He was a leading figure in international basketball, having also played in Italy. In fact, an Italian basketball magazine singled him out in 1953 as one of the top five players in Europe, while he also appeared in a mixed world team.
In addition to being a great player, Faidon Matthaiou was also a tremendous coach and a theorist of the game who left his own special mark on his favorite sport of the many he was involved with.
He was the man who revived Olympiacos’ basketball team when he took its fate into his hands in 1967, when the team had already been playing in the second division for two seasons. In his first year on the bench, he led the team back to the first division and laid the foundations for the creation of the great Reds team that would be a mover and shaker in the years that followed.
During his tenure, the likes of Giatzoglou, Kastrinakis, Diakoulas and Melini, among others, wore the Olympiacos jersey. With Matthaiou on the bench, the Piraeus club won the first Double in their history, in 1976, and without losing a single game!
The five players in basketball are like the five fingers of a hand. The playmaker and the point guard may be the key axes, but all fingers have their value
A reformer
As he mentions in his autobiography, “Faidon Matthaiou: 60 years in Greek basketball”, published by Kaktos and edited by Loukas Papaioannou, Matthaiou considers Olympiacos to have been his finest coaching stint, especially because no one interfered in how he managed the team. This was something the general secretary of Olympiacos at the time, Giorgos Papadakis, had guaranteed him, along with a salary of 10,000 drachmas a month—at a time when salaries were 2,500-3,000 drachmas, the same figure he was paid as an agronomist at the Agricultural Bank. But Matthaiou was not tempted as much by the money as by the pledge: “No one will interfere with your work and the team except you; no problems will arise from third-party interference.”
That promise was kept. The team immediately returned to the first division in the following season, initially finishing in 4th and 5th place, then climbing higher and higher until it reached second place in 1975, when it lost the championship to Panathinaikos by one point after a 63-61 defeat at the Sporting Arena. The following year, 1976, was one of the best years in the history of Olympiacos, as the team remained undefeated and won the double.
Only one absence: for his wedding!
All the players who passed through his hands remember that he never missed a training session, not even by a long shot. Only once during his tenure at Olympiacos, and after a Sunday game against Pangrati, did he inform the players that he would be absent on Tuesday, Monday being a day off. He simply said he had a serious engagement, and his assistant Vangelis Svedinoglou would oversee the practice. Everyone began to wonder what business could be serious enough for him to miss practice.
He later revealed the truth to them: he was getting married on that day to his beloved Dimitra.
The undefeated Olympiacos team of the 1975-76 season, with coach Faidon Matthaiou, top left, standing. The players, from left to right, top row, are: Rammos, Kokorogiannis, Kastrinakis, Diakoulas, Giatzoglou. Bottom row, from left: Tsantalis, Barlas, Garonis, Melini and Spanos.
Pick and roll, and the reverse
He was one of the first coaches–if not the very first–to use the pick and roll move in Greek basketball, which he worked on with the team at the Papastrateion gym.
After an Olympiacos home defeat to AEK Athens, he had assembled his players and said:
“Today we weren’t a basketball team, we were a theater troupe staging Luigi Pirandello’s ‘Tonight we Improvise’ (1930) with great success. Didn’t you see what happened? Everybody did his own thing, we put on a kilt, took out our bayonets and yelled a war cry, taking no prisoners.”
He was the first European to employ a hook shot, which was still called a “reverse shot” at the time.
A multi-sport athlete
Born in Thessaloniki on July 12, 1924, Faidon Matthaiou was perhaps the most multifaceted athlete ever to compete in modern Greece. He was a top player in water polo and track and field with Aris Thessaloniki; a rower with the Thessaloniki Yacht Club, and was also involved in table tennis, tennis, fencing, and of course, basketball.
Matthaiou participated as an athlete in two Olympic Games: in 1948 in London as a rower, and in 1952 in Helsinki as a player on the national basketball team. He later led the team as its coach at the 1960 Rome Olympics. It was at the Games in the Italian capital that he got the chance to watch a USA team including all-time greats such as Oscar Robertson, Jerry West, Jerry Lucas and Walt Bellamy.
As a player, he made his name with Aris, before moving on to Panathinaikos, Panionios and Sporting, as well as to Italy for stints with Storm Varese and Benelli Pesaro.
He was from a family active in sports, as his father Manthos Matthaiou has served as the president of Aris Thessaloniki before WWII and was instrumental in acquiring the land where the Club would later build its Harilaou stadium.
Manthos Matthaiou was killed during a bombing raid carried out on Thessaloniki by Italian warplanes in 1940.
As a player
Matthaiou played in the center at the beginning of his career with Aris Thessaloniki, from 1945 to 1949, before joining Panathinaikos with whom he won three Greek championships (1950, 1951, 1954).
In 1955, after a disagreement with his teammates at Panathinaikos, he left and joined Panionios and then Sporting, before returning to Panionios. He later transferred to the Italian Storm Varese where he both played and coached. He finished his playing career at Aris.
Matthaiou played for the Greek national team in 44 games and scored a total of 539 points–an average of 12 points per game. He played in the national team’s first official match in a major competition, specifically in 1949 at the Eurobasket tournament in Egypt. The game was against the Netherlands (which Greece won 46-28) on May 15, 1949 in Cairo. It was there that he won a bronze medal as a member of the “blue-and-white” national team.
On the bench
Matthaiou enjoyed a long career as a coach and spent time on the bench of the men’s national team, the women’s national team, Panionios, Peristeri, PAOK, Olympiacos, Aris (women) and others. He is considered the founder of Aris Thessaloniki’s women’s basketball team.
One of his memorable moments came during the 1984 Cup final—the so-called “shaved heads final” — while he was coaching PAOK. On the eve of the game, he took his players to see the film “Mission to Nicaragua” and told them that in the United States, basketball players got a very close haircut before certain games as a sign of team unity. So, his players went and did the same thing! Just hours later, PAOK posted the upset by taking the trophy from Aris (74-70). As a coach, he had also won three women’s championships with Aris (1947-49).
He was also known to… burst onto the court when he believed his team was being wronged, a practice that earned him the nickname “Goro” (from ‘gorilla’). It’s said two noted players of the day, the towering center Giorgos Trontzos and the forward Makis Katsafados, dubbed him that, because it matched both his physique and the ferocity he displayed when defending his team’s players.
His life’s work was the national armed forces team, he was a good friend of the great Bobby Knight, and Matthaiou was always ahead of his time, both as a player and coach.
He took part as an athlete in two Olympic Games, in 1948 in London as a rower and in 1952 in Helsinki as a player of the national basketball team. He later served as the coach of the men’s basketball team at the 1960 Games in Rome.
An opera afficionado
As an opera lover, Matthaiou used to recite arias and sing during practice, trips, and even before or after matches. He wanted his tenor voice to stimulate his players or even to entertain the crowd. Indeed, when he was playing in Varese, the whole city enjoyed his renditions from Giuseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto.
“The coach in the junior leagues should be like a father. The coach in amateur teams should be a friend. And the coach in professional teams should be a tyrant,” was one of his quotes. He considered Soviet great Sergei Belov to be the most rounded player in Europe, and he often told his players before a crucial match: “Anyone who has a sprain and doesn’t play in a match is a poof”!
In discussing the concept of team, he emphasized:
“The five (players) in basketball are like the five fingers of a hand. The playmaker and the point guard may be the key axes, but all fingers have their value and if you’re missing one, you’re handicapped.”
In touching on the positions on the court, he would say:
“The big guys are the flagships on a team and the short guys are the destroyers and the subs. When the perimeter defense doesn’t work well, it leaves the big guys exposed and forces them to be charged with fouls. If the flagship is wrecked, then the whole fleet sinks.”
