How did Gary Payton II's lifelong struggle with the Warriors pave the way for his success?

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Gary Payton II received the NBA Community Care Assistance Award in January in recognition of his support to youth with learning disabilities.

Just 7 months ago, one of the team's most important role players eager to return to dynastic dominance, the son of Seattle SuperSonics legend Gary Payton, was preparing to apply for an office job in the team's video department.

Seven months ago, 30-year-old Gary Payton II had been full of rejections throughout his basketball career. In the past 6 years, he has been cut by the team 4 times and worked hard in the NBA's G League for 5 years.

And he was laid off again.

Payton knew there was a gap in the Golden State Warriors' video coordination department, so he approached assistant coach Jama Mahlalela.

He sees this as an opportunity for him to continue to contribute to the team and get involved in basketball.

"I'm very serious," Payton said. If I off, I'll go and apply for that job. I just wanted to stay. I can still play in the game, I can still help, follow the road and so on. And start solving it from here. ”

But Mahalela had other plans.

"I just told him the standards of the video department: a person who is willing to learn, a person who can continue to play on the pitch anyway. He said, 'Let me do this job,'" Mahlalela said. "I said, Gary, I'm not going to let you do the job. You definitely don't have the opportunity to do that in this job. You have to play for this team. ”

Payton was ready to do what he'd been doing: adapting.

When he was in second grade, Payton was diagnosed with dyslexia, a learning disability that affects 10 to 15 percent of Americans. People with this disorder often have difficulties with word recognition, spelling, reading comprehension, language, and visual processing.

After nearly two decades of learning to adapt to face adversity, Four days after talking to Mahalela, Payton was signed by Golden State as the team's fifteenth man and took the last place in the lineup.

He eventually found a home in the NBA and became part of the sport's finest defensive guard.

When Payton's three children were still young, their mother, Monick, let them read for 30 minutes a night. Gary's younger brother, Julian and sister Raquel, completed the mission without problems. But Gary was stuck in trouble and didn't know why. Monique always heard him muttering as he struggled to finish the pages.

"Say it out loud, say it clearly," she begged her son. But no matter how many times she reminded him, Gary continued to mumble.

When he reached second grade, his teacher approached Monique and suggested that he take a dyslexia test. At first, Monique was resistant. She now says she doesn't want to think anything is wrong with her son.

I remember crying because I was too him, Monique said. "I didn't realize he had a learning disability."

Gary was having trouble reading. His brain often swaps letters, especially d and b. When he was asked to read aloud in class, he tried to calculate the paragraphs that would be assigned to him in advance so that he could practice and recognize words he didn't recognize in advance. He had trouble learning the chronological order of things, such as the order of the seasons.

Two years after his diagnosis, the Payton family moved from Seattle to Los Angeles. On the trip there, Monique saw her eldest son crying on the plane.

"He said, 'I don't want to be a fool,'" Monique said. "I said, baby, you're not a fool. It's just that you learn differently than others. ”

It won't be easy for Gary to accept the difference, which he says he works hard academically.

"After I found out about it, I was even more embarrassed to ask questions and speak in class because my classmates didn't know it, and I didn't want to remind them that I had difficulty reciting," Gary said. "I just try not to show any difference from other people."

Gary says that when teachers explain them in words, he struggles to understand these concepts. He said he often approached the teacher after class to ask follow-up questions. Eventually, he learned to ask for the concept to be written out so he could understand it.

After they moved to Los Angeles, the Paytons enrolled Gary in an academic tutoring program tailored for children with learning disabilities. Soon after, they discovered that their son was a visual learner, which is common in dyslexia patients. The news isn't surprising — Gary always has the ability to develop new hobbies after watching it a few times.

"If you can write it out and show it to me, I can understand it," Gary remembers telling the teachers.

He still does that today. When he needs to spell some words, he has to write it down, even in the air, or he'll ask Siri on his phone.

"If you look at the phenomenology of visual learners versus auditory learners and kinesthetic learners, the current understanding is that we're all learning in all ways, we just have preferences," said Dr. Francesco Dandekar, associate director of sports psychiatry at Stanford University. "And we also have ways to compensate for this potential deficiency." So when people say they're visual learners, it's more about having trouble processing auditory input... So they will be attracted to the things they see. ”

Gary and his mother, a former player, watched his father's game together — again and again. When he's alone, he watches shots of other games or other players. He would study them and pick out the parts of their game that he liked. To this day, Gary says, he's still applying the movements he's seen from the late 1990s to the early 2000s.

"Look at basketball, I mean, you can see it," Gary said. "You can see which actions will work and which will not. This really helps a lot. I think it's easier for me to see some action and then use it in my game than in other ways. I try to watch as many videos as possible. ”

But his love of the game, and the preparation required for the game, is not natural or easy to obtain.

"Because of my dad's identity, I want to stay away from this sport anyway and live up to the reputation," Payton said. "I just don't want to face it."

But when it came time to middle school, Payton decided to give it a try.

"He's lazy," Monique said. "I said, man, we're dogs on the pitch. You either join or you quit. Are you playing or playing? Are you serious? ”

When Gary was a senior in high school, he decided to meet Darrel Jordan, a friend of the Paytons and a basketball coach who had coached Julian in the AAU Basketball League. Under Jordan's guidance, Gary's footsteps and the basics of other races began to improve.

Gary received scholarships from three secondary union schools: Florida Gulf University, Florida International University, and Florida A&M University. However, his academic performance was not up to standard. The voice of his childhood who told him he wasn't smart enough came back and filled him with self-doubt.

After graduating from Hawaii Preparatory College in Phoenix, Gary attended Salt Lake Community College. By 2013, during his sophomore season, he joined St. Mary's College in Mogara, California. The school was the right size, it was close to his parents in Oakland, and St. Mary's was one of the best teams in the West Coast League.

But his father put aside a decision on whether to go to St. Mary's College, asking them to see Oregon State, where he was named to the Pac-10's Best Team in 1987 and was named Pac-10 Defensive Player of the Year and Rookie of the Year. Former Beavers head coach Craig Robinson also made his point, a tempting piece of advice that gary could hardly refuse: Robinson said he would be the one to change and make Oregon State a team back in the national spotlight.

That suggestion worked. Gary joined the Beavers in 2014 and played a crucial role in leading the Beavers to the NCAA Championship for the first time since 1990, becoming the first player to be twice named Pac-12 Defensive Player of the Year.

Yet, at the same time as these highlight moments, the voice that filled him with self-doubt — saying he wasn't good enough, saying he wasn't smart enough, saying he wasn't on any draft list, the voice he spent more than a decade trying to silence — remained.

"I don't know what I'm going to do after my college career," he said. "I know what I'm going to do if basketball doesn't work."

In Monday's second game against the Denver Nuggets, the Warriors trailed by eight points as the first quarter drew to a close.

Nashon Hyland jumped near the top arc of the three-second zone in hopes of extending the Nuggets' advantage to double digits. When his shot popped out of the basket, defending MVP hit Nikola Jokic for the rebound.

When Jokic wanted a dunk, Payton — a 90-pound weight difference and a height difference of 9 inches — jumped high and cleanly covered Jokic's shot.

Otto Porter grabbed the ball, dribbled the ball halfway through and passed it to Andrew Wiggins, who in turn sent a three-pointer to let the latter hit a three-pointer, narrowing the Nuggets' lead to five points and forcing Nuggets coach Michael Malone to call a timeout. As Jokic walked up to the team table, Payton slapped him on the butt, much to Jokic's displeasure.

When Stephen Curry stopped the frustrated center who often bumped into Payton near the basket, Payton walked straight to the bench and didn't look back.

In the mid-February match, Jokic received the ball at high altitude, this time three seconds out of the zone. With less than five minutes left in the first half, he turned to face a familiar opponent: Payton.

After trying to hit him in the back, Jokic turned to try his characteristic turn and shoot on his back with one foot.

But when he jumped, Payton seized the moment to jump, then touched the ball and completed the block.

Payton's ability to block Jokic is no coincidence.

"Video doesn't lie," Payton said.

Jokic has mastered almost all defenders – a move that has become the basis of his offensive routine. But by watching the footage for hours, Payton and Mahalela discovered how to use Payton's stature to stop Jokic's turn. It was simple, and they realized: it would give Jokic a defense he rarely encountered and didn't need to face often.

"The means he usually uses are used against taller opponents," Mahlalela said. "When Gary defended him, his center of gravity was completely different. It's all about learning and understanding how the game works. And it's really important to get to know the player, to understand how he fits into the team. ”

Ask almost everyone and they'll tell you that what makes Payton such a special player is his basketball IQ, which he's improved throughout his life by understanding the unique way of playing.

"Dyslexia and IQ are not key," Dr. Dandekar said. "It's just that your brain has a little trouble processing information. There's a misconception that success means you can do everything well. Success is actually more about understanding what you are good at, understanding what you are not good at, giving full play to your strengths, and finding ways to help yourself in things that you are not good at. ”

Payton eventually found success in the NBA, giving the Warriors a 2-0 lead over Jokic and nuggets.

"They asked me to be myself," Payton said.

Seven months ago, he was ready to be rejected again, another example that flooded his mind with the kind of skeptical voices that had accompanied him throughout his life. He doesn't know if he'll fill a gap in the Warriors' lineup, or a vacancy in the team's video coordination department.

"He knows his path and his journey is full of adversity." Warriors head coach Steve Kerr said. "He's been laid off so many times. This prepares him for the next stop at any time. But he played too well with us to be cut. ”