He doesn’t pass the eye
test. He never has. I know
this about him going in—
the coaches and scouts who
dismissed him because
he didn’t play right, didn’t act
right, didn’t look right. One
early scouting report reads
like a series of taunts from the
Bully of the Beach in the old
Charles Atlas comic strips:
“Far below NBA standard in regard to explo-
siveness and athleticism...extremely small...
needs to add some muscles to his upper
body, but appears as though he’ll always
be skinny...not a natural point guard that
an NBA team can rely on to run a team.”I
know how wrong his doubters proved to be.
I know the truth: that he’s the first unani-
mous MVP in NBA history, that he’s the best
shooter ever to lay hands on a ball, that he’s
changed the fundamental geometry of the
game itself. There is a generation of kids,
from the college level on down, who are imi-
tating Steph’s moves, throwing up Curry-style
half-court shots while chomping, Curry-style,
on their half-expectorated mouth guards.
And yet when I meet the man this spring,
at the Golden State Warriors practice facility,
my eyes tell me what they tell me and I think,
like so many before me, and quite stupidly:
Uh, I thought Stephen Curry would be bigger.
As I lurk behind the goalpost, dazzled and
half hypnotized by the shhhick!...shhhick!...
shhhick! (a sound sibilant and crisp and,
somehow, grinning) as he sinks 35 three-
point shots in a row, the nay-saying thoughts
about Curry and the Goliaths he’s going to
meet in the playo≠s assert themselves. His
vertical leap is a whole foot shorter than
Russell Westbrook’s.... LeBron James out-
weighs him by 60 pounds....
Even Curry is not immune to such doubts.
“Would I have told you my rookie year,
‘I’m gonna be MVP someday’? No way,” he
says. “I didn’t know what the ceiling was.”
Does he now? Do we? Curry knows he has
unfinished business to attend to this season
before any question about his ceiling can
be addressed, just as he knows the world
is watching and wondering. Yet in practice
he radiates nothing but balletic ease. (His
record for consecutive threes is 77; he con-
siders any day in which he sinks fewer than
80 out of 100 to be an o≠ day, an ugly day.)
The display is impressive, of course, but
it’s also quite beautiful.
Curry himself, even before he gets a bas-
ketball in his hands and starts to move, is
a beautiful human being. And “beautiful,”
not “handsome,” is the correct word here.
Teammates and opponents both used to
describe Michael Jordan as a hard man, and
he looked and acted the part: cut from stone,
built for combat. Curry, on the other hand, is
a Warrior who looks nothing like a warrior.
He’s 29 but still baby-faced, with soft sunny
features and bright green-gray eyes. There’s
an optimistic cast to his face—he looks
like he’s smiling even when he’s not. Or, as
Warriors head coach Steve Kerr says, “Steph
looks like he’s 12 years old.”
But it’s the sight of Curry in motion
that hypnotizes. The 100-shot progression
resembles an étude rather than a drill. One
assistant coach, Nick U’Ren, places him-
self under the hoop, secures each ball after
it shhhicks the net, and distributes it to
another assistant coach, Bruce Fraser—known
as the Curry Whisperer—who fires passes to
his shooter from di≠erent positions, con-
stantly varying angle, speed, and arc. Curry
remains in perpetual motion, releasing
every three seconds or so, slowly tracing
the half orbit of the three-point arc from
one corner to the other. The exactitude of
his footwork—the way the tips of his Under
Armour sneakers depart and land exactly aninch from the arc with every shot—creates
the impression that he’s negotiating a tight-
rope, not a painted line.
He doesn’t achieve much air on his jump
shot. The question that raises (Why aren’t
half this guy’s shots blocked?) gets answered
with every ball Fraser feeds him: The hands!
The speed with which Curry can receive a
pass and transition it into a shot is simply
astonishing—to the naked eye he often seems
to be volleying, rather than catching, the ball.
“I’ve always suspected he has extra nerves
in his fingertips,” says U’Ren. “His ability to
manipulate and adjust the ball in a fraction
of a second, to transition the angle or arc of
his shot in response to what a defender is
doing, is unlike anything I’ve ever seen.”
“Steph has an almost superhuman abil-
ity to micro-self-correct on his own,” Fraser
adds. “But then if one of us says, ‘Try this,’
he’s able to process the change faster than
anyone I’ve ever seen. He’s the most educa-
ble player I’ve ever known—both in terms of
his willingness to listen and in his ability to
absorb and execute.”
That soft touch, that combination of
finesse and pliancy of temperament—it’s
Curry’s singular gift, but it’s also the source
of all the talk over the years that he’s, well,
soft. It’s instructive (and unavoidable) to
compare Curry in this regard to his neme-
sis. LeBron James, the league’s other gener-
ational talent, is an unstoppable blunt-force
trauma of a player, but he has none of
Curry’s silkiness and grace. There’s some-
thing dancerly about Curry’s athleticism.
He’s one of the few players in the history of
the game capable of producing the illusion
that he can change the direction of his body
after leaving the ground.
“The one downside to Stephen Curry, if
you insist on looking for one,” Fraser says,
“is that he sometimes loses focus.” It’s true:
Throughout the drill, Curry’s eyes are every-
where. Draymond Green is 40 feet away,
telling a reporter that despite the double tech-
nical he landed the week before, “I am not
a bad boy, I’m just Draymond!”—and Curry
chimes in, “S’right, Dray! Tell ’em!” Kevin
Durant is down the floor practicing pirou-
ettes, ball in hand, to improve his balance
and core strength—and Curry finds the time
to chirp, “Dance, KD, dance!” The three-point
arc no longer1950s
GEORGE
MIKAN
To slow him down,
the league expanded
the width of the
key from 6 feet to 12.1960s
WILT
CHAMBERLAIN
The first and
last player to
score 100 points
in a single game.1960s to early 1970s
OSCAR
ROBERTSON
The only player (so
far) to average a
triple-double for an
entire season.GAME
CHANGERS
STEPH CURRY MAY HAVE THE
NBA CONSIDERING A FOUR-
POINT LINE, BUT HE’S NOT THE
FIRST TO REDEFINE THE SPORT82-GQ-MAY-201782-GQ-MAY-2017
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