Ups and downs are part of elite sports, but his incredibly challenging childhood has helped ALBA Berlin guard Peyton Siva keep his professional glories and failures in perspective.
Peyton Siva, ALBA: 'I leave it on the court'
Interviews
6 Mins read
ALBA Berlin point guard Peyton Siva has not had an easy first Turkish Airlines EuroLeague season.
After missing his team's opening round victory over Zenit St Petersburg, Siva returned to action to suffer six consecutive defeats as ALBA slipped to a 1-6 record. He then suffered another injury to miss three more games, came back to win just one of four before being sidelined for the third time this season to sit out another three games.
Despite starting the season with personal 1-9 record and enduring three separate injury absences, Siva is made of tough enough stuff to take it all in his stride – and now his fortunes are turning, as he produced a pair of strong performances to lead ALBA to consecutive road victories in last week's double-header.
All those ups and downs are part and parcel of life as a professional athlete, and his incredibly challenging childhood means that Siva is in the best possible position to keep his professional glories and failures in perspective.
"Whatever I'm dealing with on the basketball court isn't worthy of comparing to the things that people are dealing with in the real world."
Siva's father was a drug and alcohol addict, and a young Peyton would regularly have to head out onto the streets to look for him after he went missing for days on end. On one particularly disturbing occasion, when he was 13, Peyton drove around the neighbourhood and dragged his father out of a run-down house before talking him out of committing suicide as he sat next to him with a gun on his lap.
Unsurprisingly, those character-building episodes shaped Siva's outlook on life, and he remains sufficiently aware of the reality outside the glitz and glamour of professional sport to deal with whatever basketball might throw at him.
"I know that whatever I'm dealing with on the basketball court isn't worthy of comparing to the things that people are dealing with in the real world," he says.
"People are starving, getting caught up in wars, getting murdered or kidnapped. What I'm doing on a basketball court can't be measured to that. I'm playing a game that I love for a living. Someone once gave me good advice: you should never let yourself get too high or too low. Sure, I'm sad if I lose a game, but then I go home to my two kids who couldn't care less whether we won or lost – they're just happy to have their daddy home. I try to keep life in perspective in that way."
"Looking at it now, it's just a blessing that my dad's still here."
None of this means that Siva doesn't care about winning or losing. After all, becoming a top-level player has been his route to a rewarding and enjoyable professional life, but the maturity he had to show as an early teen has left a permanent mark on his mindset:
"This is my livelihood and I know that I have to go out there and perform, do the best I can for my team and to provide for my family. But that doesn't mean I have to take it home and project it on my wife or kids. If I lose or have a bad game, I leave it on the court, come back to practice the next day and work on it. But I can't go home and take out my anger on my family. That's something I've learned."
Siva learned many things from his childhood, which had a blessedly happy ending after his father – with the patient and selfless help of his son – was able to kick his bad habits and put his life back together.
"Looking at it now, it's just a blessing that my dad's still here," Siva reflects. "I'm very thankful for that. I didn't see the things I was doing as a teenager as monumental. They just seemed like everyday things that I had to do. I had a lot of friends dealing with their parents who were on drugs or whatever. It was just the environment I grew up in."
"He's been one of my biggest supporters, if not the biggest."
Siva owes his father a debt of gratitude for pointing him in the direction of a career as a sportsman – although basketball, he admits, was not the first choice. "My Dad was a big advocate for me to get into sports, and he's a huge fan of American football so that was the first sport I played seriously. I loved that; he trained me to the bone, made me a lot tougher.
"I played baseball, football and basketball, but football was my main sport until I got hurt. Then I stuck with basketball, and I ended up getting a scholarship for college. My Dad loves football but he wasn't disappointed that I gave it up for basketball. He didn't really care what I played, he was just proud that I was able to get a scholarship."
Peyton is also grateful to his mother for her unstinting support, saying: "My mom really supported my passion for sports when I was young. She made sure I was doing everything possible to keep me active and keep me off the streets.
"She raised me as a single mother with my siblings and my hat's off to her, because she's done a great job of raising her kids. She worked all her jobs, made sure we had enough to eat and had enough money to pay for our sports activities. She's been over to Berlin a couple of times, but she's not really into watching sports. She's there for moral support rather than being a fan of the game. As long as I'm healthy and doing good she couldn't care less about the actual sport…I don't think she could name one other basketball club in Europe! But if she's happy, I'm happy."
Siva's father, though, is a much more active follower of Peyton's career, and the tough times they went through together a few years ago have brought them even closer.
"He loves watching me play – he always likes to gives me his advice about what I should be doing on the court! He's been a big help for me moving forward in my life. He's been one of my biggest supporters, if not the biggest, and he's always been there for me. We check in with each other pretty much every day, and I'm very thankful for him."
The feeling, without any doubt, is mutual.