Mid- to late 1980s
MAGIC JOHNSON/
LARRY BIRD
Johnson and Bird’s
rivalry pushed the
NBA into its “golden
era” in the ’80s.evokes a tightrope so much as a satellite dish
with which Curry insists on receiving every
stray transmission in his environment.
Fraser says there are two reasons for Curry’s
distractibility: “One, because everything is
so easy for him. And two, because he’s got
this childlike quality, which can cause him
to lose focus more than some of the others.
The thing is, even though this ‘kid’ in him
sometimes hurts him, it’s also his best qual-
ity, because it makes him joyful. And when
Stephen Curry is joyful, he is an assassin.”
It’s a revealing observation, given that
the Warriors ended last year’s season with
what was arguably the greatest loss of focus
in NBA history—becoming the first team to
blow a championship series after leading
three games to one. “I gave it a lot of thought,
and it was like a recurring nightmare for a
while,” Curry tells me. “But then, you know,
you live your life and do your thing.”
As the Warriors head toward a seemingly
inevitable third championship series against
the Cavs, the question is whether Curry
doing his thing is going to cut it. Can finesse
and joy, no matter how fine, no matter how
joyful, ever again be enough to take down the
big bully in the east?
On paper, Stephen Curry’s last two sea-
sons have been what statisticians term “just
straight-up stupid.” In 2015, he won his first
ring and MVP honors after setting an NBA
single-season record of 286 three-point shots.
He then doubled down in the o≠-season
(those Cirque du Soleil drills where he
dribbles a basketball with one hand while
juggling a tennis ball with the other!) and
returned staggeringly better in 2016, repeat-
ing as MVP while contending for the league’s
most-improved honor. To stick some metrics
on it: Curry bettered his points-per-game
average by 6.3 while going Bob Beamon on
his own three-point record, raising the tally
from 286 to 402. Four hundred and two.
Yet the numbers, garish as they are, can’t
speak to the full Curry e≠ect. Truly great bas-
ketball players, the kind that come around
only two or three times a decade, have the
ability to decide, usually in the fourth quar-
ter, when their team is down and it’s now
or never, to flip a switch. Magic, Bird, and
Jordan could do it. LeBron can do it. Curry
can, too—but, as is so often the case with him,
in a new and di≠erent way. With LeBron, the
thought balloon above his head invariably
says one thing: It’s up to me. I’m taking over.
The level of ego is as colossal as it is justified.
When Stephen Curry takes over, the
moment presents di≠erently. Sometimes,
he puts himself in the captain’s seat, as in
Game 4 of last year’s Western Conference
Semifinals against the Trail Blazers, when
he scored 17 points in the five-minute over-
time period—another NBA record. (After
the game, Charles Barkley, a frequent Curry
critic, described what he’d just seen per-
fectly: “That. What I. That. That was a. That.
That was on.”) Other times, Klay Thompson
or Kevin Durant or Draymond Green is for
all appearances the one taking charge—
although it’s unmistakably, if indescribably,
clear that Curry is the one engineering the
takeover. It’s as if there’s a hive mind at work,
with Curry the first among equals. At times,
the Warriors’ choreography becomes so much
faster than the speed of thought, so intricately
loomed, that the score almost—almost—
seems besides the point.
I ask Curry what it feels like to orchestrate
something like that, and his answer is char-
acteristically modest: “Me and Kevin were
talking about it on the bench during the fourth
quarter yesterday,” he says, referring to the
50 points the Warriors scored in the third
quarter against the Clippers. “There was
a moment where me and him took over. It
wasn’t forced. There was a flow to it. There
are times when it happens with this team with
more than one person, and sometimes all five.
I don’t know what it is, but it is very...unusual.”In no small part, it’s his selflessness, both
temperamentally and athletically, that con-
founds old-school critics like Barkley, who
continually find ways to discount Curry’s
accomplishments on the court as something
other than, or less than, “real” basketball. At
one level, Barkley’s objections—most nota-
bly, the claim that NBA enforcers of yore
would have shut Curry down—can be under-
stood as an attempt to make sense of a player
who has no precedent. Curry is The Man
who never thinks of himself as anything
other than a man, one of five. It would never
occur to him to dub himself King Curry, à la
LeBron, or to refer to his teammates as
his “supporting cast,” à la Jordan. James
appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated
while he was still in high school and soon
thereafter had chosen. 1 tattooed across the
top of his back in a 400-point Gothic font.
Curry graduated from North Carolina’s
Charlotte Christian High School and was
passed over by every major college bas-
ketball program; his signature tattoo is a
small cursive on his ring finger, to remind
him of his wife during games, when he’s
unable to wear his wedding ring. You will
never hear Stephen Curry refer to himself
in the third person or see him hold forth
from a dais about where he may or may
not take his talents when he becomes a
free agent after this season. (Who’s fooling
whom? The Warriors, who want and need
Curry as the face of the franchise as they
get ready to move across the Bay to new digs
in San Francisco come 2019, are all but cer-
tain to sign him to a five-year deal worth
north of $200 million.)
“A lot of people who become celebrated
athletes were groomed and raised to be in
the position they’re in,” Curry’s wife, Ayesha,
explains. “But that didn’t happen with Steph,
and so he never became that stereotypical
athlete that people expect—the one who
always gets whatever he wants.”
The consideration of others, desirable
in most human beings, questionable in
a world-class athletic talent, was a les-
son Curry learned early and often. Curry’s
mother, Sonya, told me she didn’t let Steph
date until he was 16: “I always wanted
him to understand that dating is a privilege—
that when you date someone, you become
responsible to that1970s to early 1980s
JULIUS
ERVING
Transformed the slam
dunk into an aerial
display of athleticism
and signature style.Late 1980s to
early 1990s
MICHAEL
JORDAN
Jordan’s legacy lies in
his dunks and clutch
buzzer-beaters.2000s to 2010s
LEBRON
JAMES
The first player in
half a century to
play in six straight
NBA Finals.86-GQ-MAY-2017
(continued on page 132 ) FROM LEFT: FOCUS ON SPORT/GETTY IMAGES; RICHARD MACKSON/SPORTS ILLUSTRATED/GETTY IMAGES; JOHN BIEVER/SPORTS ILLUSTRATED/GETTY IMAGES; CHRIS SCHWEGLER/NBAE/GETTY IMAGES