Siva continued to talk for several minutes, trying not to look at the gun in his father's lap. He was becoming one of the best young athletes in the city, just beginning to sense that his life held possibilities beyond this place, but first he had to navigate through the dysfunction that surrounded him. His teenage half sister had an infant son and had become a habitual shoplifter. His mom was working two menial jobs, sometimes three. His older brother had joined a local gang and started dealing drugs.
He had watched so many lives in his sprawling Samoan family be defined by a cycle of addiction and crime, drinking and fighting, and now he feared that the same cycle would define him too. How could he succeed if almost everyone in his family was flailing?
He decided he would either change them or become them. He sat in the driver's seat of the car and spoke to his father more candidly than he ever had before. He said he had a different plan for his life -- a vision for the family's future. He wanted to improve on his lackluster grades, get serious about going to church, win a state basketball title, make a new reputation for the Sivas and maybe even earn a living playing hoops. He said he could do that only with a family that remained intact and with a father who supported him.
Are you in? Siva Sr. How many other teenagers could suddenly act like the parent? Some of his genes were in this son's wisdom, his calm, his sense of purpose. Maybe he really could get clean, leave the dope house for good. Maybe his son was capable of doing something big, of redeeming the family's reputation. The father opened the passenger door, walked back into the house and threw the gun away.
Then he returned to the car, eyes still bloodshot. He is the best player on one of the country's best teams -- a senior point guard who led Louisville to the Final Four last season. In a town with no professional franchises, he is as close as it gets to a superstar. He calls over a waiter to order chips and queso, but the waiter wants to talk about the upcoming season instead.
A year-old fan stops by and asks Siva to pose for a picture. A mechanic on lunch break walks over with a napkin and a pen. Siva is polite and quiet, pushing the chips to the side of the table and greeting the interlopers one at a time. He smiles reflexively and holds up his right index finger for their cellphone cameras. He signs their napkins and answers their questions with one-sentence answers.
Because here in Louisville, his conversations are usually simple, and he still feels somehow anonymous. They might know about his rebuilt jump shot. They might know about his weakness running the high pick-and-roll. But rarely do they know about his past -- his strange and singular and always present past, reflecting his familial devotion, defining his life. The narrative that shaped this NBA prospect, and his family, began 13 years before he was born, in the late s, when Siva Sr. He had three children -- Leilanna, Michael and Peyton Jr.
When he wasn't kickboxing, he worked as a bouncer at Seattle nightclubs, stopping some fights and instigating others. He hosted boozy barbecues at his mom's house in the South End that devolved into brawls with his older brothers, many of whom also drank heavily and weighed more than pounds. His aging mother tried to keep the peace with a baseball bat, but neighbors occasionally called the police. Even from his remove, Siva Sr. He was the youngest -- and also maybe the luckiest.
He knew the family pattern, and he had at least one idea about how to avoid it. The best path to success as a Siva, he decided, was to always do the opposite of the family. He had to transcend not only his genes but a place. His mother's two-story house on the edge of Seattle's Deuce-8 neighborhood sat in the middle of a mounting gang war: The Deuce-8 territory was a few blocks to the east, Central's a few blocks to the west and South End's just a mile away.
Trouble surrounded them -- and even if Siva was never in it, he was tied to it. Trouble was the pills he found sewn into his pocket one day in middle school after he borrowed a pair of shorts from his older brother.
Trouble was the video games his older half sister occasionally stole for him in her late teens, along with clothes for herself and baby shoes for her new son -- most of which was confiscated after she got caught and police obtained a warrant to search their house.
It was the mailing address he memorized for the nearby prison so he could write letters to his brother, his sister and his dad. It was the way his mother often told him, when everyone else's life blackened, "Now only you have the power to steer clear of all this.
From the beginning, his strategy was to steer clear through sports. His grandmother, a longtime cashier at Safeway, talked one of her customers into giving Siva a tryout for AAU basketball, and he made the team. His father, a youth football fan, knew that the local football league required players to weigh at least 60 pounds, so Siva, 56 pounds in a winter jacket and snow boots, stepped onto the scale with hundreds of playing cards and a few old cellphones loaded into his pockets.
He was the smallest player in both sports but also the most audacious -- a center on the basketball team who posted up against players a foot taller and a reckless free safety in football. He suffered a concussion. He dislocated his shoulder. The aggression that others in his family displayed everywhere else, Siva reserved for games.
Only then did he operate in the space so often occupied by his family: on the outer border of control. Just as Michael and friends joined gangs in search of an adolescent identity, Siva found an identity of his own: the basketball player, a status as respected as anything in urban Seattle -- and one that solidified him as different from the rest of his family.
A youth pastor started attending his games and text-messaging him scripture. A talented older player, Terrence Williams , invited him over on weekends to play pickup games and taught Siva how to dunk. Siva says he never drank, smoked weed or stole even after accompanying his sister to the mall and watching her walk away with an easy haul. He feared that he possessed some of those same appetites -- a flash of his father's temper, say, after a referee made a bad call.
For Siva, it wasn't enough to avoid temptation. He had to push back against it. So when he began to sense that he had inherited his mother Yvette's affection for the casino, he vowed never to go regularly enough to own a player's card.
He became the magnet for his extended family, eager to share his own successes and willing to accept their burdens as his own. He would not live like they did if he always worked to help them. He dumped out his brother's beer bottles. He counseled an uncle through addiction. He saved up a little money to help buy schoolbooks for his mother so she could earn a college degree.
To push back against the temptations of gang life, he essentially started his own gang, inviting a dozen people to sleep over at his mother's house on the weekends under her supervision, staying up all night playing video games and drinking Capri Sun by the case, turning troubled acquaintances into friends and friends into roommates.
There was Devon, who stayed over on Saturday and then accompanied Siva to church. There was Leon, who moved in for two years while his own mother struggled through rehab.
There was LC, a 6'7" basketball player who lived with Siva for a few months until he broke the house rules by sneaking out of windows in the middle of the night.
When Yvette kicked the boy out, Siva stashed LC in a family car, which worked until Yvette noticed an extension cord running to the garage. She followed it out and found LC huddled under blankets, playing video games. And Siva continued to guide, more than anyone, his father. He called every few days. He dropped everything to find his father when the demons returned.
He suggested that Senior, working construction part time and living with his own mother, could find solace where Junior had, in sports. During his first year in high school, Siva asked his father to join a men's group at the church, and his father agreed. After Siva confronted his father at the dope house, his dad stopped doing hard drugs but continued to struggle with alcohol. The family always came to games with good intentions, Siva says.
Sometimes 40 or 50 relatives rented a bus and caravanned to his games, tailgating with a Samoan feast in the parking lot and taking over a section of the stands. His father always stood at the center of the spectacle, in a T-shirt with cutoff sleeves and slits running down each side. The colder it was, the less he wore. But every so often, their intensity turned to rage, and the group became a mob.
They were infamous among basketball fans in Seattle: big, tattooed, loud and disruptive. Once, when Siva was in sixth grade, an opposing fan yelled in frustration from the bleachers just before halftime. A scuffle followed, and the fan pushed Siva's half sister. I was just doing what I could do to help. Very outstanding and outgoing. Peyton Siva, 21, is a 6-foot point guard.
But Siva is more than a good basketball player. You want to learn the secret to his calmness and the source of his wisdom. He had all the kids around him. He was a great ambassador, not just for basketball, but for everything he did in life.
Louisville coach Rick Pitino practically sounded incredulous when he mentioned the fact that six of his players participate in Bible studies, because of Siva. Usually most of them are asleep. They told me they were studying the Bible and that Peyton was the leader of the group.
Very spiritual. Everybody he touches, you come away with a great impression of him. He has been hampered by a slow-healing ankle sprain that threatened his confidence. He was fighting the fact that he was hurt.
A weaker player might have succumbed to the injury and surrendered the season. At the end of the regular season, Rick Pitino called Siva into his office and they had a frank discussion. Siva, a quick study and a District Academic all-American, understood almost immediately.
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