Regardless of what the roster might say, a player doesn't officially join the Seattle SuperSonics until point guard Gary Payton beats him in a game of pool. Call it a rite of Northwest passage: Payton invites the newcomer to Jillian's Billiards Club, near the Sonics' practice facility, or to his mansion in the Seattle suburb of Factoria for a game of eight ball. It's a casual affair until Payton suggests they liven things up with a friendly wager. Once the money's on the table, Payton assumes his on-court persona. A scowl darkens his face, his goateed jaw juts halfway to Spokane, trash spews from his mouth. "Then it's bang-bang-bang," says Seattle forward Vin Baker. "Before you know what hit you, G doesn't have any balls left on the table, and your hard-earned cash is gone."
From taking his unsuspecting teammates' money in pool to zipping a pass on the break to flicking a ball loose on defense, Payton does almost everything at warp speed. You can't hurry professional maturity, however, and Payton's growth as an NBA superstar has spanned the better part of a decade. It has been a gradual and, at times, painstaking process, but the finished product is a sight to behold. In the prime of his career at 31, Payton has arrived as the standard-bearer of this post-Jordan era. Payton bridges the divide between the savvy-but-shopworn stars like Karl Malone, Reggie Miller and David Robinson and the flashy-but-callow group led by Kevin Garnett, Allen Iverson and Stephon Marbury. Bypassing the obvious choice, Tim Duncan, Charles Barkley recently anointed Payton "the best player on the planet."
Owing largely to their point guard, the Sonics were 15-6 through Sunday, well on their way to exorcising the demons of last season, when they failed to make the playoffs for the first time since 1989-90. Payton's play has been typically stellar. At week's end he was averaging 22.2 points, 9.0 assists, 6.3 rebounds and 1.9 steals. But his willingness to embrace the role of Seattle's éminence grise has been just as vital to the team's early success. "We've always had a lot of veterans, guys like Nate McMillan, Sam Perkins and Hersey Hawkins, who were leaders," says Payton, the lone Sonic left from the 1995-96 unit that lost in the Finals to the Chicago Bulls in six games. "Now that they're not here, I understand that this is my team, and I'm taking that role dead seriously."
Over the summer Payton urged team president Wally Walker to restock the roster with players who complemented his feisty style. Hawkins, Detlef Schrempf, Dale Ellis, Olden Polynice, Billy Owens and Don MacLean were sent packing, replaced by warhorses like forward-center Horace Grant and guard Vernon Maxwell, who have five rings between them, as well as slash-and-burn swingmen Brent Barry and Ruben Patterson. Overnight the Sonics became a team loaded with attitude, their deliberate style supplanted by a frenetic attack that averages 100.1 points, 5.1 more than last season. Payton set the tone this summer when he flew his new teammates to his Las Vegas home for outdoor workouts in the desert heat. "Gary's come of age," says McMillan, now a Seattle assistant. "He gets in guys' faces when he has to, but he's also leading by example. When I think back to how he was earlier in his career, let's just say he's grown by leaps and bounds."
Payton has come a long way from the blowhard he was in his rookie season, when he said breezily, "Players like me and Magic only come along once every decade" (never mind, for the moment, that he happened to have been right), and from the hothead who turned ugly in the 1994 playoffs, during which he and Ricky Pierce suggested using firearms to settle a locker room dispute. "The book on Gary used to be that he was talented but was so intense that you could rattle him and throw him off his game," Sonics coach Paul Westphal says. "He still has the edge, but he knows how to control it."
His wife, Monique, and their three children have been steadying influences, but Payton believes his new maturity is owed to no epiphany. "You don't just come in and say, 'Bam, I'm mature; I'm the leader,' " he says. "It took time for me to grow into this and learn how to talk to certain players and how to handle certain situations."
Take his relationship with Baker, who last season suffered a crisis of confidence and endured the worst year of his career. Payton didn't help matters when he called Baker an "out-of-shape crybaby" at a heated practice last April. Best of friends off the court, Payton and Baker both downplayed the incident, which could easily have divided the team. This season Payton arrived at training camp vowing to "pump Vin up" and make sure the 28-year-old Baker returned to his All-Star level of play. Through Sunday, Baker's production was up over last season in almost every department. "Part of being a leader," says Payton, "means knowing who you can go after and who you should pat on the butt."
Consider, too, the game at Vancouver last month, when Seattle got the short end of a string of dubious calls and trailed the toothless Grizzlies by 16 points in the fourth quarter. Rather than follow the example of Baker, who was ejected and had to be restrained from going after the refs, Payton told his charges to disregard the officiating—in the characteristically un-PG parlance of GP: "F—-the motherf———calls!"—and kept his head, orchestrating a stunning 110-108 victory.
With each season Payton has added to his game, which is a brilliant mixture of efficiency and subtlety. He can go months without dunking, he lacks the killer crossover of other top point guards, and even when his jumper goes in, it's not easy on the eyes. Barry goes so far as to call Payton's style "kind of junky." Yet Payton is the rare noncenter who can dominate without taking a shot; when he's on the court, the other nine players pay him constant attention. "The NBA tries to be about flash," Payton says. "But real fans recognize the guy who makes things happen."
Like a pool shark on a hot streak, Pay-ton is capable of dropping in points in bunches, especially when he uses his deceptively strong 6'4", 180-pound frame to post up opponents and then slips deftly around them for a finger roll. But he is more effective in the role of playmaker, drawing the double team and then delivering the perfect pass—a Seattleite dish, as it were—to a cutter or an open shooter. "Gary makes the game fun," says Barry, "because he knows how to make all of his teammates better."
Yet Payton, an all-defensive first-team selection for six straight years, may be at his best when opponents have the ball. Surely the league's only player who routinely throws head fakes on defense, Payton is a master at juking as if to double-team, then dropping back like a free safety to intercept a pass. "I think one reason he's so frustrating to play against is that he gets it done on both ends," says Maxwell. "He scores on you and men turns right around and starts playing some of the best defense in the NBA."
Perhaps because skills like shrewdly running the break and sealing off passing lanes fly beneath the highlight-show radar. Payton is not fully appreciated, even at this stage in his career. Philadelphia 76ers coach Larry Brown coached Payton at the Olympic qualifying tournament in Puerto Rico last summer. Though he had seen Payton play innumerable times, Brown still walked away with a heightened regard for the player who, in all likelihood, will direct the next Dream Team. "As good as I thought he was, he's better," says Brown "As good a defender as I thought he was he's better. As tough a competitor as I thought he was, he's tougher."
Payton has a competitive fire that rages fiercely enough to trigger four alarms. Maxwell recalls that in his earlier days, whenever he was about to play the Sonics, he would tell his wife to write a check to the league office because it was a given that Payton would goad him into a technical foul. When Seattle faced Houston in a preseason game, Payton turned on the charm for Rockets guard Steve Francis. Before the opening tap he planted a mocking kiss on Francis's cheek and whispered in his ear, "Here we go." For the duration of the game, Francis was besieged by a hail of sweet nothings—"punk-ass rookie bitch" being the lone printable one—every time he touched the ball. Says Seattle center Greg Foster, a teammate of Payton's at Skyline High in Oakland, "For as long as I've known Gary, he's been getting a mental edge like that." Sure enough Francis made only 4 of 15 shots and committed six turnovers.
"I'm always gonna be talkin'," says Payton, the league leader in technical fouls last season. "It's nothing personal, but it's at the point where if I change people will say, 'Oh, he'; soft now.' That ain't never gonna happen like that."
With Payton, any game of cards, any shooting drill, any PlayStation encounter invariably becomes a challenge to his manhood. "You can see two ants crawling down the street, and you ask Gary, 'Which one is going to win?' " says Payton's former Seattle teammate David Wingate, now a reserve for the New York Knicks. "If his ant loses, he'll mess around and try to find another one that he can get back into the race with. That's his personality. That's what gets him going." Adds Baker, "Sometimes I think the concept of double or nothing was invented especially for Gary."
This near pathological aversion to losing helps explain why Payton has missed only two games due to injury in his entire career and why he's blown up at Westphal several times this year for sitting him in the fourth quarter of blowouts. He claims he gets his inner fortitude from his father, Al, a man whose license plate reads MR.MEAN and who still calls to chastise his son after watching Sonics games on the tube. Payton also credits his upbringing in Oakland for instilling in him a copious measure of badass. "No one gives you anything there," he says. "You learned that you can be friends before the game and after the game. But once the game starts, it's all about business. No jive. That's Oak-town in a nutshell, and that's one reason I love it and go back to visit every summer."
At first blush, anyway, Payton is everything Seattle is not: brash, intense, in-your-face. But with Ken Griffey Jr. on his way out of town and Alex Rodriguez likely to follow soon, now more than ever the Emerald City is Payton's place. His snarling face is plastered on billboards, his jersey is the most popular piece of apparel not made of flannel, and an English professor at Washington recently published a book, Black Planet, devoted almost entirely to his infatuation with Payton. "I was in Seattle for about a minute," says Barry, "and it was clear that G's the man here."
Payton has returned Seattle's embrace. He has every intention of finishing his career with the franchise that chose him second in the 1990 draft and asserts that he's "real comfortable" in the country's upper-left corner. While Payton cottons to neither the coffee culture nor the rain-tapering-to-showers climate of Seattle, a number of his friends have followed him there from Oakland, and he loves nothing more man to invite his pals aboard his 80-foot yacht, The Glove, and cruise Elliot Bay. "Because of how I am on the court, people think I'm wild and crazy," he says. "But really, I'm a kick-back guy, so Seattle suits me fine."
A five-time All-Star with a gold medal from the 1996 Olympics, Payton has but one professional goal left to accomplish. Though he's in the throes of the best year of his career, he knows the meter's running. "I want that ring," he says, "and I honestly think we have the guys here to do it."
Payton's undersized team prevailing in a conference that includes the Spurs, Blazers and Lakers? The conventional wisdom, to borrow a phrase, says "that ain't never gonna happen like that." But as his Sonics teammates can attest, when the team's hustler of a point guard vows to run the table, it's a bad idea to bet against him.
