’s fame grew, he encountered more and more fans, more and more requests. But when asked to do a one-on-one interview with local reporters, he’d often ask the Bucks PR team, “Why do they want to talk to me?”

He was sweet to those he knew. When Melissa Mangan, a strength-and-conditioning intern whom fellow interns suspected Giannis had a crush on, made a protein shake for Giannis, he was so touched he politely asked her if it would be OK if he followed her on Twitter.

A couple of interns, including Mangan, would mix the powder Gatorade together for the team before games and would have players test to see if it was too sweet. It turned into a competition to see who could mix the Gatorade best.

Giannis always wanted to be the tester, taking pride in the task. He was serious about the technique: one had to stir it perfectly because it’s a big gallon of powder and water and ice, and the ratio of flavor, mainly grape, had to be just right. He would take a sip, put his pinky up, pretending to be fancy, cracking everyone up, telling everyone the qualities he liked and didn’t like from each creation. “Ohhhhhh, this one is a little too sweet!” he’d say.

He’d somehow always pick Mangan’s. “He’d say it before even trying it,” she says. It got to the point where they made him do a blind taste test, with a blindfold over his eyes, so he wouldn’t automatically pick hers. He was so tickled with himself when he settled on the right mixture that he’d run, cup in hand, to Middleton. “Khris! You have to try this! It is sooooo good. Try this one!”

You couldn’t not like him. Unless you found him annoying, as kid brothers can be. One afternoon, some players were eating lunch at the practice facility, and despite not having played many minutes at that point in the season, Giannis came in and said, “I’m the Greek Freak! I’m Giannis! Someday I’m going to be the best in the league!” Miroslav Raduljica, a center from Serbia, reading a book, looked pissed. “This kid is so fucking annoying,” Raduljica said under his breath.

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.”

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.