Former Seattle Supersonics and Miami Heat point guard, Gary Payton, didn’t believe his son would be any good in basketball.
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Like most other star athlete’s children, Gary Payton II had the pressure to become a good enough basketball player to carry forward his father’s legacy.
But unlike others, this pressure was not rooted from the expectations of the society, it was directly coming from the Supersonics legend himself.
Apart from being arguably the best two-way point guard in the history of basketball, The Glove, a 9x All-Star and 9x All-Defensive First Team (NBA record) member, was also a well-known trash-talker in the NBA.
And it seems he couldn’t leave that habit behind while coming back home.
Gary Payton used to trash talk even his own son, Gary Payton II
Gary Payton II wasn’t a star basketball player in high school and was playing all sports. His father gave him a hard time for it and even threatened not to pay him for college, telling him to find a job to pay for it himself. But on top of that, he literally belittled him for his basketball skills.
“And then one summer, my dad told me I wasn’t a good basketball player,” Payton II said on a recent episode of the Truth and Basketball podcast.
“He told me I was a sorry-ass basketball player.”
So Gary Payton II decided to spite Big Gary.
The end result is the son being more like his father than he ever imagined, @ThompsonScribe writes.https://t.co/b904ptO7iN pic.twitter.com/qLIDINLtoK
— The Athletic NBA (@TheAthleticNBA) April 15, 2022
He added, “Ha, he told me I was a sorry-as* basketball player … And he told me to get a job or get a scholarship because he wasn’t going to pay for me to get to school”.
Wow! From that to being a proud father whose son, while fighting his way up from being an undrafted player in 2016 to becoming an important role player for the Golden State Warriors won an NBA championship in 2022.
Although senior Payton was a player on an entirely different level, his kid’s way earlier success championship-wise, while he won his only title well into his decline, must have made him even prouder.
The first DPOY point guard of the NBA night believes that his son’s athleticism did not come from him, but he can surely take credit for the Blazers’ guard’s strong defensive game.
Maybe it’s his genes or his trash-talk Gary Payton II never backs down from any challenge on the basketball, be it, it guards or 7-footers he is facing.
