ATHLETE OF THE YEAR GIANNIS ANTETOKOUNMPO

His fairy-tale rise made him a sensation. But now, after turning the once-dismal Milwaukee Bucks into champions, he’s becoming something of a legend. Inside the next whirlwind chapter for the NBA’s most dazzling global star—who’s deciding what he intends to conquer next.

- ZACH BARON

Not long ago, Giannis Antetokounmpo watched his partner, Mariah Riddlesprigger, give birth to their second son, Maverick, and when he saw Maverick he immediately burst into tears. This happened with Antetokounmpo’s first son, Liam Charles, too—that Giannis wept. “But I thought maybe it was because he was my first one,” he told me. He doesn’t think of himself as someone who cries, he said; he’s survived too much deprivation, too many provocations, to be reduced to tears by just anything.

We were in the living room of his red-brick house in the Milwaukee suburbs, hiding out from the August sun. Mariah was napping in the other room. Liam, big now and curly haired, was wandering around saying hi to everything that moved. Mav was in Giannis’s lap. Giannis was trying to explain just what these boys did to him when they arrived.