He always made up the lost time, no matter what. So if his son had a basketball game, the bosses never minded when Richard Hamilton took off early, leaving the warehouse where he worked loading rock salt and cement onto tractor-trailer rigs.

Halfway up the gym bleachers. That was where the son would find him--with one eye shut, and the other peering through the lens of a camcorder.

Recording history. That was what the father used to say.

These days the basketball-playing son--also named Richard Hamilton--is the Pistons' leading scorer and one of the best shooting guards in the NBA.

But back then, a dozen years ago in small-town Coatesville, Pa., population 11,000, the son didn't understand what the fuss was about.

What did his father see that he didn't?

"I was in the eighth, ninth grade, and my dad used to say, `You're going to be an NBA player,'" Hamilton was saying after a recent Pistons practice. "And everyone in my town, all my friends, used to be like, `Man, you'll never be in the NBA. You're going to be just like us. What makes you think you're going to be the first?'"

Getting a nickname

When he was a kid, Hamilton inherited his father's nickname, Rip. The elder Hamilton's mother gave it to him 46 years ago because he used to tear off his diapers as a baby.

The father decided to give it to his son, he said, because "every superstar needs a nickname."

But around Coatesville, as the story goes, the nickname they shared once became a punch line of a joke. It was due to his father's penchant for sending Little Rip to basketball camps each summer. The joke went like this:

"Why did Rip go to camp?"

Answer: "To get ripped off."

"People would laugh, and I remember I used to look at my parents and wonder why they believed in me so much," said Hamilton, 24. "And my dad used to be like, `I'm going to make sure you have everything in place. If I have to spend my last dime to get you out of here for the summer or get you a pair of basketball sneakers, I'm going to do it.'

"And that's what he did. He saw something in me."

Interesting, how things turn out.

Dad stayed around

Not the basketball part, the Pistons' Richard Hamilton is saying now, but everything else.

He was about 10 when his parents--Richard "Big Rip" Hamilton and his mom, Pam Long--split up. Although they never married, the younger Hamilton said his situation was different from those of other single-parent families he knew in Coatesville.

"My father didn't disappear," he said.

And that is something Hamilton gives thanks for every year around Christmas.

Sitting at midcourt at the Pistons' practice gym, Hamilton gripped his hands together.

"We're like this," he said, describing the relationship between him and his father. "Then and now."

"The one thing I used to love when I was a kid was that we would always spend our Christmases together, everyone. My parents had their off and on times--sometimes they were together, sometimes they weren't--but regardless what the situation was, they were both going to do everything possible for me."

Reared by his mother, Hamilton said he could count on his father even though he lived on the other side of town. His sister could too.

Christena Hamilton, 21, is a junior guard at Temple University.

"Just because things didn't work out between us, our children didn't have to sacrifice," Pam Long said. "We didn't let that happen."

Christena and Richard Hamilton also have a brother, Cordell Long, who's 10.

The elder Richard Hamilton said: "I remember going to camps and looking around--there's a lot of guys in the NBA who never had their fathers around. I just didn't understand it. They didn't know what they were missing."

Just last weekend, Hamilton's father went to see his daughter's team play at Villanova. High school sensation LeBron James of Akron, Ohio, was there, and James noticed a tall, lean man wearing a Pistons jacket. When the elder Hamilton was introduced to James, he could sense that the kid thought he was in the presence of the other Rip, his NBA-playing son.

"I'm the father," the elder Hamilton, 46, told James.

An early start

While his parents both say they didn't push basketball on their children, as soon as Rip could bounce a basketball correctly, his father enrolled him in organized instruction.

"My earliest basketball memory was playing YBA ball when I was about 8 with all my friends," said the Pistons' Hamilton. "There was about 15 or 20 of us who all grew up together, and we're close to this day."

His father taped every game his son played through high school--the lone exception being Rip's first game in the seventh grade--but Hamilton's mother caught only flashes of her son's play.

"I wasn't allowed by my son to watch his games because I would scream and yell at the refs," Pam Long said with a laugh. "So until the eighth grade, I watched his games through the crack of the door. In the ninth grade, he finally let me watch."

In his third month with the Pistons, Hamilton has adjusted to life in the Motor City.

"Rip's personality, his work ethic, his enthusiasm fits into what we're trying to do here," coach Rick Carlisle said. "I think the guys have adopted him as one of ours. He's been good, and he has a chance to be really good."

Teammate Michael Curry said: "Rip wants to be great; he doesn't just want to be an All-Star. That's what he's working toward. But I always tell him, `You're going to be able to score with any two-guard in the league. But what's going to take you to the next level is how you're able to get your teammates involved and how you play on the defensive end.' "

Curry started to laugh.

"I always mess with him, saying, `Get your shoes dirty,' " Curry said. "That means coming in the paint, whether he's driving into the paint, coming in for defensive rebounds or coming in and taking a charge. When he makes those physical plays, he really stands out."