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Excerpts from part two of an interview Thursday with Jazz small forward Gordon Hayward. He is scheduled to participate Oct. 6-9 in IPL 3: Origins, a StarCraft II in-person video game tournament at Caesars in Atlantic City, N.J.
Part I
Playing sports video games: Ironically, I don't play that many sports games. I just have never gotten into them that much. I've always been a shooter or a role-playing game. If there are sports games that I play, I like FIFA — FIFA's a good sports game. … Last year, our team would get together, we'd play Call of Duty; a lot of people do that and so I do that as well. I guess old-school games, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is one of my all-time favorites. … I grew up on, the very first video games I started playing was just the NES. Then the Super Nintendo. I had a Sega GameGear. Of course, I had a GameBoy. Then N64. I've had 'em all. Some of those older games, they used to have versions of them on GameBoy or whatever. I definitely played Pac-Man and some of those older games before. I enjoy playing those, sure. … Contra: I always played Contra when I could get it to work. On the original Nintendo you had to blow into the thing a couple times to get it to work. Whenever I could get Contra to work me and my friends were also playing that.Fully healed from minor right Achilles tendinitis: Yeah, I'm full speed now and still working out twice-a-day. I played in the Pro-Am, I played in our last game. Then they actually, Carlos Knox is doing another league, it's called the Lockout League. I'm sure you've heard of Kevin Durant and The Goodman League; the Melo League. Well, we kind of have a similar thing over here: the Lockout League. We're talking about Eric Gordon, Lance Stephenson, Mario Chalmers, Norris Cole, Shelvin Mack — a lot of local guys are playing in that. We play two times a week with that and just played this past Tuesday in that. It went pretty well. … Alec Burks is still here and Christian Eyenga from the Cavs has been working out. … Alec comes and works out during the week and I think he goes home during the weekends. … There's some pretty talented players here.Making progress improving his ballhandling: It's going really well. Just getting a better feel for it, so it's natural and you don't have to look out or you don't have to — you know the ball is right there. And when you know that ball is right there you can do a lot more things on the court.Getting together with Jazz players during September: That's something that I need to do for sure. We talked earlier in the summer about getting guys together. I need to talk to them about coming to Indianapolis. The guy who runs the Indy Pro-Am — his name is Carlos Knox — the guy we train with in the morning, his name is Ed Schilling. Through St. Vincent's, which is where I work out, we're trying to get a little— I don't know what you'd call it? Maybe a little training camp, I guess? It's supposed to be starting Oct. 1, which is exactly when training camp would be. Eric Gordon is going to be here. Zach Randolph is supposed to be here. Of course, I would be here. And hopefully Alec would stay. Then we could get some other guys to come in. And the Pacers team is supposed to be here. So, hopefully if it all works out, we could get a bunch of guys here and what we would do is just have workouts. Skill work in the morning — basically what I'm doing now on another level, with a lot more NBA guys. I need to talk to them about that. We'll probably talk about it and figure something out Brian T. Smithbsmith@sltrib.comTwitter: @tribjazzfacebook.com/tribjazz