The calm that hovers over the streets around the Chase Center in San Francisco late on a night when no basketball is being played is intoxicating. That is, until you walk inside. That same calm gives way to an eeriness—the space is cavernous and labyrinthian, hallways collapsing into hallways. A corner light flickers in a series of hiccups. Music echoes from some undetermined distance. Following the sounds, I'm led to a kind of makeshift subterranean gym. Laughter rises from a group of handlers, circled around Stephen Curry, who's dressed as if he's just finished a workout. At his feet rest two 30-pound barbells branded with the Golden State Warriors logo. A Warriors towel rests on his head. Drake's Certified Lover Boy ricochets off the walls.
It's here, in the belly of the Warriors' arena, that Stephen Curry has diligently remade himself and his team. And glimpsing him in this private lair, just before our interview, is like witnessing a superhero's origin story. Except it's the sequel, the story of his rebirth. Our hero is better than before, the mythology more grandiose. In an instant, there's a song shift. Once the beat drops on “You Only Live Twice,” Curry is newly energized, grinning underneath the shadow of the towel, gesturing with his hands, shaking his head on beat. The song serves as an appropriate anthem for a player in the throes of a second NBA life, making the impossible look easy in new ways.
The first era of the modern Warriors dynasty was staggering: three championships and five straight finals. The 73-win season. Curry breaking the single-season three-point record, then breaking it again (and again). Then things began to crumble. There's an enduring image from late in the third quarter of the 2019 NBA finals. The Warriors are down to the Raptors in the series, 3-2. But in the game itself, they're up by three. Kevin Durant had gone out with an injury the game prior, and there is Klay Thompson, barely able to walk, being carried off of the court with what later would be diagnosed as a torn ACL. A replay showed Curry slamming the ball in frustration, a rare crack in his usually placid demeanor. It seemed that he came to a realization in that moment. He was the only star left, fighting back against the inevitable depletion of his team. And he was. The Warriors lost the finals. Durant was off to Brooklyn in the off-season. The pandemic threw the league off course. Thompson tore an Achilles before he even returned from the ACL injury. Curry injured his hand. There were those who said it was a good run. We got a half-decade of greatness. No dynasty can last forever.
Yet there's something remarkable brewing in the Bay once again. The night before, there was an NBA game here. The Raptors came to town and left with their 15th loss out of the last 17 games they've played on Golden State's home floor. Curry didn't have the kind of game spectators have been accustomed to seeing him put together this season—he managed just 12 points on 2-10 shooting—but the Warriors still won, relatively comfortably. This was a departure from last season, when at times it felt like in order for the Warriors to be in a game, Curry had to maintain an almost unsustainable level. Almost unsustainable because, through the season, he somehow managed to sustain it. Those heroics were both miraculous and a bit concerning. It felt, at times, like one last flourish before the flame burned out entirely. Curry, dragging what some considered to be a fading team along, unconcerned with the toll it might be taking on his body.
But this is a new era of Warriors basketball. As of now, Curry and the Warriors have the best record in the NBA, and they've made it look both easy and fun. A youthful energy has been infused into the core of reliable stars. Young players like Jordan Poole have taken leaps. Still-youthful semi-vets like Andrew Wiggins have further solidified roles as effective two-way options. Draymond Green is back in his Defensive Player of the Year form, even more cerebral than he was before. Stephen Curry's job, so far, has been considerably easier. And three weeks after my visit to Chase Center, he'd have the chance to bask in personal accolades, too, breaking Ray Allen's record for all-time career three pointers near the end of 2021, and doing it in Madison Square Garden, of course.
But that's yet to come. In a greenroom inside the Warriors' arena, Curry settles into a chair. He's older now, 33, but doesn't look worn down. There's still a childlike quality to him—he's a thoughtful speaker, and there's often a grin creeping along the edges of his mouth, like he's just heard a secret. He's also stronger than he was, no longer the young player with a jersey sliding off of his shoulders in his Davidson years or his first few seasons in the NBA. The muscles in his arms cut a clear outline through his black hoodie as he puts a hand on his face to ponder a question. He holds this pose for several seconds after I ask him about dynasties, and the challenges of reshaping a team for another run, after over a decade in the league and just two seasons after it seemed like the torch was being passed.
“Well, as many good breaks as we got, we got kind of the same bad breaks,” he begins. “The injuries that took us to a pretty crazy free fall right before the pandemic. And it's weird because if you look at it in those two years, it was tough to be patient and tough for me, just staying locked in and motivated.”
He pauses briefly, before running toward a closing thought: “And for us, that's been the mental [block we've had to] unlock—staying sharp, staying fresh, and appreciating the climb back to hopefully get back to the top, and personally, I've just been riding that wave. Understand if you're in this league long enough, hopefully you'll experience many different things, many different narratives, and you have to not reinvent your game, but just reinvent your focus on what's the challenge ahead of you each year. And I feel like that's been really a shock to the system these last two years.”
The place the team finds itself in suits Curry. To have his squad written off, only to bring them roaring back as a newer, potentially better version of their old selves. It all fits the overarching Curry mythology—that of the perpetual underdog. It's significantly more difficult to sell that narrative now than it was when Curry was a scrawny kid firing away at Davidson, stitching together an upset run to the Elite Eight. More difficult than when he was battling ankle injuries early in his NBA career. Indeed, the idea of the underdog today seems almost an invention, just as Michael Jordan imagined slights and pulled foes out of thin air. Curry smirks a bit when I ask, incredulously, about his commitment to this underdog status. “I've failed at explaining what it feels like,” he says. “But I still carry that one thousand percent, because I have a long-term memory of everything that it took and everything I've been through to get here.”
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Curry's coach at Davidson, Bob McKillop, is one of the few people who can remember when Curry truly was an underdog. He was a three-star recruit who was all but ignored by Division I colleges, most notably Virginia Tech—alma mater of his NBA-famous father, Dell, and the school Curry had eyed for himself. Davidson was one of the only schools to offer Curry a scholarship, a choice the program made because of his resiliency, McKillop says. “We went to see him play in Vegas in an AAU tournament the summer before his senior year,” McKillop tells me. “He played in one of the auxiliary gyms, not the main gym. There were very few people at the game, and even fewer coaches. I felt pretty good knowing that only a couple of guys were watching him.” McKillop waits a beat before the reveal. “And he was awful. He threw the ball into the stands, he dropped passes, he dribbled off his foot, he missed shots. But never once during that game did he blame an official, or point a finger at a teammate. He was always cheering from the bench, he looked in his coaches eyes, and he never flinched. That stuck with me.”
McKillop is talking, in part, about the intangibles that Curry has always had. But there are parts of his game he's reinvented, too, just as anyone does who plays long enough and is committed to playing longer. Curry still refers to himself as a “late bloomer,” and when he does, he's speaking of both then and now—a game that is still evolving. The beauty that has always been present in his game still remains. Not just the shots themselves, the miracle heaves over a forest of arms, or the wide-open effortless flicks that look good even while still ascending. But also the beauty in Curry's movement. His is a game predicated on a series of small escapes, running through slivers of space in hopes of finding some larger sliver of space on the other end. All of those things are hallmarks of a beautiful game. But there's also a renewed physicality to what Curry does on the court, a renewed commitment to defense—something that haunted his play in the earlier parts of his career.
Curry tells me that there's a potential delusion he's in the throes of: the belief that he can still get better, even though he knows there's a point where he'll say that but won't actually feel it. He's not there yet, though, he claims. “There's a level of insecurity that comes with my personal experience of how I get ready for a season,” Curry reveals. “I understand where the bar is at and I've got to keep raising it. So that level of insecurity drives me, because it's three months where you're thinking about how do you get better?”
In the words of his current coach, Steve Kerr, much of Curry's constant evolution revolves around how he has taken care of his body and improved it. He's still gaining muscle—he reportedly added five pounds over the off-season—as well as refining his power, his speed, and his quickness. That more muscular frame, Kerr says, has changed Curry's ability to be dangerous from everywhere. “From when I arrived here seven years ago, there's been a huge difference,” Kerr tells me over the phone. “He's built his body in a way that impacts how he can finish at the rim, how he can get into the paint, and get through screens. And it's also helped him on defense. He's an excellent defender. This stigma has remained from early in his career that he's a weak defender, and I would just ask anyone to watch him night to night.” This bears out statistically. At the time of this writing, Curry is in the midst of the greatest defensive season he's ever had, posting his highest defensive rating since he's entered the league (97.8) and also averaging a career-high 5.6 rebounds per game.
Despite being one of the game's greatest superstars, Curry remains something of an outlier in today's NBA, situated largely outside the fraternity of stars that operate with a public off-court kinship. That's partly due to the aforementioned underdog status that defined his youth and college career. He didn't play on the high-profile AAU teams or build up the kind of relationships and rivalries that can define players before they even enter the league. This hasn't prevented Curry from forming certain narratives with his competitors, of course. His prolonged contest with LeBron James is now one of the great sports duels of our era, one that added yet another chapter late last season, when James hit a three-pointer over Curry's outstretched arms in the dwindling moments of the play-in game that would send the Lakers into the playoffs.
Curry looks upon the James rivalry almost with a sense of wonder, sometimes reminiscing about the early stages of their relationship. During the 2008 NCAA Tournament, it was James, then in his fifth season with the Cavs, who took a pilgrimage to Detroit to see Curry play in person. “I was a sophomore in college and LeBron was coming to my games!” Curry says with a sense of lingering disbelief. “I actually still have the jersey he gave me. He signed a jersey for me. I think that was November of my junior year. On my wall at my parents' house in Charlotte, it's still there. And he wrote it to me, called me the king of basketball in North Carolina. So I guess it's like the corny idols-become-rivals thing.” He pauses here, almost as if he's stepping outside of the cloud of whimsy and nostalgia, and back into the reality of their competitive push and pull, the tensions that have waxed and waned throughout their clashes. He shrugs, matter-of-factly. “But it's real, though.”
Curry counts Chris Paul as a mentor, too, but is largely ambivalent about socializing with anyone except his teammates, “my guys,” as he calls them—players he has spent the majority of his career around, building the culture of a single franchise. Which leads to another example of Curry's uniqueness in today's NBA. The player who stays on one team for his entire career has begun to feel like a relic, given how many players hop from team to team pursuing championships, or simply become late-career journeymen, playing their final, largely ineffective years in unfamiliar confines. There are certainly those who would rather forget Patrick Ewing wandering through his final two seasons, with Seattle and then Orlando. Hakeem Olajuwon winding down with Toronto. Curry has signed on for four more years with the Warriors, which would take him to age 38. In theory, he could go the route of Ewing or Olajuwon, but it seems unlikely. He's embedded himself in the community here. “When I got drafted to Golden State, my grandma had no idea what city it was in,” Curry says with a laugh. “Everyone on the East Coast thinks L.A. is all of California.”
Upon his arrival, Curry instantly fell in love with the team, the Bay, its fans. Contrary to the belief that every Golden State Warriors fan arrived just in time to bask in the heyday of the team's championship era, there was a long-suffering but devoted legion that slogged their way through the team's lean years, which stretched right up until Curry first showed up in town. The team built a consistent core of players through the draft, while also building a culture of basketball that was both winning and thrilling. But there have been changes. Most notably, there was the transplanting of the team from Oakland back to San Francisco, which Curry admits has been a bit of a challenge. He loved Oakland, he says. The team's identity was anchored there. “It feels a little bit like I got traded, but within the same organization,” he tells me. He and the team are trying to build a new legacy, a sort of Warriors 2.0 in San Francisco. Yet another opportunity for a second life.
The team's location in the Bay has provided some opportunities for Curry to build a life away from basketball. He's used his company SC30 Inc. to invest in tech startups like the travel platform Snaptravel. This entry into tech, he says, was first orchestrated by Andre Iguodala, during his first run with the Warriors. “When he came from Denver in 2013, he came with passion behind it and some connections and he started to pique everybody's interest,” Curry says. “Our conversations in the locker room started to change drastically from rap albums and cars and all that type of stuff to like: You see that company's IPO? And then obviously the awareness and exposure to what's in our backyard, Silicon Valley—he was the first that really opened my eyes to what was possible in that arena.”
Now Curry has his own media company, Unanimous, which, among other things, is responsible for producing the miniature-golf show Holey Moley. “There's so much opportunity [in Hollywood] because doors are open,” he says. “There's so much talent that can step into those rooms and deserve to be there, stay there, and have successful careers. And you can't really quantify it right now, but you can obviously have those checkpoints like, ‘Are we making a true impact?’ And, ‘How is that going to weave into everything that I do?’”
To make a more tangible and immediate impact, in 2019 Curry launched a nonprofit called Eat. Learn. Play. with his wife, Ayesha, focusing on childhood nutrition, education, and physical activity. In March 2021, the organization delivered meals to 24,000 students and their families to make up for the meals those students would no longer be getting at school due to pandemic limitations. Elsewhere in Curry's universe, SC30 Inc. has been responsible for launching Howard University's men's and women's golf programs, and his Curry Brand has poured funds into Harlem's famous Rucker Park, investing in programs to support young basketball players in the area with clinics and equipment.
There is a thread that runs through all of this: an obsession with uplifting the underdog, or the underrepresented, or—a word Curry often uses—the “underrated.”
As we talk, it becomes clear that that idea is part of his DNA. His book club, which carries the Underrated moniker, highlights books about protagonists overcoming personal struggles or ones by authors he feels have been overlooked in their own right. Cole Brown's Greyboy, about navigating the sometimes tricky boundaries between race and class, was one such book club pick; Brown is also working with Unanimous on bringing other projects to the screen. Curry lights up again when talking about his Underrated Tour, which travels the country offering a platform to three-star high-school basketball prospects. The players who might, for example, play in an auxiliary gym during the big AAU tournaments. The players who might have only one or two coaches locked in on them. (“When I was a sophomore, junior, in high school, I wouldn't even have been invited to my own camp,” he says, shaking his head.)
When Curry's aims and investments are all laid out, they can seem a bit like a sneaker commercial, spoken over some swelling instrumental. Which might be more beautiful than inspirational on its face. But his ambitions only come to life through the connective tissue that binds them together. None of it is promising that the next Stephen Curry will be unearthed through a camp, or through a kid having access to a meal or a court to play on. But these initiatives are all asking the question of what might happen if enough openings were offered. What might happen if enough young people ran through one space to get to a larger, more rewarding space. Yet another manifestation of Curry's game.
After I ask about how the responsibilities of star athletes have evolved through the decades, he brings up his father. “I had a front-row seat to watch my dad go through it for 16 years,” Curry tells me. Dell Curry played the most prominent parts of his career in Charlotte, and in the late '90s he started a foundation that built computer-learning centers in neglected neighborhoods. And just as Stephen was courtside at games, he was also required to be hands-on in the off-court aspects of his father's career. “Me and my siblings used to go volunteer and spend a lot of time in those centers,” he says. “And I got to see what happens when a community is galvanized, gets fundraising, gets places for kids to go spend time and develop themselves and invest themselves. I saw it on that level. And unless you saw it up close, in person, you didn't really hear about it.”
Curry is considering the shift in platform and ability to spread the good word. There was less than a decade between Dell's retirement (2002) and Stephen's entry into the league (2009), but in that small window, technology changed. The potential for exposure grew, and with it players' profiles soared. In turn, they gained more leverage, in part leading to the modern era of renewed player empowerment. “I'm still in the process of building and trying and doing,” he says. “Not to sound too noble, but I really respect and appreciate what's happened in my life in terms of what basketball has provided me and my family. Opportunities I never thought would be possible. And it hasn't always been perfect in terms of how I've tried to start things. And there's been a lot of different transitions through a lot of phases of the early days of doing this and taking ownership of it. But, I know it's going to be worth it.”
The Golden State Warriors currently find themselves in a unique transitional phase: The team is getting older and younger at the same time. With Curry and Thompson and Iguodala and Green all now in their 30s, they've furnished the next generation of their roster with players like Poole, James Wiseman, Jonathan Kuminga, and Moses Moody. They aren't in rebuild mode, and their best players still seem to have a lot left in the tank, but they are mindful of continuity and how to remain in contention when the sun sets on the careers of their core players. With this in mind, Kerr highlights Curry's shift in leadership. “Well, he's never been a yell-and-scream type of guy,” Kerr says. “He likes pulling guys aside and giving advice quietly. But now, he's much more likely to speak up in front of the team than he was five years ago. He's one of the oldest guys on the team, and he recognizes the responsibility that comes with that.”
Curry is something of a master of team dynamics, having had to grow into a leader with little in the way of a road map. When he came to Golden State, there were veterans, but there wasn't a winning culture. Curry, Green, and Thompson had to figure out their own leadership styles, but also how to pass down what they learned when the time came. And that time is now. The team is pursuing another title while its best players simultaneously cling to their prime and condition their young and talented teammates to keep up. It's an alarming balance, one that might be easier if Golden State's centerpieces were in the twilight of their careers, playing through farewell tours.
When Curry considers the construction of the team and his current responsibilities within the Warriors ecosystem, he grins. “Well, it's also weird because when we won our first championship, in 2015, Jordan Poole was 15 years old,” he says. “Jonathan Kuminga and Moses Moody were like freshmen in high school, and now they're here. It's weird to think they were watching us like we were almost basketball gods.” He laughs, and then offers an accepting shrug. “And now they're here helping us do it again.”
This specific nostalgia rings true for Jordan Poole, who summons a specific memory of Curry's greatness: his infamous game-winning pull-up three against Oklahoma City in 2016. “I grew up in Milwaukee, so I was mostly getting Eastern Conference games on television,” Poole says. “That was the rare night I got a Western Conference game, and it didn't disappoint.”
For Poole, the transition from spectator to participant has been surreal. Curry, Thompson, Green, and Iguodala were all part of “a world-changing dynasty,” he says—one that he's now fighting to keep alive. And he's doing so by looking to Curry's leadership. “Having someone of his stature take you under his wings, someone who has so much experience on the court and so much knowledge in life, pays huge dividends,” he says. “He opened my eyes so much to the game of basketball. He does a great job of demonstrating patience with the team, especially the young guys.”
Curry, for his part, dreams of a future five years from now where Poole is an all-star, Kuminga is an all-defensive player, and Wiseman is an MVP candidate. He and Green will be fulfilled then, he says.
But there is still the business of winning games, of building a legacy, of conquering doubters, real and invented. There are still those who insist that Curry has ruined the game—that he's inspired a trend toward outrageously long-range threes that should only be attempted by a generational talent. These cries might seem unique to someone too young to remember those who insisted that Steve Nash was ruining the game, or that Allen Iverson was ruining the game before him, and so on. The miracle in all of these players, for me and for a lot of short, small kids I've known, is that they were operating in a game not entirely built for them and yet extracting all the magic they could from it. Sure, Curry is bigger now than he once was, but he's still a fairly small guard who has perfected his ability to not only play well, but play with flair. To both wow and frustrate opponents, as Nash and Iverson did.
And there are kids somewhere shooting 35-foot shots before even attempting to perfect the midrange, and kids pulling off dribble moves with their heads down, completely missing open teammates. But there's something else that hovers in my mind as I exit the arena. We've had Stephen Curry for a good, long, thrilling time, and we're not going to have him forever. Even if he plays out his latest extension, four seasons can come and go in an instant. And so, with any luck, there are also some kids out there, short and scrawny, watching the blueprint Stephen Curry is mapping out in real time: How to dominate what isn't meant for you, until it is meant for you alone.
Hanif Abdurraqib is the author of A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance and the recipient of a 2021 MacArthur Foundation grant.
A version of this story originally appeared in the February 2022 issue with the title "The Second Coming of Stephen Curry."
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PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Shaniqwa Jarvis
Styled by Mobolaji Dawodu
Hair by Yusef Wright
Skin by Hee Soo Kwon using Dior Backstage Face & Body Foundation
Tailoring by Yelena Travkina
Set design by Dylan Lynch
Produced by North Six
Photographed at Chase Center, home of the Golden State Warriors
