The following is adapted from the author's new book  Trash Talk: The Only Book about Destroying Your Rivals That Isn’t Total Garbage.

When you set out to report a book about trash talk, as I did, you can feel pretty confident that you're going to hear a few stories about Gary Payton—and I heard my share, and then some. I heard stories from former players, reporters, coaches, and from GP himself. But even I wasn’t prepared for just how wild Payton could occasionally be on the hardwood, or how deeply ingrained trash talk was in him as both a player and a person. To wit, I present a sampling of stories about the legendary Sonics guard, who is almost assuredly the most garrulous man to ever put on a uniform.

Gary Payton enjoyed torturing rival players—and none more than a college opponent named Keith Smith. 

Coming out of high school, Payton was dismissed by many college recruiters as undesirable; he even had a scholarship offer from St. John’s rescinded before winding up at Oregon State. Back home in Oakland, Payton found himself on the receiving end of all sorts of unwelcome questions about this collective disinterest—but what most ate at him was the lack of attention from the University of California, Berkeley, a public institution only a few miles north of where he grew up. As Payton tells me, “People used to always say, ‘Why didn’t Cal recruit Gary Payton?’”

But Payton knew why: Keith Smith. He says, “Keith Smith was one of them guards that everyone really wanted.” Nice guy, too. But to young Payton, his six-foot-four rival represented every acceptance letter that never came and all of the taunting silence of his phone line. Over the next four years, whenever Oregon State played against Cal, Payton made it his mission to torment Smith. “It was a personal chip on my shoulder—to show Cal that you made a mistake,” he says. “I’d go over to the [Cal] bench and I’d say, ‘So this is y’all’s superstar? Watch how I get y’all’s superstar, and I’m going tear his ass up every time I play him.'” In the stands, Payton’s father, Al Payton, a.k.a. Mr. Mean, would encourage his son to cultivate this beef. “My father would be telling me, ‘Go at him. Don’t respect him. Just remember what they didn’t do. They didn’t recruit you. So now you going to torture who they thought was better than you.’”

Smith never stood a chance. Payton hounded him on defense and attacked him on the offensive end. He barked, You supposed to be better than me? It’s no way possible. You ain’t nowhere near my caliber of basketball player. Payton would play other mind games with him, too. “Sometimes I wouldn’t even act like he there,” he says. “And sometimes I’d tell him, ‘Man, why are you out here?’” The effect of all of this harassment was obvious—not only on the floor, but also from the stands. That’s where Bernard Ward, a childhood friend of Payton’s who would go on to earn a master’s in sports psychology, would watch these matchups. Ward says, “Keith Smith was a good player, man. But Gary had him so scared. He did the mental game on him.”

Sonics coach George Karl would play Payton for 48 minutes just so he didn’t have to hear him speak. 

Everybody knows that Payton was a relentless talker on the court. As his former Sonics teammate Michael Cage once said of playing with Payton, “When you’re done, you just want to go find a library or something, someplace totally silent.” But the point guard’s motor mouth knew no bounds. According to former Sonics head coach George Karl, Payton would talk trash to him from his seat on the bench any time he subbed him out of a game. “And if I didn’t put him back in, he’d be trash-talking everybody on the fucking bench. He motherfucked everybody,” says Karl. When that happened, the coach adds, a “cloudy energy” would descend over his team—which sometimes he preferred to just avoid. Per Karl, “I’ll be honest with you, there were games I never took him out, because I didn’t want to hear his chatter. People would say, ‘Why did you play Gary Payton for forty-eight minutes?’ Well, I didn’t want to hear his shit!”

Karl and Payton needed a mediator

At times, George Karl tried to juice his team—and especially his star players—by talking shit. “Gary and Shawn [Kemp] had to live with me getting on them,” he says. But more often than not, that tactic backfired, as the players would talk shit right back to him. Longtime sportswriter Phil Taylor remembers many Sonics games devolving into three-way bickering sessions. “I loved sitting courtside at Seattle games,” says Taylor. “George Karl and Shawn Kemp and Gary Payton—I mean, they would be trash-talking to each other, much less their opponents.” Karl admits as much, and still sounds exhausted by it, decades later. He says, “Gary and I trash-talked each other, but Gary would win those battles.”

In Payton’s telling, the volatility of his and Karl’s relationship was a result of big egos. “We used to go at each other,” he says. “Coach Karl had a big ego, just like all of us did. I had a big ego. That’s why we clashed so much. I didn’t want him to say nothing to me. He didn’t want me to say nothing back to him.” But saying nothing was never an option—for either man. As a result, there were occasional blow-ups between coach and player. Karl would kick Payton out of practice, perhaps, and Payton would retaliate by showering Karl with verbal abuse. According to Taylor, Payton would talk crap “about [Karl’s] growing paunch. Like, ‘Man, they told me you played! That cannot be that you played ball.’ And stuff about his hairline.”

It was in these moments, when Karl and Payton’s relationship was most in need of repair, that assistant coach Tim Grgurich stepped in. “He was our buffer,” says Payton. “If we would go at each other and cuss and scream and yell at each other, we would basically come in and have a beer together. I would be the last one to leave the gym, and we would go in there and we would talk about it. We’d cuss each other out and say, ‘Man, you should have said it this fucking way. Don’t say it disrespectfully in front of other people, in front of me, and I won’t say it in front of you.’ And then we’d bust a beer and chug it all the way down.” And all would be forgiven—until the next day, at least.

The Sonics brought in a designated trash talker to amp up Payton during practice.

Payton didn’t like to practice—at least not in the pros, not as he got older. But don’t take my word for it. As Payton says, “I didn’t like to practice.” A 10-year NBA veteran, David Wingate joined the Seattle SuperSonics for the 1995–96 season. He was essentially the last man on the bench, per Karl. “He knew he wasn’t going to play very much,” he says. But Wingate nonetheless held an indispensable role on the team. He was the designated shit-talker. Says Karl, “If Gary didn’t want to practice, instead of me motherfucking Gary, we had David Wingate motherfuck Gary. They’d be chirping back and forth. I was amazed how many times David Wingate got Gary to come practice.” When I ask Payton about this, he lights up at the mention of Wingate’s name. “David was my best friend on the team,” Payton says, and he fondly remembers their on-court battles. “David used to go at me. He’d grab on me and hold on me,” and talk all kinds of mess, per Payton. Come on, come on, you ain’t got it. They call you a superstar? You ain’t no All-Star. “I used to love that. I used to love going back at Dave, because Dave pumped me up in practice. And when he pumped me up, that means I’m going to get some extra work.” 

Payton would request that refs give him technical fouls.

For some players, talking trash is an important means of self-motivation. That was certainly the case for Payton—and not just during practice. There were some games when he similarly struggled to get his competitive juices flowing, when he just didn’t want to play basketball. But the point guard knew how to get himself going: he needed to start some shit. One of his tricks was to approach a referee before tip-off and request that the official give him a technical foul at some point during the game. Per Payton, “I’d say, ‘Yo, look here, I’m going to get on you tonight. You make a bad call? I’m going to get on you. When I get on you, just give me a tech.’”

(“Most of the time, he didn’t have to ask,” says former NBA ref Bennett Salvatore.)

Other times, he’d pick out a single fan in the stands—literally anyone, so long as that person was brave enough to heckle Payton—because that would provide him with the necessary tension to deepen his investment in the game. “A fan that says one thing to me—he’ll go at me, and then I’ll go at him, and I say, ‘OK, that’s what’s going to get me motivated.’” Opposing coaches recognized this tendency in Payton—the way in which he would occasionally flail for that emotional charge—and they would admonish their players not to talk to the Sonics point guard, especially on those nights when he seemed disengaged. Payton says, “They’d be like, ‘Y’all, shut up. Don’t let Gary get involved in the game.’ As soon as somebody says something to me, they be like, ‘Shut up! Shut up!’ But by that time, it’s too late.”