Due to their youth, Alekos and Ioannis Spanoudakis, two of the greatest basketball players in the history of the Club, escaped the fate of 118 of their fellow villagers in Alikianos Kampos, on Crete, when they were spared execution by the Germans on August 1, 1941, due to their youth.
There, on the banks of the Keritis stream, in reprisal for their losses in the Battle of Crete months earlier, the Nazis committed one of their many atrocities on Greek soil and wiped out an entire village, slaughtering 118 victims. Thirteen were from Alikianos and the rest were from nearby Fournes, Skines, Vatolakkos, Koufo, Prases, Karanou, Lakkoi, Orthouni, Nea Roumata and Chosti.
Though the Spanoudakis brothers escaped with their lives, they would bear the mental scars for the rest of their days. They found refuge in the port city Piraeus on the mainland, and there, as pupils of the Ionideion, a magnet school then known as the Piraeus Secondary Education School, they won the school-wide basketball championship in 1945, revealing their enormous talent.
The Olympiacos basketball team had been formed one afternoon in 1939 at the Bakalas court on the Kastella seaside promenade. The members were pupils in their final year at the Ionideion, who had been recruited by Aris Chrysafopoulos. However, the team would cease to operate when war broke out.
When it was re-established in 1945, Petros Dimitropoulos, a member of that first team from 1939 – the first player ever to play for both the ‘eternal rivals’, having played basketball and water polo first for Olympiacos and then for Panathinaikos before emigrating to Australia in the 1950s – recruited a new crop of players, mostly from the Ionideion. Needless to say, the first members of the new squad were the Spanoudakis brothers.
Alekos Spanoudakis in action with Olympiacos. His trademark jump shot ushered in a new era in European basketball.
Up front…
Both were iconic players (a third Spanoudakis brother, Fanis, who died very young, also played for Olympiacos) and were well ahead of their time in many respects, even without the exposure to how the game was played worldwide, something widely achieved in the 1990s, and still more so in recent years.
Their on-court inspiration was second to none, and Alekos Spanoudakis was actually the first player in Europe to use the jump shot. How come? An imposing aircraft carrier, the “Coral Sea”, part of the US 6th Fleet, was anchored just off Piraeus at that time, and the American sailors used to play basketball on deck on a specially designed court. Alekos Spanoudakis would spend hours playing there, mainly against a towering seaman by the name of Trease, who would try to score against him using his jump shot. The shot was such a good fit for Alekos, he worked on it over the whole summer, putting in hours of practice every day on the concrete court at the “Aigaion” textile mill, which was owned to the president of Ethnikos, Dimitris Karelas. He did so at the expense of his education, skipping the summer school classes he was taking in preparation for the entrance exams into the Athens Technical University (which he never entered). Having perfected his jump shot, he got to showcase it before the whole of Europe at the 1949 EuroBasket competition in Cairo, where the national team won its first medal: bronze.
But Ioannis, too, broke new ground. He was the first Greek player to employ the screen on defense, and he would go on to teach it as a coach, as well as exporting it abroad, to Italy, where he played for two years with Moto Morini Bologna. At the same time, thanks to his acquaintance with Bob Cousy, the legendary guard of the Boston Celtics, he was the first coach to introduce daily, and later twice-daily practices for his teams, which had previously only trained three times a week!
Olympiacos’ first basketball championship
Olympiacos would win its first championship that same year (1949), with Ioannis in the role of player-coach. There were seven teams in the finals: Olympiacos, Panathinaikos, Tritonas and Sporting from Athens, Aris and the YMCA chapter from Thessaloniki, known by its local acronym of HANTh, as well as Skagiopouleion from Patras. The matches were played at the historic Tritonas stadium on September 3rd Avenue, and some at the Panellinios ground.
In the derby against Panathinaikos, Alekos Spanoudakis played the game of his life, scoring 29 points in 26 minutes, 20 in the first half, which ended with Olympiacos 34-10 ahead. He would lead his team to a 67-45 triumph, leaving his rival, Giannis Lambrou, in despair. Despite their on-court rivalry, they went out together that same evening with their girlfriends. Olympiacos won the title with their 28-24 victory over Tritonas in the final. Alekos Spanoudakis was hailed as the top scorer in the championship with 133 points in eight games.
It would be 11 years before the Club won its second championship, in 1960, but the Spanoudakis brothers would play a crucial role in Olympiacos’ victory once again. This success ensured Olympiacos a slot in the European Champions Cup for the first time in its history, at which it faced off against Galatasaray.
The brothers were irreplaceable members of the national team, with Alekos playing 27 matches in the national strip and scoring 103 points in total. He took part in the 1949 and 1951 EuroBasket competitions, the 1952 Helsinki Olympics, the 1955 Mediterranean Games, and played in the qualifiers for the 1956 Olympics. Ioannis wore the blue and white 39 times, scoring 132 points. He took part in EuroBasket 1951, the 1951 and 1955 Mediterranean Games, and the 1952 Olympics.
They were way ahead of their time Greece’s basketball world, and without the global influences that local players and coaches had after 1990.
The future of basketball passed through their hands
Ioannis Spanoudakis left us first, in 2010, aged 79. Alekos died on March 10, 2019, the birthday of his beloved Olympiacos, at the age of 91. He had been actively involved with the Club for an astounding 49 years, first as a player and later as a coach. His legacy includes the club’s academies, which he set up and through which he and his brother nurtured important athletes, such as Makis Katsafados, Giorgos Sigalas, Georgios Printezis and Vasilis Xanthopoulos. He never missed a match in which his beloved Reds were playing and even followed them to Berlin in 2009 for the Final Four, in the company of other Olympiacos basketball luminaries, including David Rivers, Eddie Johnson and Argyris Kampouris.
Two off-court stories
The late businessman Giorgos Bobolas recruited Alekos into EPON, a youth resistance group active during WWII. But the brothers’ father was a major in the Greek Army, and he found out about his son’s activities from flyers he found in his pockets. This was the era in which three other Olympiacos players—the Andreadis brothers and Giorgos Nicolaidis—paid the price for their stance. Having been selected to join the national squad for the 1946 EuroBasket tournament in Geneva, when they arrived at the airport for their flight, the entire team was forbidden to leave by order of the then minister of military affairs (one Georgios Stratos), “for reasons of national security”. The Greek team’s participation in that European Championship had to be cancelled at the last minute, and the police even confiscated the clothes and shoes the players would have worn for the tournament.
Ioannis, who was still just a teen at the time, had asked for 10 drachmas to buy a new pair of his favorite “Romika” trainers (because the old ones had a hole in them, and he was ashamed to wear them with the patch he’d made from an old tire). The chief accountant of Olympiacos at the time, Giannis Koutsoulentis, gave him the money, saying: “Here you go, Ioannis. Just make sure you buy a pair made of iron this time, so they don’t wear out on you again”!
