MEMPHIS, Tenn. — Khris Middleton wasn’t going to play in the Milwaukee Bucks’ preseason opener on Tuesday night, due to some soreness in his hamstrings, but he headed to the gym for a morning workout carrying his Nike basketball sneakers and wearing a cushy pair of sandals that said “USA” on the straps.
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The fancy shower shoes, from Ralph Lauren, serve as a memento from Middleton’s improbable, historic, memories-to-last-a-lifetime summer. Most of it you already know: his first NBA championship with the Milwaukee Bucks, and then, a little more than two weeks later, a gold medal at the Tokyo Olympics. Middleton and Jrue Holiday, as Bucks and Team USAers, joined LeBron James, Kyrie Irving, Michael Jordan, and Scottie Pippen as the only players to win Finals and gold medals in the same summer.
There is a tiny twist to this tale, a bundle of joy, a blessing upon the Middletons. Khris’ wife, Samantha, gave birth to the couple’s second child — a boy — just a few hours after the Bucks beat the Phoenix Suns in Game 6 to end the Finals, and Middleton thought it was too much to leave his family behind for Tokyo, especially after the stress of the playoffs leading up to the child’s birth. He said he considered not joining Team USA at the Olympics.
“Being a part of an Olympic team is one dream for my professional career, and then also becoming a father again, which is another dream, so you have two dreams, but you have to be away from one — it’s just weird to try and put it all into words,” Middleton said Tuesday in Memphis, in an interview with The Athletic.
“I was thinking about not doing it, a little bit,” Middleton said. “It’s a newborn child, your son, you want to be a part of that first couple weeks and first couple months, don’t want to miss a thing. She kept telling me that everything will be fine, they’ll be here when I get back. Go over there and live out one of my dreams and when I come back everything is going to be fine.”
Middleton declined to share the name of his son. The couple’s daughter, Audrielle, is 2, having been born in April of 2019. His wife’s second pregnancy was not exactly a secret — the Bucks of course were fully aware of what was going on and supportive of whatever the family might need — but it was not a matter of public discussion, either, especially during the Finals.
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In fact, the credit for the birth announcement goes to Team USA coach Gregg Popovich, who on Aug. 5, after the Americans beat Australia to reach the gold-medal game, was highlighting sacrifices the players had made to be in Tokyo when he blurted out: “Khris Middleton’s wife gave birth and he came the next day, after the Finals. Those were pretty big sacrifices. More for his wife than for him, now that I think about it. Take the credit away from him and give it to his wife.”
The revelation not only stunned Bucks-NBA-Team USA fans, but the reporters covering the American team. And Middleton himself. He was asked about it during a subsequent Zoom session from the team hotel, hours after that game, and he didn’t want to talk about it.
“It was a whole bunch of different emotions,” Middleton told The Athletic. “You’re happy that you’re a part of the Olympic team, it just sucks that you’re not with your family, your newborn son, your daughter and your wife.”
The details Middleton chose to share in Memphis bring into focus the difficulty of the whirlwind timeline he navigated, between closing out the Suns, celebrating the title briefly, and then jetting off to Tokyo to join Team USA mere hours before its first Olympics game.
With the series tied at two games apiece and pivotal Game 5 held in Phoenix on July 17, Middleton poured in 29 points in a thrilling contest that saw the Bucks wrestle away the game from the Suns in the closing minutes. The Bucks spent the night in the desert before flying home that Sunday, to get ready for Game 6 on July 20 in Milwaukee.
The box score for Game 6 belonged to Finals MVP Giannis Antetokounmpo and his 50 points, but Middleton chipped in 17 to cap a playoffs in which Middleton kept the Bucks afloat while Giannis was injured during the conference finals. Khris averaged 24 points in six Finals contests.
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Celebrations stretched into the morning of July 21. Giannis did not even leave Fiserv Forum until about 2:30 a.m. after Game 6, still in his Bucks jersey, after hours of in-locker room celebrations and media requests.
The team held two parties immediately after Game 6, and Middleton attended so he could toast the title with his fellow Bucks. But with his wife due, he made it to the house between 3 and 4 a.m. — not all that late considering what had just taken place at the arena.
“You’re on a high, can’t really sleep that much, so, I was just up staring at the walls,” Middleton said. “I closed my eyes for 30 minutes and it was time to leave.”
Middleton said he took his wife to a local Milwaukee hospital at about 7 a.m., and his son was born that Wednesday, July 21. He stayed with wife and son — both healthy — all day and night, leaving from the hospital to join the Bucks at their championship parade through downtown on Thursday. He returned to the hospital after running to the house to pack for Tokyo, and on Friday, July 23, he and Holiday flew from Milwaukee to Seattle, where they met the Suns’ Devin Booker, for a joint flight to Tokyo just in time for an Olympics-opening loss to France.
While Holiday starred in that game and Booker played 19 minutes, Middleton, one of just two holdovers on the roster from the 2019 Team USA group that struggled in China but nevertheless qualified for the Olympics, logged just six minutes. His relative absence is much easier to comprehend now, knowing just how little sleep he’d had, and the emotional roller coaster he’d ridden welcoming his son and then leaving his growing family behind.
Middleton is a two-time NBA All-Star and 20-point-per-game scorer with the Bucks. On Team USA, he averaged the fewest minutes (15.7) of any rotation player, and scored just 35 points for the entire tournament. This is what happens on star-studded, American rosters — bona fide scorers see reduced roles because there are only so many minutes and there is only one ball, and Kevin Durant and Jayson Tatum also play Middleton’s position. Middleton is not, nor would he ever be, one to complain, but at the time he had to make that final decision to board the plane for Seattle, he could have weighed all the facts and no one would have blamed him if he’d stayed home.
While the Bucks were busy winning the Finals, the Americans were suffering through all kinds of trouble. They lost their first two exhibition games, Bradley Beal had to step down from the team because he contracted COVID-19, Kevin Love quit because he wasn’t in the right physical condition to help the team, and Zach LaVine had to briefly quarantine from the team because of a COVID-contact issue. In short, a gold was no guarantee, Tokyo is a long-ass flight from Milwaukee, and there was a likelihood of reduced minutes and touches for Middleton.
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But his wife wouldn’t hear of him forgoing the Olympics.
“I told her I wanted to stay back and be with him,” Middleton said. “She kept pushing me and encouraging me to be a part of it. She told me a lot of people made a lot of sacrifices in their life and their career just to be involved with the Olympic team, have a chance to be an Olympic gold medalist, which a lot of people cry over that and a lot of others wish they could be a part of it. If I missed this opportunity, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. She said, ‘don’t miss out on this because you think you need to be here.’
“I can’t give her enough credit for how strong she was and about how she let me know that she was going to be fine at home with the kids and recovering or whatnot.”
With a gold medal around his neck, Middleton returned home to join Samantha for those feedings in the middle of the night. Some nights, he said, Audrielle woke up with her brother, and “you have to try to figure out how to get her back to sleep. It was a lot of random nights, but it was fun, it was fun. You realize what you miss out on.”
As Samantha promised, the family was there when Khris returned. And he was able to get that gold… and his fancy new sandals.
(Photo: Stephen Gosling/NBAE via Getty Images)
