reading this book about OKC "Boom Town"
scumbag shyt...
' one time KD and his mom pulled up to a red light and his dad happened to be the car next to them. he ignored em
When Kevin Durant was eleven years old, skinny as a stack of pencils, his father came back to town and taught him a lesson. This was in 1999, near Washington, D.C., at Durant’s aunt’s house, in the driveway. It was long before the thought of Oklahoma City would have had any reason to enter Durant’s mind. The SuperSonics still played in Seattle; OKC was still lobbying, unsuccessfully, for an NHL team. But Kevin Durant wasn’t thinking about any of that. His mind was fully occupied. He and his father were playing one-on-one.
It was around this time that it was essentially determined on which side of the tracks Durant would exist. He would end up part of the struggle side. When Durant was about a year old, his father walked out. Wayne Pratt left Wanda a single mother with two baby boys. Wayne didn’t go far. He was in the vicinity, working in D.C., hanging out in PG County, still in his same circles. He just didn’t want to be the head of this particular household, leaving Wanda to assume that role.
“I felt like I was immature, selfish, I was young,” Pratt told the Washington Post in a 2012 interview. “I didn’t know what I was getting myself into.”
This was unusual. Durant’s father, Wayne Pratt, had left the family just before Kevin turned one, and his son had grown up without him.
The boys were given the surname of their great-grandfather, Troy Durant, from whom Wanda gets her maiden name and from whom her oldest son, Anthony, gets his middle name. Kevin’s middle name is that of his biological father, Wayne Pratt.
Wanda, 21, and Wayne, 22, had two young boys and were starting a family together in the shadows of the White House as the Ronald Reagan administration was ending.
They didn’t even share a last name. The only name they shared was Kevin’s middle: Wayne. It was not much of a stretch to say that basketball had stepped into KD’s life to fill the void his father left. As a boy, he basically lived in his town’s rec center, shooting and shooting and shooting, finding solace in the game, and now that he was hitting adolescence, his body was beginning to change, to stretch out, to match exactly what basketball asked of it: height and length. Durant was playing AAU ball, getting good, blowing teams out. The KD the whole world would come to know, ten years later—the effortless stretchy shooter—was already in formation.
Meanwhile, back in the driveway, KD’s father was not having it. He was destroying his son, shoving him around, backing him down—bang, bang, bang, bang—turning, dunking, screaming, cursing. One-on-one basketball is the atomic state of the game, a pure test of strength, speed, aggression, and violence, and against his father, eleven-year-old Kevin Durant had nowhere to hide. There were no teammates to defer to. Durant’s personality didn’t quite match his booming talent: he was a shy kid, quiet, passive, always worrying about what everyone around him was thinking. His coaches struggled to convince him to shoot, even when he was on fire, his skinny arms stroking in beautiful jumpers from all over the court. He didn’t want to seem selfish, didn’t want his teammates to be mad at him.
Now Durant’s father was talking trash, swaggering, letting everyone within shouting distance know that, even though he’d been out of the picture for ten years, even though he’d left Wanda to raise the kids all by herself, he was still the man, and Kevin was only a boy. Wayne Pratt was huge, strong, and Kevin was Kevin: thin, gentle, watchful, kind. And so the father scored and scored and scored, with brutal efficiency, and the boy could get nothing. Maybe it was a lesson, an alpha thing: you have to be mean to survive. Winning was not something the world was going to just hand you. If you wanted it, you had to go out and take it.
Kevin Durant, however, could only take so much. As the blowout escalated, as his father celebrated, as his brother watched on the sideline, KD broke down. He burst into tears and ran away, into the empty house. He closed the garage behind him and locked every single door. He refused to let anyone in. For a long time, he just sat there alone, with the whole house to himself, crying.
I knew this story because Durant told it to me, out of the blue, thirteen years after it happened. We were sitting in the Thunder’s luxurious practice facility, surrounded by all of Sam Presti’s perfectly straight balls—an impossible distance from that East Coast driveway in 1999. Durant was telling me the story, he said, because that moment had changed him. Locked alone in the house, with tears on his face, eleven-year-old Durant had an epiphany.
“I sat back and thought about it,” he said, glancing over at me with his big soft eyes. “I was like, ‘What am I so mad at?’ ” In that moment of emotional overload, he said, he made a decision. “It’s good to be passionate, it’s good to hate losing. But I’ve got to channel it in the right way. After a while, I started to learn to leave it where it’s at, get rid of it. Once you’re done and you’re off the court or out of the venue or whatever, go back to being you.”
story about Wayne abandoning him again later
scumbag shyt...' one time KD and his mom pulled up to a red light and his dad happened to be the car next to them. he ignored emWhen Kevin Durant was eleven years old, skinny as a stack of pencils, his father came back to town and taught him a lesson. This was in 1999, near Washington, D.C., at Durant’s aunt’s house, in the driveway. It was long before the thought of Oklahoma City would have had any reason to enter Durant’s mind. The SuperSonics still played in Seattle; OKC was still lobbying, unsuccessfully, for an NHL team. But Kevin Durant wasn’t thinking about any of that. His mind was fully occupied. He and his father were playing one-on-one.
It was around this time that it was essentially determined on which side of the tracks Durant would exist. He would end up part of the struggle side. When Durant was about a year old, his father walked out. Wayne Pratt left Wanda a single mother with two baby boys. Wayne didn’t go far. He was in the vicinity, working in D.C., hanging out in PG County, still in his same circles. He just didn’t want to be the head of this particular household, leaving Wanda to assume that role.
“I felt like I was immature, selfish, I was young,” Pratt told the Washington Post in a 2012 interview. “I didn’t know what I was getting myself into.”
This was unusual. Durant’s father, Wayne Pratt, had left the family just before Kevin turned one, and his son had grown up without him.
The boys were given the surname of their great-grandfather, Troy Durant, from whom Wanda gets her maiden name and from whom her oldest son, Anthony, gets his middle name. Kevin’s middle name is that of his biological father, Wayne Pratt.
Wanda, 21, and Wayne, 22, had two young boys and were starting a family together in the shadows of the White House as the Ronald Reagan administration was ending.
They didn’t even share a last name. The only name they shared was Kevin’s middle: Wayne. It was not much of a stretch to say that basketball had stepped into KD’s life to fill the void his father left. As a boy, he basically lived in his town’s rec center, shooting and shooting and shooting, finding solace in the game, and now that he was hitting adolescence, his body was beginning to change, to stretch out, to match exactly what basketball asked of it: height and length. Durant was playing AAU ball, getting good, blowing teams out. The KD the whole world would come to know, ten years later—the effortless stretchy shooter—was already in formation.
Meanwhile, back in the driveway, KD’s father was not having it. He was destroying his son, shoving him around, backing him down—bang, bang, bang, bang—turning, dunking, screaming, cursing. One-on-one basketball is the atomic state of the game, a pure test of strength, speed, aggression, and violence, and against his father, eleven-year-old Kevin Durant had nowhere to hide. There were no teammates to defer to. Durant’s personality didn’t quite match his booming talent: he was a shy kid, quiet, passive, always worrying about what everyone around him was thinking. His coaches struggled to convince him to shoot, even when he was on fire, his skinny arms stroking in beautiful jumpers from all over the court. He didn’t want to seem selfish, didn’t want his teammates to be mad at him.
Now Durant’s father was talking trash, swaggering, letting everyone within shouting distance know that, even though he’d been out of the picture for ten years, even though he’d left Wanda to raise the kids all by herself, he was still the man, and Kevin was only a boy. Wayne Pratt was huge, strong, and Kevin was Kevin: thin, gentle, watchful, kind. And so the father scored and scored and scored, with brutal efficiency, and the boy could get nothing. Maybe it was a lesson, an alpha thing: you have to be mean to survive. Winning was not something the world was going to just hand you. If you wanted it, you had to go out and take it.
Kevin Durant, however, could only take so much. As the blowout escalated, as his father celebrated, as his brother watched on the sideline, KD broke down. He burst into tears and ran away, into the empty house. He closed the garage behind him and locked every single door. He refused to let anyone in. For a long time, he just sat there alone, with the whole house to himself, crying.
I knew this story because Durant told it to me, out of the blue, thirteen years after it happened. We were sitting in the Thunder’s luxurious practice facility, surrounded by all of Sam Presti’s perfectly straight balls—an impossible distance from that East Coast driveway in 1999. Durant was telling me the story, he said, because that moment had changed him. Locked alone in the house, with tears on his face, eleven-year-old Durant had an epiphany.
“I sat back and thought about it,” he said, glancing over at me with his big soft eyes. “I was like, ‘What am I so mad at?’ ” In that moment of emotional overload, he said, he made a decision. “It’s good to be passionate, it’s good to hate losing. But I’ve got to channel it in the right way. After a while, I started to learn to leave it where it’s at, get rid of it. Once you’re done and you’re off the court or out of the venue or whatever, go back to being you.”
story about Wayne abandoning him again later
Wayne started coming to Kevin’s AAU games and middle school games, establishing a consistent presence. The easy conclusion was that Pratt returned because he knew Durant was a basketball prodigy. He must have heard about how his son was starting to look like a future star on the court, and Durant was already taller than all the other middle school kids. In fact, he was so tall, his coaches had to carry his birth certificate because opposing parents always thought he was older. Yet the NBA hype didn’t really stick to Durant until high school. So the timing of Wayne’s return preceded the prodigy years.
Either way, Wayne Pratt had a long road back into the lives of his sons after leaving them back in 1989. On top of that, Pratt had two other children, Rayvonne and Breana, while he was away. He was now a father of four children, working as a security officer at MedStar Health.
The pertinent question: Why would Durant allow him back? It would have been normal if his hurt feelings and young resolve had erected a steel wall around his heart. Many boys in his situation have sworn off their biological dads. The anger and the emptiness from being abandoned leaves a wound that doesn’t always heal. But Durant’s response tells a lot about him. He valued wholeness over hate. His desire for love, to appease the yearning he couldn’t shake, overwhelmed whatever anger he had from his dad leaving in the first place. Durant had the chance to reunite with his father, and he took it. “Kevin, he is a loving, generous, kind person,” Wanda said in Durant’s documentary. “He’s the kind of person that believes that everyone is inherently good. Just how Kevin is.”
Durant wasn’t even in high school yet and he had already dealt with his fair share of trauma. The chance to have a father in his life had to be enticing. He got a dose of it initially. His dad started picking him up from school. Wayne and his boys would chill together and play video games. He would take them to eat before taking them home, winning them over with quality time and tasty grub. Durant didn’t have many friends. But for about a year and a half he relished having a cool dad.
But then all that stopped. Wayne disappeared again.
“I was really hurt,” Durant told GQ. “That was the first time I’d ever been hurt by anything. I’m always used to, like, keeping it inside, and it’d go away in a day. But I was like, ‘Damn, man, so we can’t play video games together no more? We can’t laugh at jokes? We can’t wrestle?’ We would wrestle every day in the living room and shyt. It was the coolest thing. And then, like, when he left, it was just like, ‘Damn, we can’t do all that stuff no more?’ It’s boring now. Because I’m by myself.” Nothing fills the void of a father in the heart of a young man. Durant did, however, have a couple of father figures in his life who tempered the emptiness. Big Chucky looked out for him, put wise words in his ear, and made sure he knew someone cared about him. His support and praise instilled confidence in Durant. It was Chucky who made Durant believe he was the best player on the floor. He would watch the NBA Draft with the players and tell Durant he couldn’t wait until it was his turn to be drafted into the NBA. Chucky was good with all the kids, but he was noticeably closer to Durant, which gave the kid a sense of how special he was.
Taras “Stink” Brown became a godfather to Durant. He didn’t put the ball in the kid’s hands, but he sure put it in his heart. Stink taught him work ethic and discipline. He once even kicked Durant out of the Center and told him he couldn’t come back. Durant ran home crying. Of course Stink let him back in, but the lesson about accountability was learned. Stink taught him teamwork and sacrifice.
“He was there when I wasn’t there … ,” Pratt told the Washington Post. “And I continually thank him for that, because he didn’t have to do that. He did the things that most men wouldn’t do; I thought that was very noble of him and [the] selflessness that he showed.”
Either way, Wayne Pratt had a long road back into the lives of his sons after leaving them back in 1989. On top of that, Pratt had two other children, Rayvonne and Breana, while he was away. He was now a father of four children, working as a security officer at MedStar Health.
The pertinent question: Why would Durant allow him back? It would have been normal if his hurt feelings and young resolve had erected a steel wall around his heart. Many boys in his situation have sworn off their biological dads. The anger and the emptiness from being abandoned leaves a wound that doesn’t always heal. But Durant’s response tells a lot about him. He valued wholeness over hate. His desire for love, to appease the yearning he couldn’t shake, overwhelmed whatever anger he had from his dad leaving in the first place. Durant had the chance to reunite with his father, and he took it. “Kevin, he is a loving, generous, kind person,” Wanda said in Durant’s documentary. “He’s the kind of person that believes that everyone is inherently good. Just how Kevin is.”
Durant wasn’t even in high school yet and he had already dealt with his fair share of trauma. The chance to have a father in his life had to be enticing. He got a dose of it initially. His dad started picking him up from school. Wayne and his boys would chill together and play video games. He would take them to eat before taking them home, winning them over with quality time and tasty grub. Durant didn’t have many friends. But for about a year and a half he relished having a cool dad.
But then all that stopped. Wayne disappeared again.
“I was really hurt,” Durant told GQ. “That was the first time I’d ever been hurt by anything. I’m always used to, like, keeping it inside, and it’d go away in a day. But I was like, ‘Damn, man, so we can’t play video games together no more? We can’t laugh at jokes? We can’t wrestle?’ We would wrestle every day in the living room and shyt. It was the coolest thing. And then, like, when he left, it was just like, ‘Damn, we can’t do all that stuff no more?’ It’s boring now. Because I’m by myself.” Nothing fills the void of a father in the heart of a young man. Durant did, however, have a couple of father figures in his life who tempered the emptiness. Big Chucky looked out for him, put wise words in his ear, and made sure he knew someone cared about him. His support and praise instilled confidence in Durant. It was Chucky who made Durant believe he was the best player on the floor. He would watch the NBA Draft with the players and tell Durant he couldn’t wait until it was his turn to be drafted into the NBA. Chucky was good with all the kids, but he was noticeably closer to Durant, which gave the kid a sense of how special he was.
Taras “Stink” Brown became a godfather to Durant. He didn’t put the ball in the kid’s hands, but he sure put it in his heart. Stink taught him work ethic and discipline. He once even kicked Durant out of the Center and told him he couldn’t come back. Durant ran home crying. Of course Stink let him back in, but the lesson about accountability was learned. Stink taught him teamwork and sacrifice.
“He was there when I wasn’t there … ,” Pratt told the Washington Post. “And I continually thank him for that, because he didn’t have to do that. He did the things that most men wouldn’t do; I thought that was very noble of him and [the] selflessness that he showed.”
Ayee Youngblood heard you got some game lemme see
This line has me weak. "brutal efficiency"