ATLANTA — On the bench, the face of this Final Four will be sitting, his right leg shattered, but never his championship dream. Not as long as Kevin Ware knows Peyton Siva is the one with the ball and Louisville’s dream in his hands.
“He’s been an amazing son,” Peyton Siva Sr. said over his cellphone during his drive from Louisville to Atlanta yesterday. “He’s a special kid, just a humble kid, down-to-earth, a loving kid. … Any parent would love to have this baby.”
His son is back at the Final Four trying to get Ware, Rick Pitino and the Louisville Cardinals past Wichita State tonight, to Monday night’s championship game against the Syracuse-Michigan survivor, and he is a champion regardless of whether or not he cuts down the nets at the Georgia Dome.
“He’s my rock,” Peyton Siva Sr. said. “He’s why I’m sober. He’s been inspirational to my heart. I can go on and on.”
And so he did, talked about the fateful day the drug and alcohol demons conquered him, led him to contemplate suicide on the mean streets of Seattle … until his youngest of three children saved him.
“I didn’t have the coping skills I have today,” Peyton Siva Sr. said. “I didn’t have the strength to know I was going to be all right.
“I’d been gone a couple of days. Nobody could find me.
“But HE found me.”
The boy — 13 years old at the time — pulled up in his brother Michael’s Dodge Dart, maybe two miles from their home.
“He found me on the street. I’m like, ‘What are you doing here?’” the father asked.
What were you doing on the street?
“I was dealing drugs, doing drugs, drinking. … I was out of my mind at that time,” he said. “He picked me up, and he parked around the corner.
“I had pulled out my pistol. I didn’t want to live anymore.”
Except the boy didn’t want to live without his father.
“I love you,” the father recalls his son saying, “and I know you love me too, and I know you would do anything for me.”
Peyton Siva Sr.: “I’m looking at a young man that was telling me what he wanted in life. It was an eye-opener. Peyton told me he was going to do good in school, he was going to start going to church. … He just wanted me to be here for him and support him.
“It was a turning point in my life.
“That day, I threw away the drugs, threw away the pistol. I started treatment, started getting counseling, I started working on my life. I started going back to do what I had to do to be here for my baby.”
Peyton Siva Sr., a Little League coach these days, recalls his baby picking up a basketball as a 5-year-old, pleading to let him play with his 7-year-old brother Michael and 8-year-old cousin T.J.
“He was so persistent,” Peyton Siva Sr. said. “He wouldn’t leave me alone. I gave him a test. I wanted to see where his skill level was at. I made him run up a football field five times or more, then run around the field, then run uphill 10 times. He did all of it nonstop. And trust me, when he showed me that — you have to be 7 years old to play — I went and took his birth certificate and erased the birthday and made him two years older. I had to keep my word.”
Young Siva has been Most Outstanding Player of the Big East the past two years. He has 20 assists in Louisville’s four NCAA Tournament victories.
“He is a great leader,” Chane Behanan said. “If it wasn’t for him, I don’t think we would be in this situation.”
With Ware watching, Siva will play added minutes in his point guard duel with Malcolm Armstead.
“I just got to play a lot smarter,” Siva said.
His next game could be his last game.
“My legacy I want to leave is keep God first over everything, just put your teammates above all, and play for the name on the front and not the back,” Siva said.
He is Louisville’s dream come true. For Pitino. For Ware. For everyone.
“He cares so much about everyone else that the whole world just loves him,” Russ Smith said.
No one more than Peyton Siva Sr.
steve.serby@nypost.com