Becoming an NBA player requires a lot of hard work. Maintaining at the top of the game is even harder, but those who manage to stay in the league and have a long career enjoyed the privileges of being in the association.
Besides the money, you can get a lot of recognition, especially with females. This isn't new, as players from old eras learned all the advantages that being an NBA star could grant them. Hall of Famer Gary Payton is no stranger to this, as he had two kids with two different women at the same time.
Payton says he learned his lessons and tried to advise others to not make his mistakes. Some of his friends didn't listen and ended up having multiple kids with different ladies. During a recent interview with VladTV, GP opened up on players like Calvin Murphy (who fathered 14 with 9 different women) and Shawn Kemp (7 children with six women) not being careful with their personal life.
"That’s my OG. I asked him about that, he said, ‘Hey, I was having fun.’ That is what it is. You’re having fun."
“When you’re so popular, during that time, what’s gonna happen?” Payton continued. “A lot of women are gonna come at you. So during that time, protection and all that old stuff wasn’t in our minds. We would just have fun and do what we have to do and we didn’t have to worry about getting AIDS or all this other stuff, but it was happening.”
Payton revealed that after Magic Johnson revealed he was infected with HIV, NBA players started being more careful, as they realized it could happen to anyone, no matter how much money you have or your status.
"You start thinking about, ‘Woo, this is real.’ And then you start reading up on everything, and then you start understanding how it’d be unsafe."
Still, Payton said that others just kept having fun, as they never thought so many girls would be interested in them.
“It was just a thing that; you grew up, you ain’t had that many women that was gonna say you was fine,” GP said. “It was just that type of situation, and when you get a bad one and keep getting bad ones, you was like, ‘Man, I can’t turn that down.’ It’s like you can’t turn it down.”
“It is what it is,” The Glove said. “We were like that. Nobody else was different. Everybody was the same. We was in Oakland, we didn’t see a bad one, we didn’t see that. We would probably see one bad girl, she probably had a boyfriend already, and we couldn’t get her. But when we’re getting approached, we see 10,15 of them, and they’re giving it to you. So it was just one of them things.”
This won't stop happening anytime soon. NBA players still have big clout with women. Some find their partner for life, while others have an active dating life, and others get deceived by somebody trying to take advantage of them. The NBA can look incredibly great from the outside, but not everything is as good as it appears to be.
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