In the below VladTV clip, former NBA star guard Gary Payton spoke about his former teammate Shawn Kemp having 7 kids by 6 different women, to which Vlad pointed out would just be the norm in today’s society.
The former Seattle great then explained that they were young NBA players living on top of the world, and he admitted that protection wasn’t the first thing on their minds.
Vlad also brought up Houston Rockets legend Calvin Murphy, who is better known for fathering the most children out of any former NBA player — 14 with 9 different women.
“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.”
Having fun didn’t come without consequences, as we all found out when Magic Johnson announced he had been diagnosed with HIV, forcing him to retire. According to The Glove, that was an eye-opening moment for everyone within the NBA brotherhood.
Click on ‘Follow Us’ and get notified of the most viral NBA stories via Google! Follow Us
“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.”
However, the instant popularity and all the benefits that come with it, including the women, was too tempting to simply give it up.
“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.”
