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Stockton enjoying life
after the NBA

HE slips in and out of a line of dribble-drilling kids as effortlessly as he once wove through defenders.

He gives out smiles and compliments and priceless little tips the way he used to dish out assists.

He does not wear The Shorts.

He dresses, well, like an ex-basketball player.

You can see NBA all-time assists and steals leader John Stockton has been spending his days at peace, rather than in the gym. You can tell he's retired: He gets down to demonstrate a tricky drill -- this week he's at Manoa District Park for his Basketball Essential Skills Camp -- and the ball doesn't cooperate. Even for a future Hall of Famer, the sphere slips away.

"Pressure," he jokes, laughing, playfully waving off a photographer who'd hoped to capture the move.

Quite the opposite, in fact.

These days Stockton is as retired as a guy in his early 40s can be.

It was two years ago that he left the NBA life behind. After 19 years and 10 All-Star games and two NBA Finals and one Dream Team, he decided it was time to walk away.

He has to miss it, you think, a guy with competitive fire that hot. You just know he's still dribbling in his dreams.

"No," he says quietly. "I haven't missed it at all.

"I want to make sure I'm not insulting anybody when I say that," he says. The camaraderie was great. The moments. The coaches. The guys.

But it was time to get on with life.

"I played enough," he says.

He was tired of hearing his six kids grow up through his wife's reports on the phone.

We've seen so many athletes who can't handle life after the final horn, who keep un-retiring, who still crave that buzz of competition, who aren't sure what to do without the game that made them great.

You could call Stockton an NBA legend. He was good enough for the label, but he was so soft-spoken, so unassuming. This was a guy who was the best ever at giving the ball away.

He was an all-time great. And now he's not. He's just a guy. Just a dad. Just a middle-aged man in regular shorts.

And he doesn't seem to mind a bit.

THE KEY, HE says, is that he waited for the right moment. He knew for sure when it was finally time. He'd been thinking about putting the game behind him for a long, long while.

"To be honest," he says, "(since) my first year in the league."

He never thought he'd stick, not back then. Always thought he had to fight. Had it in the back of his mind that he was a coach's check mark away from putting that finance degree to use.

"I never thought that people would appreciate what I do," he says.

And the NBA life never quite felt comfortable. Not really. He never embraced the money and the fame and the luxury and the bling. You see guys who suddenly see 18-room houses as ho-hum reality, as everyday life.

Stockton had a couple of near-slips at the precipice, but he never jumped. You can take the boy out of Spokane ...

It's cliché, but take a look around at his camp. Over in the corner in this Manoa gym is an old teammate, a sophomore when Stockton was a senior in college. Another instructor used to referee his summer-league games when Stockton was a kid.

The head coach, the tall guy running an All-Pro's camp? That's his old coach from sixth, seventh, eighth grade.

He came out of Gonzaga when no one had ever heard of it. Before Cinderella. Before Sweet Sixteens and high seeds and March Madness and ESPN.

"These kids now," he says of his Gonzaga descendants, "they're celebrities."

OK, so let's help UH here -- how can other schools make that jump? How can they do what Gonzaga has done?

"I don't know what they did," Stockton says. "What a spectacular transformation."

It's like a different world.

"In my four years there, when I was there, I never had to talk to the media once," he says. He laughs.

That sounds pretty good to him.

HE'S ASKED IF KARL is coming back for another year. And the answer is again quick, quiet, but definitive: No.

Not that the Mailman couldn't do it if he wanted to, Stockton says. His old teammate Karl Malone is smart and tough and skilled like few others who have played this game.

"He's so powerful," Stockton says. Oh, he could play.

But he doesn't need to. Not anymore. "He's comfortable," Stockton says.

Stockton knows the feeling. He knows his friend has better things to look forward to than basketball. Like the rest of his life.