It wasn’t exactly the shot that Giannis Antetokounmpo wanted, but, then, all he really wanted was the last shot. Everyone knew this, Antetokounmpo most of all: when the game clock started to wind down, he would have the ball. And so, with fifteen seconds left in Monday night’s game between the Milwaukee Bucks and the Indiana Pacers, and the score tied, he backed down a Pacers defender, then spun into a fadeaway as the buzzer sounded. The crowd in Indianapolis, which had kicked off its booing early—during a video tribute to the former Pacer Myles Turner, who had left Indiana during the summer for a much bigger contract in Milwaukee—watched anxiously, as the shot went through the net. And Antetokounmpo, who had earlier booed back at the crowd after a thunderous dunk, put his fingers to his lips again, before giving the crowd an emphatic thumbs-down.
The word on Antetokounmpo at the start of his career was that he was nice—too nice, even. Back then, he was around six feet nine and scrawny, and got bullied around the rim. The sportswriter Mirin Fader, in her book “Giannis,” describes how, after his rookie season on the Bucks, he would stand in front of a mirror and practice a scowl. If he was known for anything, it was for his innocent enthusiasms. “I just taste for the first time a [smoothie],” he tweeted as a rookie. “MAN GOD BLESS AMERICA😊.” The tweet went viral, of course. Then he grew two and a half inches and packed on muscle and became one of the most fearsome athletes in the world, a freight train coming through the paint to slam the ball home, again and again.
Still, for a while, off the court, his reputation for gentleness and humility persisted. N.B.A. fans learned about his childhood—how he had hawked CDs and DVDs on the streets of Athens, to help support his brothers and his parents, Nigerian immigrants in Greece who had no papers and struggled to find work. One can imagine the toughness and difficulty that might result from such an upbringing, but Antetokounmpo’s outward personality, and his foreign background, seemed to prompt many Americans to view him with an air of enchantment. There was so much delight in his smile, so much generosity in the way he deferred credit and heaped praise on his teammates. The Bucks won a title in 2021, and Antetokounmpo scored fifty points in the clinching game. His life sounded like a Disney movie even before it became one, in 2022. (It’s called “Rise.”) Perhaps this is how he wanted the world to see him, the Disney version—he’s credited as an executive producer.
But the real story has edges and is more complicated than a fairy tale. On a press dais after a loss, Antetokounmpo, asked by a reporter whether he viewed the season as a failure, famously replied that he doesn’t think in terms of failure but instead in terms of growth.