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. Once, during Siva's sophomore year in , his high school hosted a pregame ceremony before its biggest rivalry game to retire the jersey of former guard Jason Terry, one of Siva's idols.
The school had never retired a jersey; local basketball dignitaries packed the gym, and Terry interrupted his NBA season to fly back from Dallas. Moments before the ceremony, Siva's sister recognized a man in the stands who she believed had stolen her car.
She ran across the gym and started screaming at him, Siva says, starting a skirmish on the edge of the court, with her father eventually pulling the two apart.
I would imagine, and I don't know this for a fact, but I would imagine that so many people would be 'what's wrong with you? If you can't insulate yourself from all of that, then you're not gonna get back to your form. And that's what I keep telling our guys: insulate everything. She'll give him one of these 'I know you're not playing well, so let me step away from you' he jokingly steps back. I think he hears it -- that he's not playing well -- and he's a very sensitive young man so he presses.
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Tough, smart, great defender, good passer, and is a good floor general. Only thing he struggles at is scoring. If he can improve is shot and get better at finishing around the rim he could be a huge steal in the 2nd. You know what? I know exactly who you are talking about. Siva's game does remind me of his. That's pretty high praise you are dishing out to Siva there. Return to Board. Page 1 of 1. Latest LSU News ». Sports Lite ». Latest SEC Headlines ».
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