He drove a few miles -- to a block where he had found his father half a dozen times before and parked in front of a two-story house with boarded-up windows and overgrown grass. It was a place he had heard his father refer to as a dope house, and Siva had never wanted to step inside it. Four or five men smoked cigarettes on a sloping front porch. One recognized Siva's car and disappeared back into the house. He emerged a few minutes later with Siva's father -- a 6'3" former kickboxer, eyes bloodshot and expressionless, scratches rising on his shoulders and arms, a gun tucked halfway into the pocket of his pants.

"Pey-pey?" he said, using his son's nickname. He squinted into the daylight and asked why Siva had bothered to come find him.

"I want to help you," Siva replied. "And I need you to help me."

His father sat in the passenger seat of the car, pulled the gun from his pocket and set it in his lap. He had been out of work for months and suffering from unrelenting depression. He looked down at his lap and fiddled with the gun.

"I want to end it," he said. "I'm ready to be done."

"That's so stupid," Junior said, shaking his head, his voice firm but quiet. "That's so selfish."

"How come?"

"Because you're my dad. I need you."

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.

"I want to do something big, and I want you to be a part of all that," he said. "Stop just wasting your life. Are you in?"

Siva Sr. listened in the passenger seat, stunned into silence. 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.

"Okay," he said. "I'm in."



NEARLY A DECADE later, at a Mexican restaurant in a college town across the country, Siva sits down after a preseason workout and tries to eat lunch. 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 10-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. "I'm used to everyone recognizing me," he says, and it doesn't bother him. 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 1970s, when Siva Sr.'s own father died of cancer at age 52. Siva Sr. was 12 years old then, and the tragedy set in motion a pattern of anguish and escape. Siva Sr. and his eight siblings drifted in their grief. Siva Sr. says he joined a gang, dealt drugs and blunted his pain with alcohol, then marijuana, then ecstasy and, at last, crack.

He had three children -- Leilanna, Michael and Peyton Jr. -- by two women in his early 20s but couldn't make it last with either of the mothers. 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 250 pounds. His aging mother tried to keep the peace with a baseball bat, but neighbors occasionally called the police. Siva Sr. cycled in and out of jail, mostly on drug charges, missing many moments of his children's lives.

Even from his remove, Siva Sr.'s problems ran through their bloodlines, afflicting one person after the next until Peyton Siva Jr. hit adolescence. 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. Trouble was the $20 bill he received in weekly allowance from his grandmother that his father sometimes took when he was desperate for a fix. 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.

"Everybody in the city knew him as the craziest athlete, the wildest and usually the best," Michael says.

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. An AAU coach named Daryll Hennings began flying him to tournaments across the country. 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. "My whole family is addicted to something, and I didn't want to tempt fate," he says.

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. So Senior coached football and volunteered at the gym of the Boys & Girls Club. 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. "Peyton was almost like a counselor," Siva Sr. says. "He checked on my progress and gave me equal amounts of love and tough love."

Says Siva Jr., "As long as I was helping fix people, I knew I wasn't part of the problem."