The boy was born in Minneapolis on October 28, 1996, while his father was finishing up a season with the Minnesota Timberwolves. Stojko Vranković was 7'2 and 32 years old at the time, deep into the second of his two NBA stints — the first had been with the Boston Celtics from 1990 to 1992 alongside Larry Bird and Kevin McHale, the second was with Minnesota and would soon end with a brief Clippers run. The NBA called him "The Human Victory Cigar" because Stojko's biggest job in Boston was to mop up garbage time after the Bird-McHale-Parish frontcourt had done its work. He played 170 NBA games and started 73 of them. He averaged 2.8 points and 3.0 rebounds and 1.0 blocks. He made his real impact somewhere else entirely.
The somewhere else was Panathinaikos. In April 1996, six months before Antonio was born, Stojko Vranković chased a loose ball across the floor of a Final Four arena in Paris and rose to deny Barcelona at the buzzer in the EuroLeague Final. The block delivered Panathinaikos a 67-66 win and the club's first European championship in its 77-year history. Captain Panagiotis Giannakis, asked about the moment by the official Final Four website, gave the canonical description: "All that happened at the end of the game is unbelievable, a few seconds that lasted one century! I remember Stojko running like Carl Lewis from one side to the other to stop Montero. He blocked the layup, almost at the buzzer, and he sealed the victory."
The man Antonio called father was, by then, an Olympic silver medalist twice over — once with Yugoslavia in Seoul in 1988, again with Croatia in Barcelona in 1992 in the gold medal final against the Dream Team. He had been a coffin bearer at Drazen Petrovic's funeral in 1993 — Petrovic, the friend, the inspiration, the player who Stojko once called "basketball's Amadeus" while speaking at the opening of his memorial museum in Zagreb. He had played alongside Toni Kukoc and Dino Rada and Drazen and the rest of the great Yugoslav generation. He was, in every meaningful sense, a giant.
Antonio was born into all of it.
The family moved often, as European basketball families do. Antonio grew up partly in Croatia — Zagreb, where his father played for KK Cibona; partly in Greece, where his father starred for Panathinaikos; and partly in Italy and the United States as Stojko's career carried him through Bologna and Boston and Minneapolis. Stojko and his wife Lovorka had three children: daughters Andrea and Matea, then their youngest, the boy who would inherit his father's height and his father's surname.
By the time Antonio entered high school, the family had settled in Florida. He enrolled at Pine Crest School in Fort Lauderdale — the same elite private school where future Kentucky guard and NBA lottery pick Brandon Knight had been a star. The two would be linked by a single line in the Pine Crest record book.
Antonio was a late bloomer in everything except height. As a sophomore he averaged 10.7 points, 11.3 rebounds, and 2.7 blocks. As a junior in 2014 he leveled up: 18.7 points, 12.4 rebounds, and 3.8 blocks. The senior season was the breakthrough. He averaged 27.5 points, 16.1 rebounds, and 5.0 blocks per game and earned two-time Sun Sentinel first-team all-county and Class 4A-2A All-Broward first-team selections. The signature game came against Taravella High School: 55 points on 24-of-48 shooting from the floor — a single-game scoring effort that tied Brandon Knight's school record. The Florida Vipers AAU circuit gave him his platform. The Pine Crest record book gave him his place.
On April 15, 2015, the 6'11 center committed to Duke as the third member of the 2015 recruiting class — joining Luke Kennard and Chase Jeter. He was three-star ranked. He was thought to be the depth piece, the practice body, the development project. Mike Krzyzewski took him for what he was: a son of European basketball royalty, raised in three countries, nearly seven feet tall, with the sort of pedigree that doesn't show up in stars.