Karl Enjoys Peace Of Mind - For Now Recent Playoff Wins Lighten Burden That Has Often Tortured Coach, Family

The ball boy can go back to sixth grade in peace.

Coby Karl is 12 and full of freckles, picks up after the Seattle SuperSonics and is no longer scheming to run away from home. His father and his father’s franchise have been rehabilitated in the span of a fortnight, and, for his next trick, George Karl will try to get rehired.

The most collapsible team in basketball just made a reservation for June. Its reputation - or what was left of it - was on the free-throw line Friday night against the Rockets, until Gary Payton’s knuckleball of a foul shot splashed in. Seattle suddenly had a 115-112 victory, a 3-0 series lead over the defending champions and a ball boy in the arms of its coach.

George and Coby Karl hugged at midcourt as if there were no tomorrow, when, in fact, there had been no yesterday. The SuperSonics had rushed into summer the previous two seasons - losing horrifically to the Nuggets and the Lakers in the first round - but a lockout, an overhaul and the weepings of a child have altered their fortunes.

“Us against the Bulls, probably” said Karl’s supportive wife, Cathy.

The phone calls are saner now. After last season’s premature exit, an acquaintance of Kendall Gill, then a Sonics guard, had dialed the Karls’ home number with threats, and - if that was any indication of the franchise’s mood - the family expected a pink slip at any moment.

“I started cleaning closets,” Cathy Karl said. “I thought we were out of there.”

The man of the house himself - George - appeared on the brink of a meltdown. Initially after the loss to the Lakers, he had been alternately inconsolable and self-deprecating, but the public did not have to live with him. Cathy, 48 hours after the loss, arrived home one afternoon to find him bawling on the back porch.

“He was on the deck, standing there crying,” she said. “It was like all of a sudden, it just hit him, and it tore me up.”

Meanwhile, Coby Karl was being heckled in school, was reading venom in the newspapers and needed as many tissues as his father. “I saw the weekend after the Lakers series that they were scared,” George Karl said of his family. “So, I couldn’t be crazy. I had to be strong. My family was scared, so I couldn’t be goofy.

“You could see it in their eyes. I don’t think you understand how vicious it was in Seattle. How vicious? Bobby Weiss, my assistant, said it was the worst he’d witnessed in 25 years. The joke Bobby Weiss told was, if the pope had come to Seattle and his hat had blown off, and I had walked on water to pick it up, the headline the next day would’ve read, ‘Karl can’t swim.”’

But hidden blessings were on the way. The team owner, Barry Ackerley, and the general manager, Wally Walker, decided - on a whim - to keep Karl on board, at which time Karl mapped out a wish list.

He wanted his most egregious player gone: Gill. He wanted the player who griped most about playing time gone: Sarunas Marciulionis. He wanted his 11th and 12th players to become cheerleaders, not complainers, and he wanted Shawn Kemp to touch the ball in the lane 25 times a game. He wanted Gary Payton to pass more, and he wanted to trade for a selfless leader with a jump shot: Hersey Hawkins.

“We cleaned up some of our cancers,” Karl said. Then he got his surprise: the lockout.

“The lockout kept me and the players away from each other,” he said. “We weren’t allowed to speak. That was good, that was good. There was time for my pain and for their pain to heal. Then, the lockout gets done about 10 days before the season and everybody’s pumped up. I don’t know if mentally we would’ve come back as vibrant if we had time to talk about it all summer long.”

The Karls had spent weeks at their summer retreat in Idaho, and the regular season ended up being a cleansing 64-victory adventure. But Karl and seven of his players were about to become free agents, and never once did Ackerley and Walker offer a vote of confidence. And, before anyone knew it, another Karl was on the back porch crying again.

The Sonics lost at home in Game 2 of their first-round series against Sacramento, and the obituaries began resurfacing. Coby Karl - in front of George and Cathy - broke down and bawled by the back door.

Karl decided if his son was miserable, so was his team. He did not “ream” them; he challenged them to win two in Sacramento and kept his mouth quiet. He sat on the rim of the scorer’s table during the games - uncommonly serene - and the result is that the Sonics are one victory from the Western Conference finals.

Coby, meanwhile, will travel with him the rest of the tournament. He sleeps in his father’s room, distributes towels on his father’s bench and still has carte blanche to leap into his father’s arms at midcourt. “I’ll never forget that moment,” Cathy Karl said. “To see the most important men in my life be that happy is great. Made me cry. Made me cry.”