Gary Payton does not want to be traded to a losing team. He does not want to stay on a mediocre team. But in the March 5 issue of ESPN The Magazine, John Gustafson explains that GP is running out of time and running out of choices.

Gary Payton plays the angles. So skinny he looks almost two-dimensional, he's got a game that's anything but lean. On defense, he is demonstrative and deadly; setting himself like a cornerback, rolling that head from side to side, flashing that scowl, leading with flexed hands chopping the air, fingers splayed like a freshly scrubbed surgeon's. On offense, he's equally tortuous, moving into the frontcourt with a sprinter's gait, rotating his back to protect the pill, then slowly picking you apart -- a three here, a finger-roll there, and pass after laserlike pass so precise that surprised teammates often have trouble finishing.

He's the greatest player to wear a Sonics uniform and undeniably the Emerald City's biggest star. Gigantic images of GP cover the city from NikeTown to 2nd Avenue, which seems only fitting for a guy with an ego big enough to have named two of his sons (by two different mothers) Gary Payton Jr. and Gary Payton II. And yet it's not enough. Behind the scowl is the same angry East Oakland product who entered the league 12 years ago. He might not trash talk as much, but he wants to win as much, and he still won't back down to anyone. Not teammates. Not coaches. Not teammates-turned-coaches. No one.

By now, you would have expected this geometric wonder to be angling in on a title. But at 32, Payton can see the shot clock winding down. Time is boxing him out. With Patrick Ewing in tow, the Sonics began the season as a sleeping title contender. Then, within a span of two months, the head coach was fired, the owner sold out and management clamped down on the franchise player. As the final stretch approaches, the Sonics are both too old and too young, too inexperienced and too intense. As they struggle to jump back into the playoff race, GP stands in the middle of the fray, trying to shake his demons and propel his team toward the future. But with each successive game, his patience grows thin. And with it, so do his chances for a championship in Seattle.

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At first glance, Payton appears to have everything. A stable home with wife Monique and three kids, his own Nike shoe and a fat paycheck (a seven-year, $85 million deal that ends in 2003). He spent New Year's Eve on his yacht, The Glove, partying and playing bones with rappers E-40 and Master P. In a league full of greenhorn stars, GP is royalty. He has piloted four division winners, including the 1996 Western Conference champs, and is one of only two point guards in history to win NBA Defensive Player of the Year. (Alvin Robertson is the other.) Bolster that with career averages of 17 points and seven assists, and you can swagger more than a little. It's said that Gary loves his numbers and, a season ago, he put up some big ones. An All-NBA first-teamer, he was the only player to average at least 20 points, six rebounds and six assists. But, entering the 2000-01 season, his most impressive number may have been his consecutive starting streak of 315 games.

Despite a number of nagging injuries, he soldiered on this winter, crossing the 350 mark even as the Sonics' new blend of old (Ewing, a creaky Vin Baker) and young (Rashard Lewis, Ruben Patterson) fizzled. But the bad omens kept coming -- early and often. Four games into the sked, coach Paul Westphal offered to quit after overhearing co-captains Payton and Baker openly argue about his performance after a loss to Orlando. In his inimitable players-first style, Westphal asked the team to vote on his future. Payton, cautious of the "coach killer" label, refused to let that happen.

Two weeks later, in Dallas, the friction continued. During a timeout, Payton suggested Westphal put Ewing and Baker back into the game. "You play," Westphal said. "I'll coach." GP answered with a string of invectives, threatening to slap his coach until teammates intervened. The Sonics won, but in San Antonio the following day, on the bus to a shootaround, Westphal told the team Payton would be suspended. Then, after meeting with his star player, Westphal reversed himself. The streak continued. Five days later, Westphal was fired.

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Teammates may marvel at his ability and his intensity, but Payton is not the most popular player in the Sonics locker room. His jawing tends to grate on people. From an early '90s squab with Ricky Pierce to the dumbbell he hurled at Vernon Maxwell a year ago (hitting Horace Grant instead), Payton has a long history of run-ins. Last season, one Sonic said: "I hope he doesn't die, because no one would go to the funeral."

Even close friends feel the heat. Since arriving in Seattle, Baker has prompted numerous complaints about his play. Through the tough times, Payton stuck by him. He blasted the Sonics for trying to ship the power forward in the off-season and offered to act as a go-between when Baker and Westphal hit the skids early this season. Yet GP has been equally quick to criticize Baker for failing to pull his weight. "I don't discriminate," he says. "If Vin is not doing what he should be doing, I'm going to tell him about it."

Baker knows Payton well enough to recognize the heart of a warrior. "He's the most competitive person in the world," he says. "He's got the bark of a pit bull, but he's got the bite of a chihuahua."

GP won't debate his popularity, but he does acknowledge a generation gap in Seattle. Regarding his young teammates, he says: "They didn't come up in the Magic era or the Bird era or the Jordan era. We're talking about guys 18, 19 years old, making big money sometimes right out of high school. They think, 'I don't have to listen to you.' Well, they do."

For a young team in need of direction, The Glove's manic mouth is an endless source of animosity. One local paper reported that GP and Ruben Patterson came to blows last season. At 6'5", Patterson is like a mini-Charles Barkley, tough to control inside. He likes to call himself The Kobe Stopper for shutting down Bryant, his former Laker teammate, in practice. Some say it's Patterson's intention to take over the team that irks Payton. But Payton denies any bad blood between the two, saying they are more alike than different.

Clearly Payton's not one to call "my bad." But he refuses to give credence to the idea that his vacillating, calm-to-crazy demeanor smacks of some sort of split personality. "I'm not a Dr. Jekyll-Mr. Hyde," he says. "That's just the way I play basketball. On the court, I don't have to be your friend. On the court, my job is to get wins."

Sound familiar? Close your eyes and that could be Michael Jordan talking. Or Charles Barkley. Or Karl Malone. Basically, any player who's ever tried to shoulder a team to the top of the world. "Gary wanted to win at everything we did," says Laker Greg Foster, who played in Seattle last season and starred with GP at Oakland's Skyline High. "Atari, dice, cards, anything. If he lost, he'd act like he didn't, and we'd have to play until he won."

That desire is what pushes Payton to the brink of Mr. Hyde territory, taxing his relationship with anyone who refuses to match his intensity. "The most talented players need attention, they need direction, and they need to understand the coach," says George Karl, former Sonics (now Bucks) head man. "It's easy to coach the 11th and 12th men. But it's hard to coach a guy who has a negative and a positive energy."

To understand Payton's tendency to dominate and detonate, you need look no further than his first coach and father, Al, known around their East Oakland neighborhood as Mr. Mean for his old-school, no-nonsense ways (though he did wear a single diamond earring before it was the fashion). It was Al who taught Gary everything he knows about roundball, touring the Southwest with his son and a summer league team he christened The Family. "When he yelled at me, that motivated me," says Gary. "It made me want to play hard. When somebody don't say nothing to you, I think that means they don't care."

From Day One, GP was hard-pressed to shake his dad's less-than-subtle teaching influence. "Gary was the baby, and Al put a lot of time into him," Annie Payton, his mom, told The Seattle Times when GP was drafted by the Sonics. "Whatever Al says, Gary will do."

But Al's son had to learn how to look out for himself when he enrolled at Skyline High, a member of the roughneck Oakland Athletic League, where police escorts, death threats and postgame riots were common. After losing to a rival school, the team bus once left in a hail of bullets, Foster recalls. "His first year he was a monster," says former coach Fred Noel. "I almost threw him off the team." The young Payton had to be summoned to the coach's office and handed an ultimatum. Noel gave him one game to comply. If Payton didn't run the offense according to the coach's instructions, he was gone. "First half he didn't do it, so I pulled him," says Noel. "Second half, I put him back in and said, 'Last half' " That's when things changed, when Payton was confronted with the possibility of life without basketball.

By the next season, he was like a coach on the floor. He could interpret certain looks and gestures from Noel and communicate his instructions to the team. But GP never strayed too far from his roots. "I don't think Gary's mellowed since the Oakland days," says Foster. "At some stage, he's going to have to learn to trust the people around him. But the only way he's going to trust the people around him is if they match his intensity."

If there was one NBA coach Payton could trust, it was Karl, the man who guided Seattle to those four division titles. As GP describes it, both men had healthy egos: One was a supremely confident player, the other a supremely confident coach. The two had their run-ins, of course, mostly shouting matches, but they eventually came to terms. "He is angry and fiery, and at times he can become selfish," says Karl. "But the same things they say about Gary, they say about me -- that I lose control, get stubborn, say things I shouldn't. You have to manage Gary's energy. In return, you get one of the top five players in basketball."

If Karl's relationship with Payton was a melding of egos, Westphal's was a pairing of opposites. From the outset, the conservative, religious coach and former NBA golden boy (Celtics, Suns, Sonics, Knicks) was an anomaly to the son of Mr. Mean. In the end, though, it wasn't Westphal's relationship with Payton that got him fired, but Westy's laissez-faire style, which failed to inspire Baker and the Sonics' young talent.

So who better to manage the volatile Payton and nurture the nucleus of Patterson, Lewis and Desmond Mason than no-nonsense Nate McMillan, who once shared a backcourt with GP and has spent his whole career in Seattle? As a teammate, McMillan served as Payton's big brother, pulling him aside when he felt he was acting up. The two men clearly respect each other. So naturally, McMillan was disappointed when his old friend lost his head yet again.

In McMillan's first three games, the Sonics beat the Blazers and the Lakers. But by mid-January, they began a tough four-game homestand with Payton hobbled by a groin injury. Losing to Phoenix late in the fourth quarter, GP came up with a steal. But after his pass to a breaking Patterson fell out of reach, the two started sniping at each other and never quit. Minutes later, an enraged Payton had to be restrained by Oaktown buddy Jason Kidd.

Unable to run a simple inbounds play, the Sonics were forced to call a timeout during which, according to McMillan, things were settled. But after the 89-80 loss, he and Payton started arguing on the way off the floor. Once inside the locker room, Payton turned up the tirade while the rest of the Sonics looked on. When the smoke cleared, McMillan met with his point guard in private for about 90 minutes. And after a near sleepless night, the man who had partied and played alongside GP for seven years decided he had to take action. He suspended Payton "for a minimum of one game" for conduct detrimental to the team. "You don't want to suspend a guy, especially a guy you went to battle with," says McMillan. "It was a tough decision in that I have feelings for Gary. But at the same time, I'm in a different role."

The longest active playing streak in the NBA was over at 356 games -- for disciplinary reasons. More significantly, though, the suspension raised questions about The Glove's future in Seattle. He is still very much in his prime, if a shade slower. What he lacks in burst, he makes up for in brains, adroitly picking his spots, quietly drawing double- and triple-teams to set up his teammates. He had two straight 30-point games (both victories) after returning to the lineup on Jan. 21.

Yet with the team just two games over .500 in the stacked Western Conference, Sonics fans must wonder how much longer Payton will steer the ship. All season long, he's talked about how he has lost his sense of loyalty. "I try to keep it in perspective as business because it ain't fun no more," GP says. "For the last three years I've been losing, and I don't like that." His agent, Aaron Goodwin, is more to the point. "When did the rules change?" he asks. "This is the same Gary who went out and fought and yelled and kicked and came within a couple games of a championship. Management had no problem with him then. Now things have changed."

It's hard to fault Payton for his frustration. Because he's a tireless worker and a savvy vet, he's a better player than he was during the '96 Finals run. But save for McMillan, no one's left from that team. Since Karl's exit, Seattle has struggled just to earn the eighth playoff spot. And though GM Wally Walker has done well in the draft, his other moves, notably hiring Westphal and trading for Baker and Ewing, have been all-out failures.

That leaves the Sonics in a tough spot. For years, owner Barry Ackerly was a fervent Payton supporter. Some speculate he even nixed a potential off-season trade. But Starbucks chairman Howard Schultz, whose group purchased the Sonics for $200 million in January, has no such loyalty. He is very high on McMillan -- the two are trying to hammer out a long-term deal -- but much less firm on Payton. "I want to be very respectful of the years Gary has given to this organization," he says. "We'll see where we go."

What does that mean for the player who has come to symbolize Sonics basketball? It's doubtful they'll try to move him before season's end; they'll fill more seats now and get more value later if they wait until summer. Payton is sly about his prospects here even if he knows his time may be short. "If I was the third option on a championship team, I wouldn't care," he says. "But I can't see myself relocating, taking my family away from this. I hope I can be the third option on this team and win a championship."

Is he serious? Is Gary being Gary when he says he cares about finishing his career in Seattle? It wasn't that long ago that the NBA's angriest man would stamp his feet and demand a trade whenever he wanted to make himself heard.

Now the Sonics may trade him because they don't want to listen anymore.

This article appears in the March 5 issue of ESPN The Magazine.