Utah’s Stockton: Everyman’s Point Guard : Pro basketball: Small-town player makes good in Salt Lake City by subtle brilliance, finesse more than flash.

John Stockton is the basketball player Norman Rockwell would have painted: size and style of play the average person can relate to, boyish looks with straight black hair cropped around the ears, married his college sweetheart, bought the house next door to his parents in Spokane, Wash., all within a mile of the important stopping points of his youth.

Americana with a behind-the-back dribble.

St. Aloysius grade school was five blocks away, Gonzaga Prep about a mile, the entrance to Kennedy Pavilion, where he starred while playing at Gonzaga University, all of three blocks. Upon returning to Spokane every summer, he plays rec-league games, where some guy will invariably take a look at the 6-foot-1 Stockton, decide this can’t be the superstar everyone speaks of and try to apply tight defensive pressure.

Bad choice.

Stockton grew up in a small-town atmosphere and works in one, this being the biggest city Utah has to offer. To be sure, it is no big city. Against this backdrop, much like the one where he developed into a first-round draft choice in 1984, he has become the point guard coaches wish they could create on canvas: Selfless, intelligent, durable, a record-breaker.

Paint by numbers, and Stockton is a composition fit for the Louvre. During the first four decades of the NBA, only two players had 1,000 assists in a season--Kevin Porter in 1978-79 and Isiah Thomas in 1984-85. But Stockton came along and did it three consecutive seasons. That’s all three years he has been a full-time starter since replacing Rickey Green. Stockton had 1,134 this season to better his own mark.

Lacking the versatility of Magic Johnson or the quickness of Kevin Johnson, Stockton’s brilliance is subtle, mostly setting up the highlight-reel material by teammate Karl Malone. Finesse more than flash. Yet he almost became the first person ever to twice lead the league in assists and steals the same season before finishing second in the latter.

“When I think of John Stockton, I think of smartness,” Phoenix Coach Cotton Fitzsimmons said. “I think of a guy being at the right place at the right time all the time during the course of the game. The word you probably use with John Stockton is alertness.”

There are others.

The greatest, according to one long-time observer.

“I think he’s the best point guard to ever play the game,” said Rod Hundley, who spent six years with the Lakers in the 1950s and ‘60s and has been broadcasting Jazz games since 1974. “I don’t consider Magic Johnson a point guard, let’s clear that up right away. But for the position and what John Stockton is supposed to do, nobody is better.”

Ultra-competitive, everyone agrees. Some at Gonzaga dislike playing with Stockton during off-season pickup games because he’s calling every foul, and the intensity is as if the stakes are loser leaves town.

“Everybody always sees this angelic image of the choir boy,” said Dan Fitzgerald, a long-time friend of the Stockton family who coached John in college. “But I’ll tell you this right now: the kid next door will poke you in the eye to win. He will not cheat, but he will get a piece of you before the game is over.”

Stockton has left his indentation in the best of places. This season he had 10 games of 20 assists or more, marking up the New York Knicks for 27 in December, the third-highest single-game total. He hit the Lakers for 23, Cleveland for 22, Portland and Phoenix 21 each and San Antonio for 20.

Teams try to cut the court in half against Stockton, a sixth-year pro. Keep him outside around the perimeter and there are fewer passing lanes to the basket. Let him penetrate the middle, and he could go right or left with the pass.

But now his long-range shooting has improved, making him all the more dangerous. As recently as last season’s first-round playoff series against Golden State, Coach Jerry Sloan noticed teams back off Stockton outside. Many provided obligatory coverage against the jump shot and strictly played the assist.

Stockton, who dreads interviews that make him discuss himself, has gone from someone Jazz officials once wondered out loud if he can, or would, shoot to the eighth-best three-point shooter in the league. That happened this season, when he averaged a career-best 17.2 points and connected on 51.4% of his attempts overall.

Sloan says Stockton has better range. Stockton says Stockton, who has it written into his contract that he be allowed to play summer league in Spokane without permission from the team, isn’t spending extra time establishing his outside game this year. So there.

“You’re assuming I think a lot during games,” he said. “I just pretty much go out and play. I don’t think about what I’m doing good and what I’m doing poorly. In an 82-game schedule, there’s going to be a lot of both.”

Actually, his reputation as a thinking-man’s player was established before he even played an NBA game. While waiting between the draft and the conclusion of contract negotiations, Stockton asked the Jazz to send game tapes from the previous season. He wanted to break down the style of his future teammates, wanted to know, for example, exactly where they wanted to receive the ball on the fast break.

The tone was set. Before missing four games this season, he played the full 82 in each of the first five seasons. You couldn’t get him out of the lineup.

Maybe the location had something to do with it. No one would suggest that Stockton couldn’t be successful in any city, but to miss the fact that he did not have to make any great adjustments apart from the jump to the NBA level of play, is to miss what John Stockton is about.

“It was easier for him,” Fitzgerald agrees. “He is comfortable in a setting like a Salt Lake, like a Minneapolis. My feeling is that he’s more comfortable there than he’s going to be in, say, Manhattan. I think that’s all been part of it. He could play anywhere, but the quality of life is real important to him.”

Said Stockton: “It helps. But I’ve always been the type of guy who plays with the cards he has been dealt. I will make the best of any situation. If I was playing in a bigger city, I could do the same things.”