In addition to completing his career, adding another impossible sequence to a decade of them, offering him his final basketball dream come true, Stephen Curry’s Olympic gold medal has created a problem for him.
“I don’t know where I’m gonna put it permanently,” he says, gazing lovingly at where it sits on an end table not two feet from his left hand. It’s been about a month since he returned from Paris, and he has barely let the prize leave his sight: “Literally, I know who has it or it’s within arm’s reach.” He has no trophy room, he says; his four Golden State Warriors championship rings, his two NBA MVP awards, his NBA Finals MVP award, his NBA All-Star Game MVP award, his NBA Clutch Player of the Year award—all are “out the way,” he says, until his career is over.
Which it is not, even if his 36-year-old knees creak from time to time, and his 36-year-old brain starts to focus on what comes next.
“It gets harder every year to find that motivation,” he says. “But it’s easy for me to just lock in on the idea that I know the ball is gonna stop bouncing at some point, and I have to be able to give it everything I got while I have the opportunity. I operate from a spirit of gratitude, to be sure.”
He has spent nearly his whole life writing his basketball legacy. He is here today, sprawled across a gray armchair in the bridal suite of the Ridgewood Country Club in Paramus, N.J., for another kind of legacy: His Underrated golf tour, which seeks to provide access to the sport for kids from underrepresented backgrounds, is playing its final event of the season, the Curry Cup, and he is taking a brief break from holding court on the first tee so he can talk about the organization. Ninety-six teenagers have played half a dozen events across the country—all free of charge, from the flights to the hotels to the meals to the clubs—and the top 24 boys and top 24 girls are facing off this weekend.
He likes the idea that they can learn what he has from golf—“perseverance, patience, humility,” he says with a smile familiar to anyone who has ever picked up a club—but also that they can spend time around the sorts of titans of industry who tend to populate country clubs.
“Maybe a seed is planted: Hey, maybe I could be—you fill in the blank: a pilot, anywhere in the C suite [at a] Fortune 500 company,” he says. “You name it, we want to give them an understanding that it’s possible, and this is a roadmap to get there.”
Growing up as he did with a professional athlete for a father—Dell Curry played for five NBA teams from 1986 through 2002—young Steph learned early to value process over results, an idea he tries to impart to the young golfers. Someone recently sent him a video of an interview he did at All-Star Weekend in 2010, his rookie year. After he finished laughing at his appearance—“I had no facial hair, the low cut—I looked like I was 16 years old,” he says—he smiled at his words.
“I want to be known as a true professional, a guy who played the game the right way,” says 22-year-old Steph. “Hopefully still in the league and still effective in the league—there’s not that many people that last double-digit years, so it starts now, building a foundation for later on down the road.”
That wasn’t fake humility, Curry insists now. “My dad played in the league for 16 years, and ironically, this is coming up on my 16th year, and all I wanted to do was play 16 years just to try to match him,” he says. “The accolades and the resume and all that didn’t really matter. But honestly, for me, that’s the only way I think I got here and accomplished all this, because you don’t focus on the result. You focus on what you pour into it.”
That was the advice he offered Jayson Tatum during the Olympics, he says, when Tatum—not six weeks removed from his first NBA title—endured the first benching of his career. As Tatum, 26, sat for two of the U.S.’s six games, Curry thought carefully about what to say and how to say it.
“You don’t want to take for granted that even a guy that has accomplished everything he did—and coming off the Finals experience and actually winning—that when a situation like not playing a game comes up, that he knows how to digest it in real time,” Curry says. “So you don’t want to take that for granted, but you don’t want to overreact to it, so I tried to find that balance. All I told him was, Yo, you’re a dog. You know who you are, embrace who you are, and when it comes back around, you know you’re going to be asked to help our team at some point. That was my message. And he was amazing, the way he handled it. He never let it become something that impacted the group. And you got to give him credit for that, because it’s not easy. We all expect greatness, and we all want to be a part of it. He handled a very tough situation like a professional.”
Curry has made 10 All-Star Games and owns two FIBA Basketball World Cup gold medals, so he has some familiarity with lining up alongside other stars. And he has been the Warriors’ unofficial captain for a decade. But he knew it would be different to lead an Olympic team—and the personalities on it.
“Side by side with—” he begins, before starting with LeBron James and Kevin Durant and eventually just listing the entire U.S. roster—“you get to this point where there’s an element of sacrifice that you have to kind of approach that team and that locker room [with]. Everybody’s gonna be asked to do something different. It’s not gonna go everybody’s way in terms of how many minutes you think you’re gonna play, or even what the box score is gonna look like. You kind of have to just give yourself to the group and whatever you’re asked to do.
“And honestly, I think the management of that was relatively easy, because in the locker room, we didn’t really deal with the noise. [We] kind of blocked it out, and it was all about winning. We knew what was at stake if we didn’t win, so we kind of embraced it. And it was cool to see how everybody operates differently when it comes to how they approach preparing for the game and all that. But at the end of the day, [we had] some competitors and some dogs in that room, and they’re in that room for a reason, so we kind of just latched on to that, and the best came out when it mattered the most.”
For Curry, that was in the final 2:47 of the gold-medal game against France, when he sank four increasingly absurd three-pointers. The last one—with a six-point lead, with 35 seconds left, with all four of his teammates open, with two Frenchmen lunging at him—was so preposterous that even the hostile crowd roared. Curry laughs as he looks back at it.
“It’s funny how it works sometimes,” he says. “I was in that position because I made the first three, so I was trying to milk the clock, and then I was going to initiate the play, see if they were going to double team. So it’s all connected in a way. I would not be in that situation had I not made [the others]; I probably would have been in the corner watching somebody else have the ball. But since I did make the first three, it was kind of a nice crescendo, for sure.”
He smiles. The interview is over. It’s almost time to return to the golf course and the legacy he is building there. But first, he turns to his left, to the basketball legacy, and he tucks his gold medal in his pocket.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Steph Curry Is Basking in His Gold Medal and Building His Next Chapter: a Junior Golf Tour.
