A great read on Giannis, this is just some of it:
Even the night his father passed. “I went to the gym,” Giannis said. “He was there with me.” He said the lesson from his parents was: stay in motion. Never stop. “I try to not feel pain,” Giannis said, “because I feel like whenever my parents felt pain, they never showed it.”
Stubbornness, persistence, hard work, going to the gym even on the night your father dies—that can get you pretty far. But Giannis, in the past few years, began running up against the limits of hard work, he said. There’s a sports psychologist who works with the Bucks, and Giannis talks to him almost every day. They work on coping mechanisms. They work on anxiety. They work on being in the moment. They work on separating the guy who is arguably the best basketball player in the world right now from the guy holding his newborn child trying to knock down the walls between him and his own feelings. One thing the sports psychologist led Giannis to try was: Cry! And not just at the birth of your sons.
“I had to break down the barriers I was talking about and be by myself, cry, and realize, ‘I got to fucking help myself,’ ” Giannis said. “This guy, he’s like, ‘Sometimes, being persistent and stubborn? Sometimes it fucks you up.’ ”
He looked down at the sleeping baby he was holding. “You’re not going to put the curse words in here, right?”
Superstar athletes have long been conditioned to think of themselves as brands, spokespeople for the million- and billion-dollar businesses they front. This is not Giannis. “I don’t want to be the face of the league,” he said, adamantly. “I want to play great basketball. After that, if I disappear in the night, good. Don’t even talk about me, don’t even remember me. I don’t care.”
He loves basketball but is not of basketball. “Let me show you downstairs,” he said, suddenly.
He padded down the carpeted stairs in his socks, through his not particularly giant suburban house, which he bought from an old teammate, Mirza Teletović. The door frames were too small for him, and he had to duck under each one. Next door, the ground had been torn up and the foundation laid for a second house for his mother, who currently lives upstairs.
Down in the basement, he has a weight room. Soon he will have a basketball court, too, connected to it. Giannis famously would go to the Bucks practice facility so often, at so many different times of day and night, before and after games, that the team sometimes took action to keep him out so he could rest: “They had this term, ‘lockout,’ that you cannot go to the gym, because they know I will go to the gym. Now, see what I did?” He gestured toward the construction outside, toward what would soon be his own facility. “Fuck lockout. Sorry. Oh, my God, I’m cursing. Eff lockout. I build a gym right here.”
He also has a slew of framed jerseys down in the basement. Some of the jerseys are hung, proudly, on the wall; others are stacked haphazardly on a pool table or near the bar stocked with alcohol that Giannis doesn’t drink. Many are his, but curiously, he also has dozens of framed jerseys from other NBA players too. Some are perhaps what you’d expect: the uniforms of greats who’ve played the game and since retired or passed away. Dominique Wilkins, Dirk Nowitzki, Dwyane Wade, Vince Carter, Kobe Bryant. But many of them—the majority of them—are from his peers: guys he competes against during the regular season and the playoffs.
He’s got a framed Blake Griffin Pistons jersey. He’s got one from Kevin Durant, and one from Steph Curry. James Harden—“A lot of people think that I have beef with James Harden, which is not true,” he said, because if it were, why would his jersey be here? He continued the tour. “This right here is from Luka Dončić, the wonder boy. Anthony Davis. L.A., you know him. Jokić. I love the game! Oh, this is mine from this year. This is from the MVP I won. The All-Star MVP. Bradley Beal. Damian Lillard. Derrick Rose. I love Derrick Rose. LeBron James, man. Look! Look what he wrote for me.”
Many of the jerseys are signed, some with brief messages, but this particular one, a LeBron Lakers jersey, had a longer note, and Giannis read it out loud: “To Giannis, a.k.a The Greek Freak. Continue to strive for greatness every single day you wake up, brother. Love everything you represent to this game of hoops, and off the court as well. The limit is not the sky. Go beyond it.” LeBron had signed off with the sketch of a crown.
Giannis beheld the inscription proudly: “That’s big time, you know?”
He is aware, if distantly, that by the hypermasculine competitive codes of the NBA, you are not supposed to venerate your competitors, let alone collect their jerseys, let alone adoringly read what those competitors write on those jerseys to note-taking reporters. But Giannis has never been good at those codes, and at times he has found freedom in defying them. For instance, he said, “People that talk to the sports psychiatrists and stuff like that, they label us ‘soft.’ We’ve seen that in the past, like, ‘Oh, man, I’m having anxiety.’ ‘Man, you’re soft. Go deal with that.’ That’s how it’s labeled. That’s why it’s hard for people to talk to somebody and open up. Even for me, it was extremely tough.”
He’s convinced that all the really good athletes are secretly in some form of therapy. Some not so secretly. They use a word or a phrase and he knows. The other day, Giannis was watching Naomi Osaka, the three-part Netflix docuseries, and was struck by the way the tennis star spoke about the challenges that have come with her success. This happens more and more now—in dealing with himself, he’s noticed how many other people are dealing with something. He said he could recognize a kind of struggle in Osaka’s eyes, even before she began speaking. “She wasn’t happy, she wanted to get away from the game and all that stuff, and it’s fucking hard, man,” Giannis said. He was talking about her, but he was talking about himself too. “I started doing it when I was 18. When you’re that young and you’re doing it, people don’t understand the amount of pressure because at the end of the day, you don’t only have to perform and be the best, you have the big brand that you got to fucking carry on your shoulder. You have your own country, Japan, that you got to carry on your shoulder. Or Greece, in my case. You have all these people that you got to take care of. Sometimes…”
He paused. “I’ve never said this: I don’t want to fuck up.”
That fear of fucking up, of not being able to carry the weight and support the people around him, was what drove him for a long time. He said he was just walking around Milwaukee yesterday, remembering what it looked like to him when he first got here. “You’re 18,” he said. “You have very small experience of life, of being by yourself. I came here, and I was scared. I never felt lonely in my life, and I was scared. I was going back to the hotel at 8:30 p.m. because I was scared. I was by myself.”
Scared of what, I asked him.
“Scared of life! I was fucking 18,” Giannis said. “I was a kid.” Playing a sport that was still new to him with a bunch of grown men. “So, I was already scared of life, now you’re putting me on the basketball court? I’m scared of these dudes, for sure. But you know what I knew? I have no fucking choice. I have no option. I can’t fucking stop. If I stop everything, my family, I can’t help them. I cannot be in a position to help them. So I kept going.”
He went between home and the facility, the facility and home. “He lived in the gym,” Giannis’s longtime agent Alex Saratsis said. “He would sleep at the gym.” Before Giannis met Mariah, that was literally all he did.
“I was on a mission,” Giannis said. “That’s why, seven years later, I had to fucking talk to somebody. Because I had issues now, you know? But there was no stopping me.” For eight years he put his head down and chased greatness. Then he won a championship. Now, he said, he was working on all the things greatness cost him. Peace of mind. Life outside of basketball. A family. That kind of thing.
Just a year ago, Giannis’s contract with the Bucks was slated to end, and he had to decide whether to stay in Milwaukee or leave. We know what happened next, of course. But the way it happened, I think, is instructive, and perhaps suggests something about Giannis and the unique, determined way he sets out to do almost everything in life.
“Everybody was texting me: ‘Leave the team,’ ” he told me—other players, some of whom haven’t talked to him since he decided to stay. He understood, he said. “It’s human. I will say I want to play with the best players; I wish K.D. was on my team, not against me. I wish LeBron was on my team, not against me. Steph, on my team.” And the winters in Milwaukee were cold—“cold as shit,” he specified. This would be an opportunity to never see another Milwaukee winter again. To raise his sons in a place where they might see the sun from time to time.
But there was something inside him that just wanted to do it the hard way, he realized. “I chose to stay here even with all the pressure because it’s easier to leave. That’s the easy thing to do. It’s easy to leave.”
There is an aversion to easiness with Giannis that can go deep. Easy is an epithet when he says it. Easy, in Giannis-world, describes almost everything that isn’t pain, that isn’t suffering, that isn’t taking on long odds and trying to beat those odds. He regards the usual perks of being a player in the modern NBA—partying in the better Los Angeles clubs, recording in the better Los Angeles music studios, acting in Hollywood—as, basically, frivolous: “Being in movies? Easy. Space Jam, all this? Easy. Easy. I don’t want it, though.” He is intent on life itself, by which he means the painful stuff of existence, the stuff that neither money nor ability can finesse. Life? “It’s hard, life.” Or at least, his was. He pointed at his chest: “It molds you to be this guy.”
“I think he’s never wanted to take an easy way out,” Saratsis said. “In every aspect of life. He wants to be challenged.”
In the end Giannis decided to stay in Milwaukee because it was difficult. And then, improbably, the Bucks won. “One challenge was to bring a championship here and we did,” he told me. “It was very hard, but we did. Very, very hard. I just love challenges. What’s the next challenge? The next challenge might not be here.” It’s not that he doesn’t love Milwaukee, he said. But he was always wary of things becoming too easy. “Me and my family chose to stay in this city that we all love and has taken care of us—for now,” Giannis said. “In two years, that might change. I’m being totally honest with you. I’m always honest. I love this city. I love this community. I want to help as much as possible.”
Did this mean he was thinking about…leaving? I asked his agent.
“I don’t think it’s, ‘I’m thinking about leaving the Bucks,’ ” Saratsis told me. “But I think he’s genuinely like: ‘Okay, I have reached the pinnacle. The next challenge is, let’s repeat.’ But what happens if you do repeat? What’s the next challenge? What is that next barrier? When you think about it from a basketball perspective, by the age of 26, this kid has accomplished everything,” Saratsis said. “So sometimes you’re going to have to manufacture what those challenges are.”
On his home’s second floor, Giannis keeps a room full of unworn shoes. A literal room, filled to the literal top, in a house with only a normal abundance of rooms. “How many of these shoes do you think I wear?” Giannis asked me, mischievously, and then answered his own question: “I don’t wear them.”
There’s every Jordan known to man here, and shoes that Virgil wrote on. Travis Scott Nikes. Kobes. Giannis is sponsored by Nike, so this isn’t surprising, but the fact that he doesn’t wear the shoes is a little surprising, and the fact that he is keeping them is more surprising. More surprising still: “I’m going to sell this shit,” he said, with a grin. That’s why he’s devoted an entire room of his own living space to them. Not to wear them but to keep them as an investment.
Mariah’s father makes jokes about Giannis. “You know when the birds go in the morning?” Giannis said, quoting the joke. “ ‘Cheep, cheep’—cheap. That’s who I am.” On airplanes, he used to buy coach tickets and would seek out whoever was sitting in the exit row and ask them to switch: “ ‘You’re a Bucks fan?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Want two tickets for the game? When? November?’—I’m a great seller, that’s what you don’t know. I’m a great seller—‘Would you trade my seat with you?’ ”
I said that if Giannis Antetokounmpo approached me to switch seats on a commercial flight, I’d probably be surprised that he wasn’t on a private jet.
“Nobody has money for a private jet, man. Hell no, man.”
Not even to Greece?
“Why would you spend $150,000 to one-way trip there? That’s $300,000. The market makes 6 to 10 percent every year… He’s laughing.”
(I was laughing.)
“So, you can make, for the rest of your life, with that money you just spent, 24- to 30,000 a year, because that’s what the market makes on average. If you take that money and you take it away, that 24- to 30,000 growth every year goes away—correct? So why would I teach my kids that?”
Giannis drives a 2011 GMC truck he bought not long after he got here, or a Mercedes he bought in 2018, or the G-Wagon he got for free. “I don’t put my money in my stuff that loses value,” he said. Meals, sure. He and Mariah go out and eat well. “But ain’t nobody got time for spending money on clothes and time for...what’s it called?”
A stylist?
“Fuck—sorry. Eff no. Man, let me tell you one thing. This is me. If you try to spend time on how you’re going to look to the tunnel, man, you already took away focus from the game. Just put on some stuff and just focus on that 48 minutes. Not how I'm going to look in the tunnel when they show me. Now, if you’re talking about one thing I enjoy, I love watches.”
Why? Because they increase in value. He named a few, and then asked that I not say which ones. He is trying to give less free promo, now that he’s a champion: If you want your product to be mentioned by Giannis, from now on you’re going to have to pay. As we talked, he’d be deep into some anecdote and then wonder if he was supposed to promote his businesses, the sponsorships he’s already acquired, the investments—like the piece of the Milwaukee Brewers he just bought this week—he’s already made. Is he supposed to promote his businesses? How does one do that in an interview? He was unsure. He settled for leaning into my recorder, listing his endorsements, then going back to whatever story he was telling.
A mosquito flew by, and he reached out one giant hand and closed his fingers around it.
“I caught that,” he said, showing me.
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