Takeaways (and some story alterations) from 'Rise,' the Disney+ movie about the life of Giannis Antetokounmpo
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The almost unfathomable real-life story of Milwaukee Bucks star Giannis Antetokounmpo was given the Disney treatment with the Friday release of "Rise," a chronicle of his journey as the child of undocumented Nigerian immigrants in Greece to basketball fame.
The family-friendly movie follows young Giannis and brother Thanasis as they discover the sport while trying to make ends meet for their family, the obstacles along the way and the events that landed Giannis in the 2013 NBA draft.
The Bucks took a gamble on the raw, mysterious prospect with the 15th pick in that draft nine years ago today (June 27, 2013), a decision that would transform the franchise and lead to the 2021 NBA championship.
More: Milwaukee Bucks forward Thanasis Antetokounmpo picks up player option for 2022-23 season
Some details were a little curious, but with Giannis as one of the film's executive producers, we can expect at least the bones of the story to be rooted in accuracy. Here are some takeaways.
Perhaps we underestimate how harrowing life was for Giannis' parents
The movie opens with a dramatic sequence in which the Adetokunbo parents, Charles and Veronica, escape deportation in Turkey and manage to cross the border into Greece (their name was later changed to the different spelling as part of the citizenship process).
When Veronica is in labor with Giannis, she takes a city bus to the hospital and has to skirt questions about her residency. Veronica also explains to a Greek official the Catch-22 her family faced; they couldn't get legal residency without a legal job, but nobody would hire them for a legal job without residency.
Throughout the film, the parents are understandably cautious about the brothers' discovery of basketball, worried that the visibility might prompt government officials to deport the family, even though Giannis and three of his brothers (Thanasis, Kostas, Alex) were born in Greece.
Giannis' older brother Francis Antetokounmpo is at the heart of the story
The movie also focuses on the emotional story of Francis Antetokounmpo, the oldest child of the family who was left in Nigeria with grandparents so Veronica and Charles could emigrate.
Often, Francis — who pursued soccer like his father while living in Nigeria — doesn't get mentioned in the same space as the other four brothers because he didn't grow up in Greece. Giannis in the movie vows that through basketball, he can reunite the family in the United States, including Francis.
'Rise' is really about Thanasis, too
Those who have followed the Antetokounmpo story know that Thanasis plays a role much larger than merely the hype man on the Bucks bench who occasionally subs in for high-energy minutes and flashy dunks.
When the brothers were younger, Thanasis was considered the bigger basketball prospect, and he also served as a mentor for his younger brother.
More: Three Antetokounmpo brothers are headed to all-star weekend: 'It's history'
In the movie, Thanasis has an opportunity to play for a higher-level basketball club — complete with a paycheck that would have helped the family significantly — but the offer was rescinded when the club learned of his family's undocumented immigrant status.
Thanasis indeed signed to play with Maroussi BV, though the details were perhaps a little different in real life. From Mirin Fader's book, "Giannis: The Improbable Rise of an NBA MVP":
"Financial issues wiped out the team before Thanasis could play even a single game for it. Plus Thanasis didn’t have citizenship papers, so he was ineligible to play in any event. Watching that sliver of hope dissolve was devastating. 'That was the first little bit of success that we’d seen,' Alex says. 'It put us at the top, then knocked us down.' "
The movie also profiles a Thanasis ankle injury that forced Giannis to take charge of his Greek team — an unfamiliar position in which the younger brother thrived. The injury also keeps Thanasis from a FIBA regional tryout for European scouts.
The FIBA tryout specifically isn't mentioned in Fader's book, though there is a mention of Giannis not getting playing time in a preseason game for the 2014 FIBA Basketball World Cup. But Giannis did compete in several tryouts, including some that included NBA scouts (like Bucks GM John Hammond, who's portrayed in the movie but not shown making the trip to Greece).
The tryout in the movie leads to an unsettling encounter with a Greek agent who threatened to alert authorities of their immigration status if Giannis didn't sign with his Greek program.
The draft process is portrayed a little differently than reality, including agent Haris Eleftheriou
One of the film's chief characters in the latter half of the movie is an inexperienced agent named Haris Eleftheriou, who vows to do everything he can to get the brothers a pro opportunity. In turn, the family exhibits loyalty to him even when the aforementioned Greek scout tries to steal the family away as clients.
There's no real-life reporting of an agent named Haris Eleftheriou; presumably he's an amalgamation of agents Georgios Dimitropoulos and Giorgos Panou, who were among the first to recognize Giannis' talent and ultimately steered him toward agent Alex Saratsis, who formally began contacting NBA or EuroLeague scouts.
In the movie, the concept of the NBA draft is proposed as a solution by Eleftheriou to help Giannis get his family all in the same place; Eleftheriou had negotiated an opportunity for Giannis to play with Spanish team Zaragoza with a clause that allowed him to depart for the United States if he's selected in the draft. Eleftheriou suggested NBA teams would help Giannis' family get stateside, whereas the Spanish team would not be willing to fight for visas for everyone in the family.
But with the Antetokounmpo family uncertain if he'd get drafted, the risk is explained that Giannis would then play for the Spanish team (without his family allowed into the country), and possibly have the family's status exposed to a broader audience.
Fader's book outlines how many different forces were at work to pressure the Greek government to issue visas (and thus provide official Greek citizenship) for Giannis because he'd been identified as such an elite talent, and Greece would be cast in a negative light if it disallowed Giannis to compete on the NBA stage or if he pursued a Nigerian passport to play on the Spanish team.
Zaragoza did, in fact, offer Giannis a contract and was willing to work on the visa situation, but the NBA draft wasn't necessarily a late-in-the-game solution; many scouts from America had flown to Greece to see Giannis play.
Of course, the country did indeed issue visas for both Giannis and Thanasis to travel to the draft, and the Bucks coordinated for all members of the Antetokounmpo family to move to America.
This intriguing Milwaukee shout-out doesn't make timeline sense
At one point, Giannis asks his brother just before the draft if he might not get picked, and Thanasis tells him that people don't get picked all the time. His examples of players who fit this mold were perhaps unexpected, including Dwight Buycks, Diante Garrett and JaMychal Green.
Buycks played at Bay View High School and Marquette University, and Garrett attended Milwaukee Vincent before going to Iowa State. All wound up playing in the NBA, though curiously, Buycks and Green both didn't play in NBA games until after that 2013 draft, so it likely has to count as a continuity error. Garrett had played in only 19 games to that point.
The Philadelphia 76ers trolling is strong
It's hard not to laugh in the final stages of the movie when teams are continually passing on Giannis in the draft, including Philadelphia, which had been thought to have interest. "What even is a 76er?" asks one of the characters gathered in Greece with the family to watch the draft on TV. "Seventy-sixes cannot play basketball."
This comes on the heels of a joke in HBO's "Hacks," in which the two main characters discuss Philadelphia's "Trust the process" mantra as an ethos they could apply to their own situation, only to be told that the 76ers had not, in fact, followed the process to a successful finish.
Giannis' dad passed away from a sudden heart attack, nodded to at end of movie
This is the story about the boys growing up, but the movie does close with a bit of a montage that features some moments from his success in Milwaukee, including the 2021 NBA Finals.
The clip of Giannis delivering the speech after accepting his first MVP, in honor of his late father, still gets us! Charles died suddenly of a heart attack at age 54 in Milwaukee.
After an epic performance in the first home win of the 2017-18 season, Giannis dedicated the night to his father, and his emotional speech while accepting his first MVP award in 2019 references Charles.
Otherwise, Hammond is really the only Bucks representative people will recognize portrayed on screen..
JR Radcliffe can be reached at (262) 361-9141 or jradcliffe@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter at @JRRadcliffe.
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This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Giannis Disney+ movie 'Rise': What's fact, fiction and more takeaways
