Onumba.com, USA –—— The wait, the speculation, the pundits analysis and divergent opinions on where he would play ball next are all over.
But for Nigerian NBA superstar Giannis Antetokounmpo, it marks the beginning of the next chapter of his stellar basketball career as he heads to Miami Heat where he would join forces with another Nigerian star Bam Adebayo.
Coming from Greece, where he was born to Nigerian parents of both Igbo and Yoruba tribes, Antetokounmpo was quickly monickered the ‘Greek Freak’ because of the enormous challenge for pundits and reporters pronouncing his last name.
And that last name, with all of the setbacks associated with it, highlights just how far this previously scrawny dude has come.
The two-time NBA Most Valuable Player (MVP) played for the Milwaukee Bucks since he entered the league in 2013, quickly developing a reputation as a tough, versatile and dominant player that easily ranks him alongside only a handful of elite players in the special orbit.
But soon after joining the NBA, and emerged as a formidable juggernaut, Antetokounmpo was hit with a setback after the death of his father Charles in 2017 at the age of 54 of heart attack. When he bagged his first NBA MVP trophy, Antetokounmpo reflected on a nostalgic mix of emotions fuelled by the good news of his MVP accomplishment without his father’s presence.
Antetokounmpo, 31, credits his quantum leap to superstardom to his late dad who constantly encouraged and pushed him to strive to be the best. Now he is. A lengthy tapestry of his accomplishments has catapulted him to the epitome of basketball in a league packed with the best players on the planet.
He was selected 15th in the 2013 draft by the Bucks.
Antetokounmpo suffered a strange Achilles heel in the NBA in the beginning. No ——- not that Achilles heel that often sidelines athletes for months. This Achilles heel was his last name. It obscured his epic talent resulting in a stunted growth initially. He unleashed his talent game after game, but the pundits hiccup was their lazy inability to get past his last name, and as a result, he suffered a severely truncated hype.
But while his rise in the NBA wasn’t exactly meteoric, people taking notice of it made it appear as though it was a quantum leap into superstardom.
His coach at the time Jason Kidd knew precisely why Antetokounmpo was not yet a household name. He expressed the view that the ‘Greek Freak’ has been good all along, only he was not accorded his props earlier in his career.
A reporter asked Kidd why Antetokounmpo was not receiving his props.
He replied: “his last name.”
Because of his long last name, which to Americans looks more like an alphabet soup than a last name, Antetokounmpo toiled in obscurity, despite his obvious superior stats, impressive production and all round spectacular showings.
But after the fog of his last name that once eclipsed his game was cleared, thanks to reporters and pundits for discarding Antetokounmpo for “Greek Freak” and “Giannis, allowing for a easy injection of his name into analysis and paving the way for his on court brilliance and super star level production to shine unobstructed. It didn’t take long for him to become a household name.
Antetokounmpo enjoys dual citizenship of both Nigeria and Greece.
His Nigerian parents are a Yoruba father and an Igbo mother.
