"What is it?"
I get this question a lot when explaining my vision for Up From Here.
The best I can usually do is to say that it's a modern media brand that treats sports as what they've always been to me - life's most honest teacher, delivering truths in a language nearly everyone understands, reminding us what we're capable of and bringing us all a little closer together.
But the best articulation for the spirit of what I've set out to build actually comes from a twenty-something from Greece built like a superhero, who once said with a thick accent but perfect clarity: “There’s no failure in sports.”
If you have somehow never watched this, I encourage you to take the time.
His thoughtful perspective caused a predictable sh*t storm in the news cycles - because of course it did - but spoke to me in a way no words from an athlete's mouth ever had.
I have fallen into this binary trap for most of my life:
We either win, or we are failures.
That perspective, as Giannis masterfully demonstrates, isn't just wrong.
It's absurd.
In today's issue, you'll find the story of a man who turned his greatest vulnerability into his most profound strength - not by conquering it, but by moving through it.
There's a lesson here that extends far beyond free throws, beyond basketball, beyond sports.
It's about how we relate to our own imperfections, how we carry our vulnerabilities, and how we find presence amid pressure.
It's about time, patience, and the courage to take your own measure rather than allowing others to measure you.
It's about furiously embracing the belief that it can and will get better as long as you’re willing to never stop the pursuit.
In other words, it's exactly what I hope Up From Here will always be about.
In your corner,
The Legend:
One of only 11 players ever to win NBA MVP, All-Star MVP, and NBA Finals MVP.
THE LEGEND
Before the championship.
Before the mockery.
Before the counting.
Giannis Antetokounmpo's relationship with time had always been complicated.
A child of Nigerian immigrants, he grew up on the streets of Athens, where time wasn't something you owned - it was something you borrowed.
He learned to move faster than the world around him.
To sell trinkets before the police arrived.
To be punctual for practice even when he didn’t know how he’d get there.
Even his own body seemed to be racing ahead, stretching inches overnight, evolving faster than his skill set could keep up.
By the time the 2021 playoffs arrived, he had stretched the boundaries of what seemed possible on a basketball court - except at the free throw line.
The ritual had followed him from Miami to Brooklyn to Atlanta, each arena finding its own rhythm to the same mocking melody.
But nowhere was the scrutiny more intense than at the line itself.
There, time collapsed around him in strange ways.
His routine had grown longer, more deliberate.
Dribble. Breathe. Dribble. Breathe.
A meditation that could stretch beyond ten seconds, past the very rules of the game.
A career 71.7% free-throw shooter in the regular season, he would watch that percentage plummet when the lights grew brightest - down to 55% during these playoffs.
Each miss amplified the whispers - was this his fatal flaw? The thing that kept greatness just beyond his reach?
In a game that celebrates instantaneous decisions made at superhuman speed, Giannis insisted on slowing down at precisely the moment when everyone - referees, opponents, fans, even his own coaches - wanted him to hurry up.
It wasn't defiance.
It was necessity.
A man trying to find stillness amid the storm.
The Moment:
Eastern Conference Semifinals. Game 7. Brooklyn's Barclays Center. June 20, 2021.
A hostile crowd had turned his vulnerability into theater.
"ONE... TWO... THREE!"
The Brooklyn Nets had installed a digital timer on the scoreboard, illuminating each passing second of his routine - until the NBA ordered it removed.
But the crowd didn’t need a prompt anymore.
They stretched their count past ten, past twelve, their voices rising with each number -not to hurry him along, but to inhabit his anxiety, to multiply it.
"TEN... ELEVEN... TWELVE!"
The free-throw line had become a public referendum on his ability to handle pressure.
Fourteen attempts that night.
Fourteen chances to break under the weight of expectation.
Fourteen moments where the game, the series, his reputation - all hung in that impossible space between action and hesitation.
Would he surrender to the chaos?
Or would he find something the crowd couldn’t touch - a private sanctuary within public humiliation?
He missed six of those fourteen attempts.
Yet somehow, in a game decided by just four points, his 40-point, 13-rebound performance dragged Milwaukee to victory.
It was as if he’d made a bargain with the basketball gods: struggle at the line, dominate everywhere else.
The Bucks’ 115-111 overtime victory sent the heavily favored Nets home and Giannis forward, his free throw demons still unexorcised, but his championship path suddenly clearer.
The Words:
I kind of try to focus on the moment, in the present.
That’s humility.
"I don't think at the free-throw line," Giannis had said earlier that season. "I just shoot shots. I've done this since I was like 12 years old."
But the playoffs demanded a new vocabulary, a new relationship with time itself.
"I figured out a mindset," he would explain during the NBA Finals.
"When you focus on the past, that's your ego. When you focus on the future, that's your pride. I kind of try to focus on the moment, in the present. That's humility."
His teammate Khris Middleton, watching the struggle unfold night after night, understood that silence was the only gift worth giving:
"I don't say much to him. I don't want to get in his head and have him think about 1,000 different things."
The wisdom was in what remained unsaid - that sometimes the heaviest pressure comes not from the crowd, but from the voice inside.
The one telling you to hurry.
To fix everything at once.
To be someone other than who you are.
The Truth:
Basketball is a game of mastery through repetition, but the paradox of free throws is that the more desperately you need them, the harder they become to make.
Muscle memory collapses under the weight of consequence.
In the crucible of the NBA Finals, Giannis' routine became a public Rorschach test.
To the Phoenix crowd, it was comedy - a chance to penetrate the armor of a superstar.
To basketball purists, it was a violation of the game's unwritten contract.
To the referees, it was an uncomfortable gray area - the official rule allowed ten seconds, but who really wanted to decide a championship that way?
Game 5 of the Finals crystallized everything.
With 1:09 left in the fourth quarter, Milwaukee clinging to a one-point lead, Giannis stepped to the line.
Phoenix coach Monty Williams called timeout after his first miss, a psychological chess move designed to flood his mind with doubt.
When he returned, Chris Paul and Jae Crowder flanked him, whispering, chirping, making sure he felt the weight of the moment.
He missed again.
Seconds later, in a moment that defied conventional narrative, Giannis soared for an alley-oop dunk that would help seal the game.
It was as if the misses had never happened - or rather, as if he had found a way to let them happen without letting them matter.
To Giannis, the routine was something else entirely - not a stalling tactic, but a lifeline.
Not delay, but devotion.
The Echo:
Game 6 became his masterpiece.
50 points. 14 rebounds. 5 blocks.
And most improbably?
17-of-19 from the free throw line.
The same routine that had stretched seconds into small eternities now produced a rhythm of near-perfection.
The crowd still counted, but now he had found a way to make their voices part of his meditation rather than an intrusion into it.
The free-throw line - that stark, solitary place where time stretches and contracts - became an unexpected window into something more universal.
The man whose early life had been defined by hustling, by the desperate need to move faster than circumstance, had discovered the revolutionary act of taking his time when the world demanded acceleration.
And in the end, he didn't silence the count - he just made it irrelevant.
The Lesson:
Perhaps we've misunderstood ritual all along.
We call it superstition, routine, habit - words that suggest mindlessness.
But Giannis showed us that ritual, at its best, isn't about controlling the outcome but about controlling our relationship to it.
"No matter if I miss a shot or make a shot, I take the next one."
The deepest freedom isn't found in perfection, but in the willingness to fail visibly, repeatedly, without surrendering the right to try again.
The most profound confidence isn't the absence of fear, but presence within it.
And here lies the beautiful contradiction of Giannis at the line:
In the very place where he was most vulnerable, most human, most doubted, he found the wisdom that would make him a champion.
Not by conquering time, but by making peace with it.
Not by silencing the count, but by finding his own voice within it.
That sometimes, the most powerful thing we can do when the world is screaming at us to hurry is simply to take another breath - and then another - until we find ourselves standing firmly in the present moment.
The only place from which anything is possible.
The Deep Dive:
📰: Giannis Antetokounmpo isn’t Scared of Missing Shots. It’s Part of What Makes Him Great. (Washington Post)
📹 : Giannis Seals Game 5 with Alley-Oop And One (YouTube)
The world speeds up around us. Our heart races. Our thoughts scatter.
That moment we’ve prepared for is suddenly rushing past.
The world will try to rush you. Breathe anyway.
I think a lot about time. Not the calendar kind, but the internal kind – how a minute can stretch or collapse depending on what's happening around us.
We all know those moments when time seems to accelerate beyond our control:
The interview where your mouth moves faster than your brain.
The presentation where you race through slides as the audience chases your point.
The argument where you blurt out something you immediately regret.
We are all, at times, Andrew in Whiplash – "Not quite my tempo" – except the demanding conductor is life itself, constantly telling us we're too slow or too fast, rarely just right.
But you may have noticed something about people who are truly great at what they do. They have a different relationship with time under pressure.
They slow down precisely when everyone else speeds up.
Watch Chappelle during his specials. When he reaches the crucial part of a story – where an amateur would rush to the punchline – he does the opposite. He creates space. He steps back.
That silence isn't empty – it's where the power builds. The audience leans forward. And when he finally delivers, the impact doubles not because the joke improved, but because he understood that anticipation amplifies effect.
You see this with master chefs too. When time is running out, novices chop faster, move quicker. But the masters? Their knife work becomes more precise, not more hurried. They find efficiency through control, not speed.
Nobel Prize-winner Daniel Kahneman has (perhaps famously) helped explain why this works in Thinking, Fast and Slow.
He identifies two thinking systems:
System 1: Fast, automatic, intuitive – prone to errors under pressure.
System 2: Slow, deliberate, analytical – better for complex decisions.
Under pressure, we default to System 1. It's evolutionary – our ancestors needed quick reactions to survive threats. But in most modern pressure situations, System 1 actually sabotages us.
We need System 2's wisdom, not System 1's reflexes.
Think about rushing to an important meeting. Your System 1 brain has you frantically multitasking. How many times do you double back for something forgotten? That's System 1's efficiency illusion.
Most of us treat pressure like a predator we need to outrun. We speed up, take shortcuts, make snap decisions. Our breathing gets shallow. Our vision narrows.
But the masters? They treat pressure like a wave they can ride.
Navy SEALs have a saying: "Slow is smooth, smooth is fast." In life-or-death situations, they discover that moving with deliberate precision – what looks slower in the moment – actually produces better results in less time.
I am neither SEAL nor comedian, but I've found we can all experiment with this relationship to pressure:
The next time you feel yourself rushing, stop. Plant your feet firmly. Take three deep breaths. Notice the shift – shoulders relaxing, vision widening. Then move with purpose – one task at a time.
This isn't “calming down” – it's shifting from reactive mode to responsive mode.
In a heated conversation, count to three before responding. Those seconds will feel eternal to you but register as thoughtfulness to others. The space between their words and yours is where better responses are born.
Before a presentation, resist reviewing notes one last time. Instead, take a full breath that expands your chest. When you open your eyes, you'll see the room not as a threat but as a space you're about to fill with presence.
Because presence is precisely what we’re talking about – fully occupying a moment rather than racing through it.
The pressure will always be there. (!!!)
The deadline will always be approaching. The stakes will always feel high.
But the space between stimulus and response? That's yours to control.
Our relationship with time is our relationship with ourselves. In choosing to breathe when everything says hurry, we're claiming our right to exist fully in each moment.
The world will try to rush you.
Breathe anyway.
Who else but Diana Taurasi, the GOAT of GOATs?
It’s hard to celebrate when an icon hangs it up, but holy sh*t, do we have so much to be grateful for.
Indeed, the WNBA’s all-time leading scorer and the only hooper, male or female, with six Olympic gold medals - has at last called game on her legendary 20-year career.
A daughter of immigrants who once practiced shooting into bullhorns hung on walls, Taurasi amassed 10,646 points (nearly 3K more than her closest competitor), secured three WNBA championships, and went undefeated in Olympic play (42-0).
It is an undisputed legacy that would be difficult to overstate.
A self-described "kind asshole," (highly relatable) she once told her Olympic coach to "get the f-ck out of this zone" before drilling a 32-foot dagger.
She was basketball’s ultimate truth-teller, the one who made the impossible feel inevitable - a fearless leader who, as Sue Bird puts it, separated herself by "the way she makes her teammates feel" and "raises the level of her teams."
She leaves behind a game forever changed - more skilled, more competitive, more her.
To Keep On Getting Buckets - Baileigh Sinaman-Daniel
“I thought to myself, I could do this in college. What’s stopping me from doing this in college?” Sinaman-Daniel said. “So, I started emailing hundreds of coaches and it didn’t really matter what division it was. I was just trying to get a possible maybe or even better — a yes.”
