A14| Friday, April 3, 2020 THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
Steph Curry Needed a Place to Shoot
The world’s greatest shooter went 16 days without shooting before his wife bought him a hoop
BYBENCOHENStephen Curry
is still working
out the kinks
of working
from home.SPORTS
shelter-in-place instructions. She
estimated she’d barely been outside
more than 20 minutes over the
past couple of weeks, stepping out-
side only occasionally with her
partner, Ilana Kloss, for a bit of
fresh air, or to restock on supplies.
Like many, she was finding creative
methods of passing the time. On
Instagram, King posted a video of
herself inside her apartment,
whacking her still-impressive fore-
hand with her “eye coach” training
device.“Keep your head still,” she in-
structed. “Watch the ball.”
Ordinarily, King would be on the
road—she remains an indefatigable
presence on the world-wide tennis
circuit. I asked her the last time
she’d spent two weeks straight in
her New York apartment.
“Probably never,” she said.
On Wednesday, the All England
Lawn Tennis Club announced the
cancellation of Wimbledon 2020.
The grass-court tournament, where
King won the women’s singles title
six times, won’t be back until sum-
mer 2021. It was a decision that
left the tennis world hollow. But
King understood.
“Oh, they had to,” she said.
“They didn’t have a choice. Who
does?”
“It’s just so sad because so many
people are losing jobs,” she said.
She knew from her experience or-
ganizing tournaments; players rep-
resent only the tiniest fraction of
the people it takes to put on
events. “It’s stadium employees,
the guards, the catering, the trans-
portation.”
It’s been speculated that tennis
might be among the hardest-hit
sports during the pandemic, be-
cause of its global reach. Not only
do players come from multiple con-
tinents, but so do the crowds. Ev-ery one of the tennis majors (the
Australian Open, the French, Wim-
bledon and the U.S. Open) is a
bucket-list experience that draws
an audience from around the
planet.
“It’s so global,” King said. “A lot
of our tournaments are vacation
destinations.”
For now, the tennis world is
pressing pause. Roger Federer, who
is recovering from knee surgery, re-
cently posted a video of himself
practicing against a wall in the
snow, and with his wife, Mirka, do-
nated one million Swiss francs
($1.03 million) to help families in
his home country. World No. 1 No-
vak Djokovic made a similarly sized
donation (€1 million or $1.09 mil-
lion) for ventilators and medical
equipment.
Everything helps. Perspective is
essential, said King.
“Players need to take a beat, re-
flect and realize what a privilege it
is to play and make a living,” she
said. “How lucky are we to have a
job? Not just in tennis—anybody.”
Across the river in Queens, work
was under way to transform a
jewel of tennis into a crisis hospi-
tal. It was a scenario no one could
have imagined not long ago.
But Billie Jean King is all in. Of
course she is.The plan is to set up beds inside the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center’s
indoor facility, above. No one is more on board than Billie Jean King, left.This week, officials in
embattled New York
City announced,
somewhat startlingly,
that they would begin
construction on a
350-bed temporary
hospital inside the Billie Jean King
National Tennis Center—the
sprawling site of the annual U.S.
Open.
It was one of those announce-
ments that could stop you in your
tracks. There are a lot of announce-
ments like that these days. It dem-
onstrates how rapidly the pan-
demic situation in this city is
evolving, that a beloved sports
campus—a place where Roger and
Serena, Novak and Naomi have tri-
umphed, where an aging Jimmy
Connors once yelled, “Isn’t this
what they paid for? This is what
they want!” —could be asked to
transform into a triage center to
relieve pressure on overburdened
local hospitals.
I needed to talk to the woman
whose name is on the front door.
“I think it’s great ,” Billie Jean
King told me. “Anything we can do
to help this cause right now. When
I saw that, I went, ‘Yes! Good!’ This
is another way to give back.”
King is totally on board with the
emergency plan. Which isn’t so sur-
prising, really, when you think of
how the 76-year-old tennis icon has
led a life distinguished as much by
serving greater goals as it is her
on-court accomplishments (which,
if anyone’s counting, include an as-
tonishing 39 major tournament ti-
tles in singles, doubles and mixed
doubles).
“I’m so happy to hear that we
can be of use and help others,”
King said.
It’s hard to overstate the pres-
ence King continues to have in ten-
nis. She remains a pied piper for
her sport and an advocate for pay
equality across all sports—last
year, both the men’s and women’s
champion at the U.S. Open took
home a check for $3.85 million. The
two-week tournament at summer’send is the biggest, snazziest tennis
showcase in North America. (A few
years ago, King let me tag along to
see if she could get into the Billie
Jean King Tennis Center without
showing an I.D. She did.)
The BJK Tennis Center, which is
run by the U.S. Tennis Association,
will now be utilized in two ways.
The first purpose is to serve as a
medical overflow building—the
plan is to set up beds inside the
tennis center’s 100,000-square foot
indoor court facility; one idea is
that it will take in non-Covid-
cases so area hospitals can focus
on infected patients. The tennis
center is not far from
Elmhurst,a Queens
hospital hit very
hard by the outbreak.
The tennis center
will also join the ef-
fort to feed first re-
sponders and fami-
lies and children in
need, using the food
prep facilities in the
recently rebuilt Louis
Armstrong Stadium
tomakeupto25,
meals a day.
Similar transfor-
mations are happen-
ing elsewhere in the
city, where the mood
has shifted quickly
from what is happen-
ing to all hands on
deck. Not only is the
USTA/BJK tennis
center sizable and
well-located, it sits
on publicly owned property. (Fun
fact: A regular weekend hacker can
book a court at the tennis center
during the tournament off-season.
I’ve done it plenty.)
“A lot of people don’t realize it’s
a public park,” said King. It’s one of
her favorite things about the tennis
center. “I grew up in public parks.
A lot of us did—Chris Evert, Jimmy
Connors, all of us old farts.”
King was on the phone from her
apartment in Manhattan, where she
was adhering strictly to the localJASON GAY
Temporary Makeover
For U.S. Open Home
in shape, are the least of anyone’s
worries in terms of what’s going
on in the world,” Curry said.
Sixteen days is the longest he’s
ever gone without playing basket-
ball while healthy, and Curry said
in an interview on Tuesday that
he’s trying to make the most of his
time off. “I have definitely worked
on my golf game a lot more than
my basketball game,” he said.
In addition to practicing his
swing and social distancing, he’s
also grading homework and guid-
ing his oldest daughter through
second grade. The coronavirus has
turned Curry into a substitute
teacher.
“She’s upstairs finishing lan-
guage arts,” he said, “and then
we’ll get to math in 30 minutes.”
It had been a difficult season for
Curry even before the entire world
shut down. After breaking his left
hand in October, an injury that all
but guaranteed the Warriors would
not be going to their sixth consec-utive NBA Finals, he returned from
a four-month absence on March 5.
He was not expecting to go an-
other few months without playing
again.
But on the morning of March 7,
he came down with the flu. On the
night of March 11, Rudy Gobert
tested positive for another virus,
and the NBA season was immedi-
ately suspended. Curry’s most
prominent appearance since then
was interviewing Dr. Anthony Fauci
on Instagram. The only sign of bas-
ketball was the miniature hoop in
the National Institutes of Health
offices.
It was deeply peculiar for Curry
to be alone in March. This was the
month when he became an NCAA
tournament folk hero and he’s usu-
ally preparing for a deep run in the
NBA playoffs. When asked what he
misses, his response was concise.
“Everything,” he said. He misses
leaving the house. He misses his
co-workers. He even misses thingshe’s not supposed to miss. “The
feeling of being sore, and those
days you don’t want to get up,”
Curry said. “I’ve missed those.”
NBA players are communicating
by Zoom even as they have no clue
when they’ll see each other next,
when they’ll play again and when
they need to be peaking in their
conditioning. They are keeping in
shape while sheltering in place,
which is a bit like training for a
marathon that could be in three
weeks or three months. They’re
stuck between tapering and the
basketball equivalent of running 20
miles.
And one team that perfected the
art of playing together is staying in
touch while apart.
Curry no longer has access to an
NBA gym, weight room or even
something as basic as a hoop. But
he does have a Peloton bike at
home. As it turns out, he’s not the
only one: The Warriors have been
going for a group ride in the morn-
ing.
The invitation goes out on a
Slack group—Curry admits to skip-
ping one class because he didn’t
see the message—and then a mani-
acally competitive bicyclist named
Draymond Green attempts to de-
stroy everyone around him, accord-
ing to a person familiar with the
rides.
“In the Tour de Warriors,” Curry
said, “I’m above average, but I’m
not on the podium yet. I have to
figure out how to get there. There’s
always something to shoot for.”
He also has something to shoot
at. Curry says he’s been trying to
maintain his sanity by doing what
brings him comfort. For others in
the Bay Area, it’s baking sourdough
bread. But for him, it’s playing bas-
ketball.
When he broke his left hand, he
used his right hand. When there
was a lockout in the NBA, he be-
came a slightly overqualified Da-
vidson College scout team player.
Now that he can’t get inside the
Warriors’ locker room, he simply
goes outside.
He doesn’t have rebounders—his
children are more fascinated by the
trampoline next to the hoop—but
he doesn’t mind shooting by him-
self.
“I feel like a little 12-year-old
kid out there running around, sim-
ulating game shots in my drive-
way,” he said. There is only one
thing missing from the home court
of his own making, and it happens
to be the very thing that made him
such a basketball revolutionary: a
3-point line.
“That’s my next step,” Curry
said. “That’s this week’s project.”FROM TOP: NATHAN DENETTE/THE CANADIAN PRESS/ASSOCIATED PRESS; STEPHANIE KEITH/GETTY IMAGES; ELSA/GETTY IMAGEST
he best shooter in the
history of basketball
didn’t have a place to
shoot. So he built one
for himself.
Stephen Curry had been stuck at
home for more than two weeks,
unable to do the one thing he does
better than anybody, when his wife
ordered him a Spalding hoop for
their driveway. For the first time in
16 days, he could shoot a basket-
ball. Or at least that was the plan.
But this solution only caused an-
other problem. Now he actually
had to put the hoop together.
“I got overwhelmed looking at
the manual,” Curry said.
After what he could only de-
scribe as “a pretty serious effort,”
Curry finally succeeded at his un-
expected assembly job. It only took
him five hours.
“I was very confident in myself
going in,” he said. “That was shotdown pretty quick.”
The simple act of shooting a
basketball in these very strange
days turned out to be trickier than
Curry anticipated. Even after he
was done with the basket, there
was something else to do: find a
ball. “I sacrificed one of the indoor
ones, and it lasted a day and a
half,” Curry said. “It was worth it.”
This proud new owner of an
outdoor basketball is still working
out the kinks of working from
home. And that happens to be a
pretty good way to describe the
life of professional athletes at a
time when American sports are on
pause.
They went from thinking about
the playoffs to thinking about pan-
demics. Their offices are closed.
Their colleagues appear on
screens. The most athletic people
on the planet are getting used to
lockdown just like the rest of us.
“Our problems, when it comes
to trying to find workouts or stay