CONTINUED FROM PAGE 95STEPH CURRYCONTINUEDthis is embarrassing. But one of my favorite
pastimes is organizing the garage. That’s when
I get in my zone. Just doing the shelves, putting
shoeboxes here, moving athletic equipment
over there, everything in its place. That’s my
zone. That’s my arena.” He gazes o≠, picturing
those shelves just so, and smiles. Something
his mother told me comes to mind.
“In the NBA, a lot of people play with a chip
on their shoulder, and that’s what motivates
them. They need to feel disrespected. But
Steph has always been fueled only by the love
of the game. He doesn’t need to be angry. In
fact, I think he discovered a long time ago
that anger distracts him from his own self,
and anything that distracts him from his self
prevents him from playing his best. I also
think this has created confusion. A lot of
people along the way have expected and even
needed him to have a hard edge, to be more of
a nasty person.”
Curry assures me that he has the heart of
an “assassin”—his word, not mine—beating
just as surely as the kind Christian heart
sitting next to it. Both were on display in
February, when he sparred publicly with
Kevin Plank, the CEO of Under Armour. In an
interview with The Mercury News, a reporter
asked Curry if he agreed with Plank’s asser-
tion, on CNBC, that Donald Trump was “a real
asset for the country.” Curry responded that
“I agree with that description—if you remove
the ‘et.’ ” (Shhhick!)
Curry spent an entire day on the phone with
various Under Armour personnel, “pursuing
clarification about what was going on” and
“making sure everybody knew where every-
body else stood on the issue.” By which he
meant, as he tells me now, “If I had come to
the conclusion that the leadership of the com-
pany was not in line with my core values, and
vice versa, I would have jumped o≠ that plat-
form.” That is to say, Curry would have walked
away from his most prominent and lucrative
corporate endorsement—reportedly worth
$32 million through 2024.
Under Armour quickly issued its “clarifi-
cation,” distancing itself from Trump’s more
noxious race prescriptions while stipulating
that by “asset,” Plank had only meant to say
that the new president would presumably be
more business-friendly and tax-averse than
his predecessor. Curry considered the expla-
nation satisfactory. His mother, though, had
a bone to pick with her son: “I told you never
to swear!” Curry responded that he hadn’t
said the word, only implied it. Mother and
son agreed to disagree.
“Even then, I was worried that I had
messed up—that having a playful attitude had
detracted from the serious point I felt I needed
to make,” Curry says. “I’m not gonna pretend
that I have some long history as an activist. But
I’m definitely in the camp that when it comes
to athletes, whoever has a microphone in front
of their face, they ought to use it.
“You know,” he adds, “I did get a lot of
feedback from other believers who were dis-
appointed in the aggression of my statement.
They thought it was un-Christian of me to call
[Trump] a name. Now, I understand that Jesus
probably wouldn’t have used that term. But
He was in that temple going crazy, flipping
tables.... I think that sometimes, you have to
remember who you are and what you stand for
and not be ashamed of that.”
One wonders: What would Michael have
done? Or one doesn’t wonder, actually,
given that the answer is obvious: Nothing—
because in his day, Michael Jordan assid-
uously avoided doing or saying anything
that might compromise his corporate
branding. (“Republicans buy sneakers, too,”
he supposedly quipped.) On the court,
Jordan emblazoned himself on the cultural
imagination as a transformative black ath-
lete; o≠ the court, he e≠ectively recused him-
self from the politics of race. Curry reverses
that equation: On the court, he’s a trans-
formative athlete whose race is rarely fore-
grounded; o≠ the court, he’s willing to signal
his own black consciousness with $32 million
in the balance.
Not so soft, after all.- ••
A WEEK LATER, I get to see Curry’s sense
of joy, his selflessness, and his Christian
forbearance put to the test. In the opening
minutes of a game against Washington, one
of the Wizards goes MMA on Golden State’s
wondrously named center Zaza Pachulia while
boxing him out, launching him into Kevin
Durant’s left knee. The resulting sprain will
sideline Durant for weeks.
When I talk to Curry the next day, at an
event at Liberty University—a Christian
college in Lynchburg, Virginia, where Seth
Curry played his freshman year—Curry seems
shaken. “We still don’t know what to call the
injury, still don’t know what it means,” he
says, more to himself than to me. He is, quite
uncharacteristically, not fully present; this is
the only instance during our time together
that he fails to make eye contact while
answering a question. “We’re gonna have to
remember how we worked as a unit before
KD came on board.”
Onstage, while making no mention of
Durant’s injury, Curry testifies passionately
about the gratitude he feels to God for his tal-
ent and the platform it provides for him to
“shine a light.” It’s di∞cult not to think of the
looming six-foot-eight wall of will—that is,
LeBron James—threatening, now more than
ever, to eclipse that light come June.
After his speech, Curry poses for pictures
before being whisked away to Chicago (where
the Warriors lose, 87–94). Watching him
go, I recall how plainly hobbled he was during
last year’s championship series by the ankle
and knee issues that had sidelined him earlier
in the playo≠s—and how he never used those
injuries as an excuse or explanation. And then
I remember Ayesha’s take on that subject.
“As great an athlete as my husband is,
one of his greatest gifts is his ability to keep
losses in perspective,” she says, emphasiz-
ing—as Curry himself does—that this is a
product of his faith. “Last season could have
devastated some people, changed their being,
their whole personality. Steph was down for
a little bit, and he wanted to reflect on how
things could have been di≠erent. But by ‘a
little bit,’ I mean two days—three at most.
Steph wants that championship as much as
anybody ever could. But he doesn’t need that
ring to complete his own sense of who he is
and what he’s worth. Win or lose, he’s the
same happy guy.”
andrew corsellois a gq correspondent.BEST NEW RESTAURANTSmushrooms bathed in chestnut-miso butter;
huge head-on prawns, painted the color of
freshly fired brick with red-chile fish sauce.
The pizzas are blistered and bubbly and per-
fect. If the story of a Korean woman making
expert pizza in the heartland isn’t quite as “It’s
a Small World” as Flowers of Vietnam’s, it’s still
almost enough to make you leap to your feet
reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.- ••
FOR ALL THAT, the tasting menu remains
the signature style of our time, the battlefield
on which all the semiotics of modern din-
ing are being hashed out and contested.
Sometimes you can watch that battle being
waged at the table in front of you. Take,
for instance, the by turns maddening and
wonderful Tarsan i Jane, the creative home
of Catalan chef Perfecte Rocher, late of
L.A.’s smoke.oil.salt (a 2015 GQ Best New
Restaurant), and his wife, Alia Zaine, another
restaurant veteran, who runs the front of
house. The two decamped to Seattle last year
with vague plans to open a food cart, when a
barn-like space in the Fremont neighborhood
fell into their laps. Sticking with the times,
the couple keep things spare, prioritizing
the wide, open-fire grill in the kitchen while
letting strings of hanging terrariums and lan-
terns make do as decorations. At the same
time, they are fatally attracted to some of fine
dining’s worst pretensions. When you make
a reservation via the website, you are treated
to a disquisition on “trust,” a lecture that
boils down to “Don’t ask for salt.” I pitied the
server, otherwise stellar, who was forced to
follow the policy of not giving tastes of wines
by the glass, explaining, “We should be able
to tell you what they are like.”
There may have been a time when such
forced re-education in the dictatorial
power of the chef was necessary, but we’re
post-no-substitutions now. Or, at the very
least, post-manifesto. And I worry that such
tonal missteps are keeping Seattleites from
Rocher’s cooking, which is some of the most
alive and enrapturing I tasted all year. Much
like the restaurant itself, the Catalan- and
Valencian-inspired dishes come to the table
buttoned-up and chef-y, then stir to life as
their many components seem to relax, sigh-
ing into one another: In one, raw pieces of
rockfish are tossed with sesame seeds, thin
threads of dried chile, and a dehydrated-plum
powder that sends electric jolts through the
fish. A tangled heap of lamb belly and black
trumpet mushrooms comes fairly vibrat-
ing with a sharp stab of citrus, provided
by a Bodegas Sauci sherry gelée, and the
nearly e≠ervescent spice of bay-leaf oil. On
Sundays, Tarsan i Jane serves a five-course
MAY 2017 GQ.COM 133