According to a new book, Giannis Antetokounmpo, who is now perhaps the NBA’s most brilliant player, was so impoverished as a child that he had to share a pair of basketball sneakers with his older brother.

The athlete, who grew up in a neighborhood of the Greek capital Athens, had to wait for his brother Thanasis to finish playing before he could wear his size 15 sneakers since his parents couldn’t afford two sets.

Giannis once passed out while training on an empty stomach since the family of seven was struggling to make ends meet and frequently went without food.

His current lifestyle as the star player of the Milwaukee Bucks, whom he helped lead to victory in the NBA championship in May for the first time since 1971, is a far cry from his modest beginnings.

In her new biography, Giannis: The Improbable Rise of an NBA MVP, written by Mirin Fader and released on Tuesday, the poverty to riches tale is exposed.

According to Fader, the 6′ 11″ basketball player was so ecstatic after the incredible victory that he consumed pancakes nonstop for ten days after trying them for the first time.

He grew fixated on Walmart, which he viewed as a “treat,” and he would fill up containers of food from the free buffet after practice because he was so used to living in poverty.

Giannis ordered everything at once when he first visited Chipotle because he was so overwhelmed by the selection, which required him to wrap it all in two football-sized tortillas.

According to Mirin Fader, a writer for the sports website The Ringer, the NBA was dominated by an unknown, slender Greek immigrant with Nigerian parents who played in Greece’s lowest professional level and was considered a wildcard draft gambler.

Only basketball greats like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and LeBron James had won the league’s Most Valuable Player award before the age of 26, which Giannis did in 2019 and 2020.

But for Giannis, whose parents emigrated to Athens from Nigeria in 1991 in pursuit of a better life because of the unrest in their native country, such splendor was a pipe dream back home.

They relocated to Athens’ working-class area of Sepolia, but they had trouble finding job and were denied Greek citizenship.

According to the book, Giannis was born three years later, and by the time he was six years old, he and his mother Veronica were already making a living by selling phony purses and sunglasses on the street.

If his family didn’t have enough food, his father Charles would forgo meals for a few days. At one occasion, his mother had to sell her wedding band to buy food for the family.

Giannis once had to go with his mother to the landlord’s office to plead for additional time to pay the rent after the family was evicted more times than they could recall.

When Giannis was growing up, he first aspired to be like his father, who was a gifted soccer player until suffering an injury.

However, a local coach named Spiros Velliniatis convinced him to start playing basketball when he was 13 years old, saying that God had spoken to him.

Nothing ‘divine’ was at work, according to Velliniatis, even if Giannis had no basketball skills or talents at the time.

Giannis arrived forty minutes early for practice at a national training camp and gave it his all.

He started playing for the Filathlitikos youth squad, which participated in the Greek national second division. At halftime, some of the players would smoke, and the team’s lack of professionalism was astounding.

Since Giannis couldn’t always afford the metro and bus fare, the dusty gym was two hours’ walk from his house in a run-down area of Athens and lacked air conditioning.

Despite his poor shooting skills and inability to dribble, Giannis remained committed to improving.

But because he was skipping meals and not getting enough nutrition, even exercise became difficult.

Because he was so weak that he ‘could not go on any more,’ Giannis started ‘gasping for oxygen’ during one session and finally passed out, according to Fader.

Following the event, his teammates would continuously give him food after learning that he had not eaten anything during the day.

In order for Giannis to play immediately following his game, his brother Thanasis would give him a pair of sneakers that Giannis shared.

But the family’s low socioeconomic standing wasn’t the only social obstacle they had to overcome.

Alex, Giannis’s younger brother, claimed that they always felt like “outsiders” because they were black growing up in a predominantly white nation.

This was particularly true when it came to race, and Giannis was referred to as a “blackie” by passersby, who advised him to “go back to your country.”

Rahman Rana, a teammate of Giannis with Pakistani ancestry, recalled: “He was treated horribly by people.”

“We received second-class treatment.”

Giannis played against another team in Crete when he was sixteen years old, and the opposing fans yelled, “Go home, monkeys,” and threw coins and drink cans at him.

After the game, Fader writes, he started crying.

“It was the saddest day, seeing how racist people are,” Rana recounted, recalling how Giannis was “just shattered.”

“People were rejecting us despite the fact that we were trying so hard to fit in with this society.”

Giannis opened out to Rana, saying that he felt “destroyed” witnessing his family live in such poverty.

Fearing that the police would stop them or that white vigilantes would attack them on the street, Giannis and his brother kept at home at night.

Giannis was afraid of being detained and expelled from the country because he had no documents.

Nikolaos Gkikas claimed that Giannis could only deal with the bigotry by “burying it deep inside.”

After putting in a lot of effort, Giannis was soon winning games by swatting away opponents’ shots at one end of the court and dunking at the other.

Despite his 6′ 11″ height and his wingspan, which would eventually exceed 7 feet, he learned how to dribble like a point guard.

However, he was confined to the semi-pro second league since he lacked Greek citizenship, which prevented him from traveling by air or playing for the Greek first division.

Giannis had secured an agent by 2012, but when undergoing a physical examination, the physician was taken aback by the appearance of his liver, which appeared to be that of a 70-year-old alcoholic.

To relieve the burden on his body, the doctor suggested that Giannis increase his intake of nutritious meals.

NBA scouts started to show interest in 16-year-old Giannis after hearing rumors about a gifted but unpolished adolescent.

After arriving in limousines, they trekked to the filthy gym in Zografou, where scores of NBA scouts sat with clipboards.

American interest put tremendous pressure on Greek officials to grant Giannis citizenship so that he could be able to relocate to the US.

Only after Giannis garnered attention from basketball clubs and his family contacted the Nigerian embassy in Greece did they expedite the process, according to Fader’s harsh writing.

After obtaining his passport in May 2013, Giannis had to confront the intimidating NBA draft.