“To this day, I feel the effect, the traumatic stress. That came two weeks after nearly ripping apart his left knee in a fall during a game that left it looking like an elbow, he said.“My leg was the opposite way,” Giannis said. “I look at the block – How the f–k did I do this s–t?” is how he put it. He astounds even the best, his block on Deandre Ayton at the end of Game 4, “a feat of athleticism so impossible and otherworldly that it’s even more confusing in slow motion,” the story noted. ‘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. In his first game of the new season, he scored 32 points in 31 minutes against the Brooklyn Nets, who boasted Kevin Durant, now surpassed by Antetokounmpo, called The Greek Freak for his freakish abilities in the lingo of compliments players give each other. “I think he’s never wanted to take an easy way out,” his manager Alex Saratsis said. “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,” the magazine piece put it. Now, Antetokounmpo, who decided to stay in Milwaukee and signed a $228 million contract extension, can show off a raft of honors, including Most Improved Player (2017), Defensive Player of the Year (2020), two MVP awards (2019, 2020), and an NBA championship. He came to the league as tall and athletic but not without the skills he would hone against the world’s best until he became better than them, rarely put down although Kawhi Leonard schooled him hard in a showdown.
He was a good, very good player in Greece but not the hoop monster he became as his skinny body grew out and his indomitable spirit, built by adversity, pushed him all the way to a title and NBA king. “Six months before I came to the NBA, I was selling stuff in the street,” he told GQ. The story showed that it hasn’t gone to his head though and that family comes first, his brothers Kostas and Thanasis also in the NBA but as role players, and that it was relentless hard work that brought him to the top, so happy to be picked by the Bucks he waved the Greek flag at the draft. With the honor, Antetokounmpo joined the likes of other superstars such as hoopster Lebron James and quarterback Tom Brady for the cover of the magazine that’s more noted for showing off men in expensive clothes and gear. The magazine’s Senior Staff Writer, Zach Baron, outlined the rise of Antetokounmpo, who was a raw talent drafted by the Bucks in 2013, showing only the glimmer of a promise of the high-flying multi-threat hoop pterodactyl he would become, dominating the league. It’s a long way from Greece – which he still considers home – where he had to share one pair of basketball sneakers with his brother and fainted during practice after going days without food, and helped his mother peddle fake bags on the street, the family evicted from homes several times. He hasn’t let fame or fortune go to his head, remaining humble and not forgetting a tough upbringing and being shunned by Greek society until his skills on the court gained the son of Nigerian immigrants citizenship.Īnd now the cover of GQ and being named the men’s fashion magazine the 2021 Athlete of the Year, replete with a shoot inside that shows him wearing a $17,700 bracelet, a $16,000 necklace and $1,340 sweater.Ĭoming off an NBA championship year in which he was named the Most Valuable Player in the finals that brought the Milwaukee Bucks their first title in half a century, Antetokounmpo is riding the crest of celebrity. As a kid on the hardscrabble streets of the Athens working-class neighborhood of Sepolia, he used to hawk sunglasses for sale but now Giannis Antetokounmpo – arguably the world’s best basketball player – can afford to spend thousands for a pair of his own – if he wanted.
0 kommentar(er)
