Seattle Retro Shoe Store, sells what Bird calls "crazy, crazy stuff
- sneakers you have never seen before and won't find anywhere
else." Other favorites are Champion Party Supply, for costumes and
Ed Hardy gear, and Easy Street Records, for music and DVDs.
As of late August, Durant hadn't visited these or many other
Seattle mainstays. But he does have a good head start on his
Seattle tenure. No, he didn't spend much time in town this summer
after the team drafted him; rather, the
University of Texas phenom
worked on his game, logging some time with USA
Basketball and with
the
NBA summer league.
Understand this:
Kevin Durant loves basketball. Seemingly
physically unable to resist the lure of a WNBA ball orphaned at the
far end of the Key Arena court, he snares it during a break between
photo setups and fires shot after long-distance shot, rarely
missing. When somebody else - the photographer - is doing the
shooting, Durant, between clicks, mimes his three-point motion. "I
see a basketball, and I have to shoot. It gets me excited every
time I see a basketball," he says, acknowledging the obvious.
He moved to
Seattle in mid-September, to a house on Mercer Island,
where he'll be living with his mother and other family members. His
poise and self-assurance make it easy to forget that Durant just
turned 19. Only once during the interview does this bubble to the
surface: Mom sidles up to him and, as he's enthusiastically
recalling seeing R&B star Ne-Yo at the Showbox in June,
squeezes a puddle of skin cream onto his pizza-size hands and
begins to
massage it in. Durant temporarily stops what he's saying
and shoots her a look that's familiar to parents of teenagers
everywhere.
He perks up when the conversation turns to steak and the
procurement thereof at area bistros. Admitting that he has dined at
only a few such places, he points to Metropolitan Grill and the
Brooklyn as his early favorites. "They have all the steaks, all the
sides, all the appetizers," he says.