I guess my last post absolutely shut everyone else up, lol.
I'll try to revive this thread by sharing a bit on why Giannis is my favorite athlete. It's not just because he plays for my favorite team.
Reminds me of how I used to want to be anywhere but home around that age, because I was either depressed from not having the toys and games my better-off cousins had, scared to be outside in a drug-riddled and violent neighborhood, or at best, bored. I’d beg my mom to take us to Target (a superstore here in the US) because it would always have a couple of the current game consoles out with the latest games to play, and that was often my best way to experience new games. I’d get there and be like, "OK Mom, I’m good. You can leave me alone for a couple of hours now", lol.
I don't really go to Target very often these days, but in a weird way, I kind of see the brand as a friend, like the friend that would let you come over and play his/her games. And unlike my rich cousins, wouldn't make fun of me for circumstances I didn't yet understand or were beyond my control, didn't make me feel inferior, and didn't use what they had as a form of control.
Target is the reason that I'm such a huge Nintendo fan today. I was very much an impressionable kid in the mid-90s, and the PlayStation kiosk would often have demo disks of games that were buggy, took forever to load, and always incomplete. Even the ones that were fun ended far too early. Because the N64 obviously couldn't have demo disks, they'd put full games out on display, so I'd spend hours on Super Mario 64, GoldenEye, Star Fox 64, Mischief Makers and so on. So when the time came when I could finally get a console at home, it HAD to be the N64.
I don’t think we had it as bad as the Antetokounmpos, but part of the reason I root for Giannis is because I can absolutely relate to his come up. And I love how he has never taken his eyes off the prize while keeping family number one. You can hate him as a rival, but you have to love him as a person.
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