This happened again after Game 6, he said: that he needed an IV. Then he went back to the hotel and got a second one. “I ask, ‘Can you give me that trash can?’ Throw up five times.” They gave him an IV-he was so dehydrated it took them 45 minutes to find the vein. “I’m naked, I only have my towel,” lying on the trainer’s table, he remembered. In the shower, after the next game, he started cramping his lips turned purple his hands got white. How the fuck is that possible? He was in one place and suddenly he was in a completely different place in about a millisecond. And when he jumped to block Ayton’s shot, that was the leg he jumped off. Somehow he played in all six games of the Finals anyway. ‘I thought you would be an NBA player and have a better life. You know why nobody saw it? Because I didn’t see it. Giannis will tell you himself: “What I am today, nobody saw it. “He looked like a guy who was going to be a project,” his longtime teammate Khris Middleton said. It was basically, “Wow, this guy does some wild stuff sometimes.” He was regarded, in his early NBA days, as capable, not destined. I’d argue that Giannis was one of these guys, first: a curio, an intriguing combination of traits and potential, but no more than that.
They don’t always attain it, but you see it with athletes like LeBron James or Kevin Durant within seconds: They are playing a different, easier game they are competing more against history, against gravity, against spectral forces in the dark, than they are against the regular guys around them. Some players seem haloed in greatness from the moment we lay eyes on them. Got handed his championship ring and went right out and scored 32 points in 31 minutes against the Brooklyn Nets in the first game of the season. He is already back out there, defending his title. A journey unfathomable in its sheer improbability, its storybook ending, an ending that may in fact be just the beginning of something even more grand and unlikely. Who was this guy? Would he be any good? Well, this is what happened next: Most Improved Player (2017), Defensive Player of the Year (2020), two MVP awards (2019, 2020), and an NBA championship this past July. All anyone knew about him at the time was that he was tall and super athletic and that he would occasionally do something remarkable, like run from one end of the court to the other in just a few strides, or jump higher than anyone else to block a shot he had no business blocking. How he had yet to become even the best player on his second-division Greek team when he was drafted in 2013 by the Milwaukee Bucks, who picked him at 15. How he was discovered as a gangly kid running around an Athens playground how he didn’t touch a basketball until he was 13. Please watch me.’ You know?” But Liam, Giannis decided, would be his own person, not a replacement for the father Giannis lost.īy now, much of his story is known.
When his team, the Milwaukee Bucks, won the NBA Finals in July, one of the first things Giannis did after the buzzer sounded was find a quiet place in a very loud arena to sit and talk to his father: “ ‘Man, we’ve come a long way. “You cannot fill that void,” Giannis realized. But his mother told him: Let the memory of your father be the memory of your father. I lost somebody that I loved, Giannis thought, and now I’ve got somebody back that I love a lot. Then all of a sudden here was this new being with his father’s name.
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Ever since his dad died, he’d felt an emptiness he didn’t know how to fill, he said. Giannis and Mariah named Liam in part after Antetokounmpo’s father, Charles, who passed in 2017, and so Giannis thought that might have been part of it, too, at the time-that maybe he was crying out of delayed grief.
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