Hersey Hawkins: Fitting In Nicely

DON'T CALL HERSEY HAWKINS A NICE GUY. THAT JUST MAKES THE SONIC GUARD FEEL NASTY. BUT HAWKINS HAS BECOME THE CONSUMMATE TEAMMATE, COMFORTABLE AS A ROLE PLAYER OR A STAR. IS HE THE FINAL PIECE TO THE SONICS' TITLE PUZZLE?

They sting him sometimes in a way and for reasons that many may not understand. Just two words, but together they form one marvelous misconception. Or so he would have you believe.

Nice guy.

It's been a difficult escape from a description so apt.

"Nice guy - I don't like that," Hersey Hawkins says. "I'm competitive. I hate to lose at anything. But I think I understand sports are not everything. You can't run your life around 48 minutes of basketball. I think I've always been able to look at the big picture."

To understand how nice fits into the grand scheme of NBA basketball is to understand how Hawkins may represent the final, galvanizing piece in the Sonics' championship puzzle.

The thing that strikes you about Hersey Hawkins is his exquisite sense of knowing where he is, and where he needs to be. In life, this obviously is true. So, too, on a basketball court, where his feet always seem to be placed behind the three-point line, where and when they need to be, no matter how he's hopped, skipped and jumped about.

Oh, Hawkins can get nasty - nasty, for him, at least. Put the pressure on, and array the obstacles, and he gets that look on his face. And he'll take it to you without hesitation. Last Tuesday in Cleveland, during the most competitive game of the Sonics' season, Hawkins was called for a rare technical foul. He has two this season, and almost feels out of control.

"I told the ref, `For you to make him that upset, you know you did something wrong,' " Sonic teammate Gary Payton says.

Hawkins got the technical foul for telling an official that Danny Ferry had hit him in the face. The official said he didn't like the way Hawkins told him.

Not a single curse escaped Hawkins' lips.

"He's just so professional about the game," Sonic Nate McMillan says. "He never has a gripe or a groan about anything. He stands out in that way. We have that professionalism in different ways on this team. His is a religious type on the floor. Instead of saying, `damn,' it's `shucks.' And the guy says thanks for everything."

Hawkins is a shooting guard, a two, or sometimes called an off-guard, a term most appropriate for anyone playing the spot opposite Payton. Those who have come before Hawkins all have been off in one way or another.

Sedale Threatt got along with the point guard too well. Ricky Pierce didn't get along with him well enough. And Kendall Gill, well, he didn't get along with the coach, which may have been worst of all. After Gill, the Sonics needed nice. They were desperate for it.

"Hersey's a quiet pro that shows confidence in his teammates," Sonic Coach George Karl said. "He's probably as classy as I've seen. He's in the Nate McMillan category, a very special category.

"His teammates feel real positive about him. That rubs off. That kind of hangs around. We needed that very much."

Under pressure, all the superficialities in the game are stripped away and all that counts is trust. When trust is gone, the quest is sabotaged. A player needs to know, needs to be able to count on, how his teammates are going to react under pressure.

No team understands this better than the Sonics. Two years ago, the relationship between Payton and Pierce disintegrated, taking with it the Sonics' chances for success in a playoff series against the Denver Nuggets. Last season, the season-long stress caused by the feud between Karl and Gill cracked the Sonics during a playoff series against the Los Angeles Lakers.

It's difficult to imagine a similar thing happening with Hawkins in the mix.

"He's a legit guy," says Washington Coach Jim Lynam, who coached Hawkins in Philadelphia. "He's a terrific teammate."

Hawkins learned much about being a teammate with the 76ers. When he arrived out of Bradley, having been acclaimed as national college player of the year by everyone who counts, there already was Charles Barkley. On the Sixers, Barkley was the team and everyone else was a teammate.

"When you got there, Charles would explain to you that he was the man," Hawkins recalls. "Then he would tell you who was No. 2 on the team, No. 3 and so on down the totem pole."

Hawkins may have started out low, but he moved up quickly.

"He helped us right from the start," Lynam says. "We were desperate at that position, at that time. We had to upgrade. We put a lot of time and effort into finding out who Hawk was."

They found a balanced, serious-minded young man capable of handling the early expectations from the Sixers, as well as the demands of playing with Barkley. Hawkins averaged 15.1 points during his rookie season at a position rendered more important in the Eastern Conference's halfcourt style of play. The next season, he bumped his scoring average up to 18.5.

Barkley kept pushing for more.

"Hawkins is the key to our team," he said near the end of Hawkins' second season. "People give the credit to me and Rick (Mahorn), but Hersey is playing so well, he should have been named an All-Star. When he hits the outside shot, it makes it so much easier for me. It's so frustrating when he doesn't hit the shot. . . . If he would be more aggressive, he could be among the two or three best guards in the league."

Taking Barkley's words to heart, Hawkins did indeed blossom into one of the league's top scoring guards. His scoring average jumped to 22.1 points a game in 1990-91, and was 19.0 and 20.3 his last two seasons in Philadelphia. He was named to the Eastern Conference All-Star team in 1991.

"Charles was on me constantly," says Hawkins. "I'd be having a bad game and he'd grab me by my shirt and say, `You're too good for this.' Just the fact that he had confidence in me made me see things in me that I didn't even see."

Hawkins' experience with Barkley not only helped make him a consummate teammate, it prepared him for his current gig. In Seattle, he is paired with Payton, a character maybe not on the order of a Barkley, but certainly approaching Sir Charles in his own way.

They make for an odd couple. While Hawkins is reserved, Payton is brash, and their playing styles reflect those qualities. They are a backcourt yin and yang.

"I enjoy playing with Gary," Hawkins says. "Now that I've gotten to know him, I think he's gotten a bad rap about how he plays and some of the things that he's said.

"We're not going to go out and party together all the time. That's not my thing. But I enjoy his company. Dinners, movies, we do that."

Payton credits Hawkins for having a calming influence on him. He calls his backcourt partner "the most respected player on the team," and says he's tried to emulate Hawkins' restrained approach on the floor.

They have enjoyed a good synergy - the best, Payton says, of any backcourt tandem he's been a part of. They, of course, have crackled on offense, with Hawkins' perimeter firepower providing a perfect complement to Payton's postups and penetration. After struggling through November, shooting 40.4 percent and 29.3 percent from three-point range, Hawkins has since hit 49.7 percent of his shots and 41.7 percent of his threes.

The Sonics never really panicked over Hawkins' early slump.

"To me, he never did anything we had to worry about," Karl says, "except miss shots."

What helped the Sonics overlook Hawkins' shooting struggles was his defense, a largely unanticipated side benefit. While Payton leads the NBA with 2.79 steals a game, Hawkins has not strayed far behind, ranking seventh with a 1.90 average.

The Sonic coaching staff loves Hawkins' court awareness on defense, a fact that makes him particularly hard to pick off. He is smallish for a two-guard at 6 feet 3, but is difficult to post because of his good hands and steady positioning. He has been a good fit for the Sonics' team style of defense, and vice versa.

"The fact that he is in the top 10 in steals without really being a gambling type of player just shows how solid a defender he is," Sonic president Wally Walker says.

As many tangible contributions as Hawkins has made, it is the intangibles that have made the biggest difference, and may again, come the postseason.

Hawkins has proved adroit at traipsing between being content to stay in the background and stepping into the spotlight when necessary. That ability conjures comparisons among his teammates to Derrick McKey, an ex-Sonic once similarly critical to the team's chemistry. Wisely, Hawkins has determined the Sonics to be the domain of Payton and Shawn Kemp, with Detlef Schrempf just a notch below and then him.

Not that Hawkins stays that low in the pecking order. When Schrempf suffered a fracture below his left knee, Hawkins immediately stepped it up, averaging 27.3 points and hitting 58 percent from the field during a six- game stretch. The outburst, Karl says, necessarily showed his teammates that Hawkins was a "prime-time player."

"His overall demeanor fits well with the team," Sonic veteran Sam Perkins says. "He's not a troublesome player at all. He's not one who looks for attention, or needs attention. You need all kinds of different guys to make a team work. If we had 12 quiet guys, it would be boring. It would be like church every day. You need a sporadic Payton just like you need a choirboy Hawkins. That we have those type of people is why the team's having more fun this year."

And they are taking Hawkins along for the ride of his life.

"Sometimes I find myself getting caught up in some of the things that go on with this team," Hawkins says. "Sometimes I find myself saying or doing things I never used to do. Sometimes I use expressions in practice that only Gary would say and the guys ask, `What are you doing?' They're shocked.

"I've enjoyed myself more this year than I have with any other team. This is a winning team. But it's also a team full of good guys who enjoy and look out for each other."

Nice, in other words. Something on which Hersey Hawkins seems an expert.