This piece was featured first on Oct 23 for One Good Thing, a weekly newsletter brought to you by Alexis Madrigal about his take on Bay Area art, culture & nature. Subscribe today.
I sometimes joke that only two things unite the whole Bay: KQED and Steph Curry. At a time when of great polarization and strife, even here, the greatest player in Warriors history is one thing we can agree on.
And Steph did it again on Tuesday night in the Warriors home opener. After a pedestrian game by his standards, he hit an absurdly deep three-pointer that sealed a win over the Lakers.
It was the kind of shot that no one even attempted before the Steph era and that no one really makes except for Steph, even now. It was the kind of shot that makes Steph such a powerful force on the court that basketball pundits reference Steph’s superpower as “gravity” because he sucks the defense in his direction. Steph warps the geometry of the game, and maybe even reality itself.
I’ve watched Steph hit so many improbable, high-arcing, slow-motion, game-winning shots that I’m not sure he doesn’t access some slightly different dimension, playing the world at a different speed. The joy of a Warriors game this past decade has been to enter the arena a mere mortal, a puny human bound by the standard rules, and through some act of transmutation to access a realm where anything is possible. It is a collective delusion. A whole arena can hold its breath together, and then scream scream scream as the ball goes into the net because of course it does.
I have mostly lost my taste for sports, especially the pro sports that dominate the landscape. There’s something gross about our veneration of these particular billionaire-owned media companies. But even deep in my humbug bag, I cannot deny Steph Curry his greatness or my esteem for him.
Steph is like no other basketball player in the NBA. No one plays like him. No one has changed the game like him. And no superstar lives the grounded life that he does. In all my years running around and reporting on the Bay, I have never once heard a bad word about Steph. Not once! I’ve heard good things from the old GM of the Warriors Bob Myers, from beat reporters, and from a random guy who worked on a commercial that Steph was in. We’re so lucky to have this basketball player and person as the avatar of our place.
At a time when the world is souring on the tech world CEO, Steph Curry is more popular than ever. He is a different model of masculinity, one who has succeeded not through overpowering his opponents but through grace, skill, charm, and humility.
What a gift to us all that at a time when bullies present themselves as the apotheosis of masculinity, there is Steph, a living glorious rebuke.
Always, there is Steph, the one good thing we can all agree on.
Alexis Madrigal, Co-Host, Forum
My Tipline
- New rad looking book club launching at Gray Area: It’s called Cybersentics! “The outward perspective examines biofeedback, while the inward perspective focuses on cyborg art.”
- Check out Rosanna Xia’s film, Out of Plain Sight, about the secret dumping of toxic waste off the California coast at the Roxie, Nov 1
- Come see me chat with Carmen Maria Machado at City Arts and Lectures about the wild, rich, dark surprise bestseller from Transit Books, I Who Have Never Known Men
- Friend of the newsletter Thao Nguyen has new vinyl coming out from her collaboration with MacArthur-winner Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn
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