After he won the NBA Finals, he went to Chick-fil-A with the Larry O’Brien trophy and the Finals MVP trophy and ordered exactly 50 nuggets—one for every point he scored in the last game of the series. But he’s trying not to tell that story anymore, either, until Chick-fil-A pays up. His teammates went to Vegas the night the Bucks won, but he didn’t. “They understand,” he told me. “They be like, ‘Giannis doesn't care about this shit.’” His teammates have been around him enough to know that they don’t really know him at all, he said. “If you asked them if they really know me: ‘No.’ I’m about work, and then I dip. I go back home to enjoy my time with my family, and then I do it again, over and over again. I don't have time to go for dinners and stuff. I don't have time to go and mess around and go out. I don't do that.” Middleton said that it took him five years to feel like he knew Giannis even 50 percent—now, after eight, he figures he’s up to 60 or even 90. But Giannis, he said, had matured too. “He’s grown and realized he’s the franchise player,” Middleton said. “So he knows he’s got to have some kind of chemistry with his teammates.”
A few weeks before we met, Giannis flew to Greece and went to the Acropolis with his brothers and walked around with the trophies. And that was the extent of it. He is already done celebrating, he said. “It’s over with. The championship is over with. Over with. Now, I’m working. In order for me to get better, I leave this championship bullshit stuff in the past.” He is back to playing basketball this fall. Back on the hard path to the hard thing.
But before he put those memories away entirely, I asked him if he could just give me one or two—were there moments, in retrospect, that had stuck with him? That mattered? He thought about it and agreed to share a few: the IVs he got; the long sleepless nights between Game 5 and Game 6; the first frantic minutes of Game 6, when he kept rushing and getting ahead of himself, instead of being in the moment.
But what he wanted me to remember most, he said, was the end.
After the Bucks had won the game, “What happened?” Giannis asked me. “The team, everybody gathered around when they realized we won, and immediately Coach came and grabbed me. Go watch the tape. Coach came and grabbed me and I pushed him out of the way. I went to my family. I hugged my mom, I hugged my brothers, I hugged my wife-to-be, I hugged my son, then I sat down and thought about my dad, right?” They were in Milwaukee; the whole arena was going crazy. So were his teammates. But Giannis found a place to sit again, by himself.
Giannis asked that I pay particular attention to what happened next, because to him what happened next illustrates something essential about him. Some of it has to do with his family: how close they are, how much he depends on them. And I don’t want to put words in his mouth; it was an image he offered, not an explanation. But without speaking for him, I think some of what he wanted me to understand was about the singular loneliness of the path. What “hard” actually means. In the end, greatness is fundamentally isolating. What you have to do to achieve it separates you from everyone else in a way that is difficult to undo.