ST. FRANCIS, Wis. – Within the walls of his three-bedroom apartment, Giannis Antetokounmpo had come to combat the beginnings of a long winter's loneliness with the preferred passage of untold young NBA players: PlayStation 4. Thousands upon thousands of hours are unapologetically consumed in the mesmerizing grasp of the flickering images on screen, and perhaps few hands so enormous had ever wrapped themselves around the game's controls.

The cold winds had come sweeping across Lake Michigan, colliding into glass doors on a balcony that belongs to the 19-year-old phenom decreed as the Greek Freak. The solitude and dull drone of those November days and nights had been constructed for the mindlessness of the PS4 and it left the Milwaukee Bucks' Giannis Antetokounmpo (pronounced YAHN-iss Ah-deh-toh-KOON-boh) playing the games the way every NBA rookie in a strange city with time loved to do.

Only, a gnawing sense of dread washed over him. Only, it felt wrong.

"He felt … guilty," his older brother Thanasis says.

Guilty over the retail price of $399, the most Giannis had ever spent on something so frivolous in his life. Guilty over his two younger brothers in Greece struggling with his parents to undo the immigration red tape to visit him in the United States. Guilty over all those long afternoons and evenings on the streets of Athens as hungry, desperate boys, peddling sunglasses and souvenir trinkets to cobble together money for groceries and power bills.

"Let's do something with our lives," Thanasis would tell Giannis, "so we never have to do this again."

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"Day by day," Giannis says now, "we got stronger."

Yes, Giannis sold his PlayStation 4 to Bucks assistant coach Nick Van Exel for the retail price and waited the three months until, finally, his family arrived in the United States to indulge himself in a console again. There are reasons Giannis sets aside most of his $1.7 million rookie salary and tries to live on the $190 daily per diem – including the per diems his veteran teammates sympathetically pass his way. There are reasons those teammates furnished his apartment with hand-me-down furniture. Yes, there are reasons why Giannis, together with his 21-year-old brother, Thanasis, who plays for Delaware in the NBA Development League, sat paralyzed early this season in an upscale Philadelphia restaurant staring at the menus.

"Get whatever you want to eat," Giannis told Thanasis.

Together, they stared at the entrees.

"Whatever you want," Giannis told him again.

Together, they stared. And they stared.

"I took the salad," Thanasis finally said. "He did the same thing."

To understand the reluctance of indulging into lives transformed, into the possibilities of excess when so recently there had been nothing, rewind to the years of the two older brothers – through a mother's illness, through a father fighting for steady work – refusing to come back home to a tiny abode near the Acropolis until they could bring groceries, bring back the dollars and coins to pay the power bill.

"We would be out on the street together, selling a toy, a watch, something, and we raise $10," Thanasis says. "And that is good, because we didn't starve today. We're going to go home. We're going to have something to eat. And it is a good day."

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