NICK CAVECONTINUEDperverse allure to the whole thing,” he says,
“of having a statue in a town where everyone
was, ‘Who the fuck is this guy?’ The idea was
to make the statue, have it rejected by the
town, and dump it in the desert—this Planet
of the Apes type of scenario, the desert even-
tually swallowing it up.”
Ironically, things have turned around. More
recently, he says, the town has been getting in
touch, apparently interested in reviving the
idea, and this clearly makes Cave feel a little
awkward. “The more I deserve the statue,” he
says, “the less interesting it is for me.”
But, to be clear, this isn’t some theoreti-
cal Nick Cave statue whose details would be
pinned down at a later date. The design exists,
and when I mention this scheme, he leaves
the room and returns with the prototype of
the bronze sculpture. It shows Cave, with long
hair and wearing nothing but a loincloth,
heroically posed on a rearing stallion, his
left arm brandishing what Cave describes as
“this sort of eternal flame.”
He places it on the mantelpiece, next to a
statue of Jesus, also wearing nothing but a kind
of loincloth, his slipping down o≠ his waist in a
weirdly sexual way. The near-naked twosome
remain there, just above us, as we talk.
After a while we break and head out for
some lunch from a café around the corner.
Cave has lived in Brighton for 15 years, and he
says that it has been a wonderful place to be,
but this period of his life is drawing to a close.
“Mostly, we just find it too di∞cult to live here,”
he says. The plan is to move to Los Angeles.
The family spent some time there last year, and
it felt like the kind of blank slate they need.
“I don’t know how to say this really,” he
says. “Everyone here has just been so great,
and that’s in a way half the problem. When
I go out in Brighton these days, there’s a sort
of feeling that we’re all in this together. And
it’s just a little bit too intense for me. It’s too
many memories, really. We’ve really tried. But
it’s just beyond us, in a way, to remain.”
- ••
IN AN ESSAY and lecture that Nick Cave,
who is now 59, wrote when he was in his early
40s, titled “The Secret Life of the Love Song,”
he quoted the poet W. H. Auden: “The so-called
traumatic experience is not an accident, but
the opportunity for which the child has been
patiently waiting—had it not occurred, it
would have found another—in order that its
life become a serious matter.” And, back then,
Cave himself wrote:
Looking back over the last twenty years, a
certain clarity prevails. Amidst the madness
and the mayhem, it would seem I have been
banging on one particular drum. I see that
my artistic life has centred around an attempt
to articulate an almost palpable sense of loss
which laid claim to my life. A great gaping hole
was blasted out of my world by the unexpected
death of my father.... The way I learned to fill
this hole, this void, was to write.
Recently, Nick Cave has been thinking about
that Auden quote again, and he says that he
has reconsidered.
“I always thought the traumatic incident
was the death of my father,” he says, “but actu-
ally I don’t think the traumatic experience had
actually happened. It was waiting.”
chris heath is a gq correspondent.
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 86STEPH CURRYperson. I told him, ‘You may be a star athlete, but
I am not gonna let you go through girls. No.’ ”
Sonya enlisted Curry’s father, 16-year
NBA veteran Dell Curry, to teach Steph and
his brother, Seth, who plays for the Dallas
Mavericks, how to treat women. “All of this was
based on the idea of responsibility. We would
ask, ‘Are you being responsible with your wor-
ship at church and at home with your family?
Are you being responsible with your school-
work and your athletic discipline?’ Only when
the answers to those questions are yes can we
then think you’re capable of being responsible
with another human being.” (Not incidentally,
Stephen and Ayesha Curry first met in the
youth group of Charlotte’s Central Church of
God, when he was 15 and she was 14.)
It’s not too much of a stretch to say that this
training in responsibility helped Curry reshape
the Warriors after Durant joined the team this
season. All great players elevate the play of
those around them; few, if any, have ever done
it as Curry does—without the need to establish
and maintain alpha-dog status. “You might
expect a guy in his position to guard his throne,
do anything he could to make sure he got his
touches,” says Draymond Green. “But he’s not
like that, and that sets an example.”
“Steph’s selflessness makes his teammates
not only better but more self-sacrificing,” says
Bruce Fraser. “Perfect example: Draymond
Green. His defensive play and basketball IQ
have gone o≠ the charts this season because
of the example Steph set in welcoming Kevin
Durant onto the team. The way Steph didn’t
set out to prove ‘This is my team’ trickled
down to all the other players. Steph knew
he’d be sacrificing stats and points. But it was
all about the team. If anything, Steph overly
tried to make it easier for KD. There were
some growing pains when Steph was trying
to make KD comfortable and KD was trying
to make the whole team comfortable. And
instead of both being natural, they were both
thinking too much, trying to overly please.
That’s what you have to understand about
Steph. You’ve got a pleaser there. And pleas-
ers are always trying to please.”
The notion that the greatest shooter in the
history of basketball is a pleaser rather than
the chosen. 1 —it is, like Curry himself, quietly,
politely radical.- ••
THE WEEKEND BEFORE the Warriors
leave for nine days on the road, I meet Curry
at a restaurant he frequents in Walnut Creek,
California. He tells me about how, during away
games, other franchises have begun opening
their arenas early for fans who want to catch—
and often cheer—Curry’s famous pre-game
warm-up routine.
“That turned out to be a test for me,” Curry
says. “When thousands of people show up
early, that starts to feel like the game. I’ve had
to learn to control my emotions and energy,
because you get going, you make a couple long
shots in a row, there are some oohs! and the
next thing I know, I’m in a full sweat. One time
in Memphis, I made three 40-footers in a row.
Our fans were going crazy. Then I missed one,
and all the Grizzlies fans started going crazy:
You suck! Can’t hit four 40-footers in a row!”
(By the way, how does a lightly muscled guy
like Curry fire from 40 feet out with a leisurely
flick instead of a whole-body discus heave?
“It’s a connection from the floor up,” he says,
“how you maintain that energy flow all the
way through.... There’s no wasted energy. No
wasted motion.”)
So how does Steve Kerr feel about
those long threes, both in warm-ups and
during the game?
“I’m sure that Coach Kerr never thought
he’d be cool with letting somebody shoot from
35 feet out without thinking about it,” Curry
says. “But he respects emotion, and he’s made
playing with joy one of our core principles as
a team.” (Kerr confirms this, saying, “From the
beginning, I wanted Steph Curry’s joy, and
the individuality that represented, to spread
throughout this organization.”) Which brings
us, again, to the trade-o≠ between Curry’s irre-
pressible joy and his focus.
“Yeah, my coaches will tell you that my
focus can be a problem,” he admits. “During
time-outs, I’m always watching the other
team, looking for my parents and friends in
the stands, looking at everything. But I’m not
spacing out. It’s my way of locking in on...
everything. I would love to have an experi-
ment where someone puts a camera on me
from the time I step into the arena to the
time I leave, so I could see where my eyes are,
where my attention goes.”
Curry’s longtime friend Chris Strachan has
thought about those wandering eyes. “I think
he does it in order to take himself away from
‘work.’ It helps him to enjoy the game the way
he always has. He feels God put him on this
earth to play, and he never wants to forget that
that’s what it’s all about—play.”
Though the restaurant’s owner has given
us our own room, and Curry is sitting with
his back to the street, every passerby who
glances our way instantly realizes: him. More
than a few feel inspired to come on in, o≠er
a few words of encouragement and gratitude,
spend a minute or two telling him about the
time they met his dad in a Safeway parking lot,
and so forth. In each instance, Curry isn’t just
gracious; he seems genuinely pleased to make
the acquaintance.
Don’t these encounters, cumulatively,
exhaust him?
“I’d be sorry if people didn’t feel moved to
come up and share a little bit of themselves
with me.”
Is this patience of his a Christian thing, a
church thing?
“Yeah,” he says, with a little tilt of the head.
“That would be a church thing.”
His everyday nice-guy quotient remains
immoderately high throughout the meal.
At one point, he o≠ers up the fact that he’s a
night owl, and that “at ten o’clock, when there’s
nothing going on, that’s when I have the most
energy and get stu≠ done.” Such as? “Oh, man,132 GQ.COM MAY 2017