51before the season that he wouldn’t talk much about his
contract, and for the most part he hasn’t. “When I thought
about it this summer when I was sitting down with Thanasis
and my family on the couch watching shows and all that, I
feel that if you have a great team—and our goal is to win a
championship and be the last team standing and get better
each day—I think it’s disrespectful toward my teammates,
talking about my free agency,” he said in September.
On this day, in the Bucks’ locker room, Giannis pro-
nounces himself conditionally content. He and Thanasis
have an endearing habit of repeating words and phrases.
Adjectives issue from their mouths like paired animals
departing Noah’s Ark. “Crazy, crazy,” Giannis will say of
some spectacle. Or “Amazing, amazing.” Tonight, he says:
“I’m happy, I’m happy that we’re winning.”
He is also happy to be winning in the hashtagged sense
of the word, winning at life, in every conceivable way. In
Athens, the Antetokounmpos famously sold DVDs to make
ends meet before coming to America, a phrase that is hinted
at on the Nike T-shirt Giannis wears after shootaround this
morning: Every letter in the word freak is rendered in
the tartan pattern of McDowell’s, the fast-food franchise
from the 1988 Eddie Murphy comedy Coming to America.
Giannis came to America with his family in 2013, during
the final season the Bucks were owned by Herb Kohl, who
attended Washington High in Sherman Park. Kohl’s father,
Maxwell, was a Polish immigrant who opened a grocery
store that would become a chain of supermarkets, those
dizzying American wonders. A chain of Kohl’s department
stores followed. Kohl’s mother, Mary, also emigrated to
America, from Russia. Herb Kohl served Wisconsin as a
U.S. senator from 1989 to 2013, when he helped bring
the Antetokounmpos to America. Alex was enrolled in
Saint Monica’s, the Catholic middle school down the street
from Dominican, where the boy had some initial difficulty
navigating two intimidating new cultures: America and
middle school: “It was much harder than high school,”
says Alex. “In middle school, it was harder to fit in. A kid
that age is not going to understand our family’s situation.”
That family’s story, even now, can be hard to fathom.
Giannis calls it an “amazing dream” and an “unbelievable
journey.” They’re not alone. “As the product of immigrants
myself, I believe in the American dream: the notion of hard
work, sacrifice, risk-taking and love,” says Kohl, 85. “That
is also the story of Giannis’s family.”
And that family recently grew by one. Giannis and
Riddlesprigger now have a son, Liam Charles, born on Feb. 10,
making Alex, Thanasis and Kostas new uncles in a growing
Nigerian-Greek-American family: the Antetokounmpos of
Lagos and Athens and Greater Milwaukee.
“My happiness level is here,” Thanasis was saying on a
cold winter morning in Wisconsin, raising his right hand
several inches above his head, to roughly the height of
his world-famous brother. “Our family’s happiness level
is here.” He held his hand there for a moment and looked
up, to roughly the height of his world-famous brother. ¼chantment with a city best known for beer and bratwurst.”
Forty-five years later, Milwaukee is perhaps still best
known nationally for those two inexhaustible resources. A
“Bratzooka” now fires rounds of cylindrical pork at Bucks
fans in the Fiserv Forum, and a “Beer Me” button summons
suds to the seat of any spectator who has downloaded the
arena’s app. The Bucks offices are in the former Schlitz
brewery campus, redeveloped as Schlitz Park, twinning
beer and deer for the foreseeable future.
But Giannis is sweeter on another of Milwaukee’s enduring
loves: professional wrestling. The late Reggie Lisowski—
known to 20th-century wrestling fans as the Crusher—is
commemorated in bronze in his native South Milwaukee;
he’s holding a beer keg on his right shoulder, his left arm
perfectly positioned for photo-op headlocks. On a cold dayin February, someone has placed a Packers hat on his head.
“Always, always,” says Thanasis, of the brothers’ enduring
ardor for piledrivers and camel clutches, kindled via TV dur-
ing their Athenian childhood. “There was a lot of people [we
admired].” He exhales deeply, loath to choose a favorite. “I
could give you a top five: Undertaker, Stone Cold, the Rock,
Eddie Guerrero—he was amazing. So many, so many... .”
He gets a faraway look, lost in wrestling reverie, and forgets
to names a fifth. But that night, before the Bucks take the
court, in the neon-lit tunnel outside Milwaukee’s locker
room, Giannis busts out the Cobra, the signature finishing
move of the WWE’s erstwhile intercontinental champion
Santino Marella, and applies it to teammate Robin Lopez.
They do this pantomime of professional wrestling before
games, Giannis, Lopez and company, betraying no signs of
anxiety over last year’s conference final exit to the Raptors,
or of the unspoken F-word that is free agency. Giannis saidAPRIL 2020ERI
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