All European basketball fans know of the great duo of that historic Aris team. Galis and Giannakis combined their talents immaculately, putting their stamp on their era with the colores of the Greek "Emperor". But what about a story before that? Lets go back....

Athenes / Nikaia Saturday January 24th, 1981.

That afternoon, the spectators who had packed the “Platon” arena to suffocation could not have suspected that, a short while later, they would become eyewitnesses to a performance that transcended the bounds of history and touched those of legend. Inside the gym, the ten players were waiting for the jump ball, measuring each other with their eyes. Everyone was looking at those two, who since May of the previous year had been teammates on the national team, but due to the peculiarities of the championship’s organizing authority at the time—with its division into North and South—were facing each other with their clubs for the first time. One of them, the 22-year-old home-grown player, had for several years already been the new great hope of Greek basketball: an international since the age of 16 and the league’s top scorer the previous season.

He stared with a flashing gaze at the visitor, that Greek-American with the afro hair who had appeared like a comet to stir the waters of the sport with his incredible offensive ability and his American-bred professionalism. His face was frozen, returning his opponent’s stare with equal hardness. Fiercely competitive, both waited impatiently for the whistle, intent on exploiting weaknesses and advantages. The taller one, in the blue-and-white uniform with number 6, thought, “Now we’ll see what you’re really made of,” while the shorter one, wearing number 7 on his yellow-and-black jersey, had two words circling in his mind: “40 points,” his usual on that season.

And finally Tsolakidis and Oikonomidis, the two referees, whistled the start of the great contest. Together with the teammates, the coaches, and the spectators, they stepped aside and left the field free to the two soloists for their unforgettable recital. A battlefield, a deserted road in the Wild West, with two gunslingers strapped with their six-shooters, firing indiscriminately. The orgy began early. Fans were left open-mouthed, seeing Ionikos’ number 6 already with 34 points at halftime and his opponent, Aris’ number 7, answering with 37. They were truly possessed, launched into orbit, and especially toward the end of the first half they turned the game into a duel, answering each other with basket after basket over a five-minute stretch.

The scene did not change in the second half, nor in overtime, with the partial numbers breaking down to 31 and 8 for Ionikos’ “machine gun,” and 23 and 2 for Aris’ “killer.” The final score, 113–114 in favor of the yellow-and-blacks, was the last thing on the fans’ minds as they tried to grasp that what they had just seen with their own eyes was real and not drawn from their sweetest dreams.

The “two-men show” of the two sacred monsters of Greek basketball had passed into the realm of myth, and everyone was asking the person next to them how many points they had scored. The final verdict was unique in the annals of the sport in our country, and the scoresheet recorded: Giannakis 73 – Galis 62!!! 

If you ask any of the old residents of Nikaia today, almost all will claim they were there that afternoon at “Platon,” an afternoon that under those conditions should have had at least twenty thousand people in the stands, not just the two thousand lucky ones who actually made it into the arena. Those few blessed spectators saw, in a first edition, Galis and Giannakis—the “Dragon” and the “Gangster”—writing the opening pages of the most beautiful fairy tale of Greek sports for the next fifteen years.