There was just one thing he longed for but never got: a European title. Of course, Giannis Ioannidis’ gave Olympiacos infinitely more than “silverware”. As such, the illustrious place he will forever occupy in the Club’s history is richly deserved.
On the old score board at the Peace and Friendship Indoor Stadium the countdown froze with 7 seconds on the clock. A foul on Angelou, free throws, 1+1, but… who cares? Not even him, the past master of claimed fouls. On his feet, the sleeves of his sweat-soaked shirt rolled up and his lucky Karelia Special cigarettes (two puffs then snuffed out) abandoned near the ashtray, he already had his arms up in the air, rightfully reciprocating some 12,000 fans rhythmically chanting his name as one. “Io-an-ni-dis…Io-an-ni-dis…”
It looked like a nod at the end of a derby. But it was also something more: it was the start of a new era in Greek basketball.
Saturday, September 28, 1991. The opening game of the first division season, and the final score reads Olympiacos-Aris 67-59 and the faithful couldn’t keep their joy to themselves: “The king is dead, long live the king!” In Greek basketball, nothing was ever the same again. The Reds’ imperial reign had just begun, and in a wondrous twist of fate, Olympiacos had emerged, phoenix-like, from the ashes of the previous “king”, whose reign has now ended. The new era had a name woven into the purple of its imaginary imperial tunica: Giannis Ioannidis…
His imprint on this era is stamped with passion – a relationship of mutual adoration with the fans
Defining two eras
Associating your name with a period of collective triumph is a self-evidently great thing. Defining an entire era is huge. But doing it back-to-back is what ultimately separates the merely “great” from the legendary. How many could do it? A handful, if that. Ioannidis was one of them.
If, on a collective level, the great Aris team of the seven consecutive championships, the unbeaten three-year-eight-month stretch, and those Thursdays when it booked its ticket to Ghent, Munich and Zaragoza and emptied the streets across Greece, was the ultimate basketball narrative of the 1980s, then the Olympiacos of the 1990s has gone down in local sports history as the exciting continuation of a scintillating career. And, still more importantly, as a force that regained its influence in a broader basketball context, one that transcended the club level.
It was Ioannidis’ Aris (1984-91) that advanced local fans’ interest and knowledge about basketball and kick-started a mass interest in the game It was Ioannidis’ Olympiacos (1991-96) that moved Greece’s basketball capital from Thessaloniki to the south and the Greek capital. In doing so, this triggering the rejuvenation of another major basketball pole: arch-rivals Panathinaikos.
And the added value? Let us not forget where we are: in the heart of the Club’s “barren years” on the football pitch, which has sorely tested the Reds’ endurance. So, the “Blond” didn’t forge a team which simply won titles or swallowed Europe whole. No, what he did before all else in these trying and unyielding times was fly the banner and keep the Reds’ morale high. This cannot be measured by numbers. It can only be felt and chanted from the stands. Sometimes in improvised verses full of gratitude.
From one day (1991) to another (1996)
The second half (the promise) has been kept, for ever and ever, amen. The first (the wish) was sacrificed on the altar of one of life’s inescapable rules: nothing is forever. Especially in cases where two personalities as larger-than-life as Ioannidis and Socratis Kokkalis had to share the same space year and location year after year. The managerial-economic axis of the basketball miracle.
For today’s 50-somethings, that farewell interview on May 21, 1996 at a downtown Athens hotel, with the tearful “I wouldn’t leave if they wanted me” and the sudden fear that filled the hearts of many in the wake of the shock—”Can Olympiacos even exist without Ioannidis?” (which is over the top, admittedly, but also indicative of how closely he had come to be identified with that dream team), will always cast a shadow over the other, happier, flashbacks from late adolescence. And the ultimate experiential definition of a “rude awakening”…
Because three—just three!—days before it, the Reds had won a triumphant third championship in a row. Winning their legendary fifth final against Panathinaikos by 75 points to 38. But then losing to them in Paris, which left the Legend deflated. Piraeus decked out in red. The absolute high point. And the definite low. Just like that. Like someone flipped a switch. It had happened five years earlier, too, but in the opposite direction…
Spring ’91. The curtain opens on the first division season with Olympiacos struggling in 8th place, and with nothing to look forward to in Europe. No one’s really paying attention. Things have been so bad for so long, they’ve almost grown used to it. And this was the atmosphere in which plans were laid for the future. With a new coach, Spyros Foskolos, already “booked”.
Until the bombshell announcement: Kokkalis has entered the building, and in record time Foskolos is out and Ioannidis is in, a nod to fans’ demands. Ioannidis, the architect of the great Aris team of that era had opted to step away from the limelight for a while. It was May 20. A milestone…
As Greece’s basketball community was trying to figure out where Olympiacos was going with all this, Ioannidis was laying out the terms of the Reds’ rebirth. First: a firm management. Check. Second, he said a grand team needed a grand venue. Agreed. So, the antiquated Papastrateion arena was out. Instead, the home court shifted to the spacious Peace and Friendship Stadium, where the memories of the 1987 conquest there of the European championship by the Greek national team still fresh. Thirdly, the team needed an on-court leader who could play. Check. The player who could lead would be none other than Žarko Paspalj, freshly arrived from San Antonio (though Rod Strickland was a strong contender early on).
And the rest? Greek players. Some already in place (Kambouris, Papadakos, Elliniades, Angelou, Sigalas and the rest) plus some new additions. The first of the new era being Antonis Stamatis, who transferred from Panellinios. Would they be enough? “For Act One, yes”—so said Ioannidis the “director”, who already had some other… alchemies in mind. A solid, tough unit, with Žarko its cornerstone in attack and all the other cogs in place in a war machine configured to meet the demands of the new game then emerging, which were: a rock-solid defense.
The results were astounding. Outstripping even the most optimistic predictions and with Paspalj in a state of grace (the league’s top scorer with 33.7 points per game), Olympiacos turns the 9-13 record of the previous regular season on its head, winning 18 game and losing 4 and exchanging the eighth position for the second, only to finally reach a final (where they are beaten in a four to one series by PAOK Thessaloniki). And that was just the start.
Within just two years, with transfers carefully chosen boost quality (Tarlać, Tomić, Berry, Fasoulas, Tarpley, et al.) and the celebrated “Ioannidis defense” becomes a total must. Olympiacos not only reached the top in Greece (back-to-back championships in ’93 and ’94), but also plants the red-and-white flag on the giddy heights of Europe. And if, in the first season (1992-93) on their already transcendental journey, they missed out on a place in the Final Four when a fateful line-step by Žarko cost them the match again Limoges at the Peace and Friendship stadium, they would never get over their loss in Tel Aviv (1994) to Catalonia’s Badalona in the final, with Thomson’s once-in-a-lifetime three-pointer and the Reds’ incomprehensible paralysis in the final minutes of the game only made worse by the pre-game rhetoric of inevitable victory.
The restart of a sports empire, an era punctuated by hard work and a drive for excellence. Ioannidis, the coach, with NBA star Eddie Johnson, who wore the Olympiacos uniform in the early 1990s.
His deepest regret
That Olympiacos team with Žarko and Tarpley was the best in Europe. They deserved to win. They should have won. But they lost. Just like they did the next season (1995, Zaragoza), albeit to a superior Real and with the great Eddie Johnson in place of Žarko. Was it Fate? The b-ball gods? Was the pressure to blame—because it was blamed for the players choking up like they did? Or was it the curse of the “Serbian lobby”?
But that barrage of losses in Final Fours and finals (3+2 in Aris-Olympiacos plus one more, in ’98, against AEK), plus never winning a European cup, would always be Ioannidis’ deepest regret. Salt on an open wound. It may have been softened by two more championships (1995 and 1996, with Rivers) and his triumphant exit (the historic +37 against Malkovich), but it would never be erased.
That Olympiacos would go on to break the curse with what was essentially “his” team in the very first season after his departure (1997, Rome), and with another stone-faced Serb at the helm (Ivkovic), is too incredible to make up—and a bitter pill indeed for the Ioannidis to have to swallow.
They say that winning a Euroleague was the main reason he upped and left Giannakopoulos in the cold in ‘99 and, letting bygones be bygones with Kokkalis, returned to Piraeus. Though much had changed in the meantime. Basketball, Olympiacos (which was no longer Greek), the competition. Himself. But he didn’t stay for long.
Which had no impact on his own personal legend. He had long since conquered the hearts and minds of the fans, and earned too prominent a place in the history of Olympiacos for it to be blemished.
With his superstitions—though he’d never admit to them. His fear of black cats, his lucky jacket, his fear of doom-mongering journalists, the deliberate minor crashes on the way to the hotel… Him, the Blonde. The “true Macedonian”, the old-school patriot with the delicate artistic sensibilities. Moody, grumpy, stubbornly dogmatic, almost provocative—but with the heart of a small child. Who, as an opponent, you loved to hate (though you’d pay whatever it took to have him on your team), and if you were… Sigalas one night in Treviso, you’d definitely keep your wits about you, just in case he threw a bottle at the head (but, at the same time, you’d do anything for him, because you knew not only what you owed him as a player, but also that, if things went south for you, he’d be the first to protect and bail out one of “his boys”)…
This was Greek basketball’s eternal “blond”,who presided over an entire era in the history of Olympiacos. The great Giannis Ioannidis (1945-2023).
