“This is exciting. I love bringing authors to campus,” Chambers said. “I just love making those connections, and there have been some events that have had fantastic attendance, and it’s so much fun when everything clicks.”
Fader is best known for her 2021 book, “Giannis: The Improbable Rise of an NBA Champion,” which made the New York Times, LA Times, USA Today, Publishers Weekly and Wall Street Journal bestselling lists, according to Dominic Massimino. The book highlights the life of Giannis Antetokounmpo, the star Greek player on the Milwaukee Bucks. Fader will be speaking about her new book, “Dream: The Life and Legacy of Hakeem Olajuwon,” Feb. 20. Born in Nigeria, Olajuwon played three years at the University of Houston before being selected first in the 1984 NBA draft by the Houston Rockets, two picks ahead of Michael Jordan. A two-time NBA champion with the Houston Rockets in the ’90s, Olajuwon became the first non-American player to win NBA MVP in 1994.
“We are doing a Q&A and book signing event — I’ll be interviewing Mirin,” Massimino said. “We’re gonna talk about the book and her strategies, how she picked her subjects and how she created this awesome work.”
In October 2021, Massimino wrote a feature article in The Occidental about Fader’s career, her time as an athlete in college and how she came to write “Giannis.”
“She was already an inspiration and personal hero of mine, so this was a cool opportunity to meet her in person,” Massimino said. “I was trying to create a version of the features of athletes that she’s created over the years. I tried to recreate that sort of thing for her, for her writing career and how she ascended to be one of the best feature writers in basketball specifically.”
The book about Olajuwon brings into the spotlight another famous player who was born outside of the U.S. and came to play, according to Massimino.
Massimino said Fader’s books on Giannis and Olajuwon are about more than just cataloguing important times in NBA history. Fader’s new book details the story of Olajuwon as a player, a man and a great athlete, all in the context of immigrating from Nigeria to play basketball, Massimino said.
“The book puts into context the mystical nature of his coming to the United States and being one of the first players of his caliber to come from Africa,” Massimino said. “It talks a lot about the way he was covered early on and the racist tropes and the misunderstanding of who he was as a person.”
Fader said working as a student journalist during her time at Occidental, after playing basketball for years herself, solidified her passion for covering the sport.
“I transferred to Oxy as a sophomore, and when I transferred, I knew I was done playing, and I wanted to somehow stay within basketball,” Fader said. “Mike Wells, the associate athletic director at the time gave me a shot writing for the Oxy athletics website, so I covered Oxy teams, particularly the men’s basketball team as their beat writer, and I just fell in love with sports writing.”
During her time at Occidental, Fader cultivated her love of reading and writing, laying the groundwork for her career, she said.
“I definitely wasn’t in college knowing exactly what I wanted to be. I feel really grateful for the experiences I’ve had, but at Oxy it was more about falling in love with writing and reading,” Fader said. “I took Intro to Literary Analysis with Daniel Fineman, and I couldn’t believe we did an entire paper over one word, or one punctuation mark, but it was that type of close reading that was so crucial to doing my books and articles and reporting.”
Fader is now a senior staff writer for The Ringer. Before writing “Giannis,” Fader wrote for Bleacher Report from 2017 to 2020. In 2019, she traveled to Milwaukee to profile Giannis’ younger brother, Alex Antetokounmpo. According to Fader, reporting on Giannis’ family was very different then, because people outside of Milwaukee did not know that Giannis had a brother who also played basketball.
“When I showed up at their family home, Giannis was there, which was totally not something I thought would ever happen, and then I got to speak with both of them, and their mother and the whole family. The story came out, and it was very well received,” Fader said. “I’d been wanting to write a book for a really long time.”
According to Fader, securing the book deal for “Giannis” was difficult.
“In sports writing, in any kind of writing, you want a universal story. That’s really what’s gonna resonate with readers,” Fader said. “Even if people do not have his exact story — of course, not everyone is from Greece, especially really difficult circumstances in Greece — this idea of love for family, hard work, resilience, doing things that seem impossible, making it when there seems to not be a way, these were all just incredible themes that I wanted to explore further.”
Upon coming back to Occidental, Fader said she is looking forward to speaking with Massimino and is excited to see old college friends and former members of the men’s basketball team. Fader said she is aware of the difficulty of finding a job after graduating and how challenging the world is right now for young people. Fader hopes her upcoming visit will bring hope to students, she said.
“Come if you’re interested in the love of language, writing, reading. So much of what we do in sports journalism is applicable to all journalism,” Fader said. “Nobody really grows up thinking they can write a book—I certainly didn’t think I could do it, but it is possible.”
Contact Olivia Correia at ocorreia@oxy.edu.
