What I’ll say

I’ll start by saying what I won’t say. I won’t say he should stay. I won’t say he should go.

What I will say:

1. It’ll be the right decision. I know that because Stephen’s not a knucklehead, and neither are his parents, and neither are his coaches, and neither are his friends. It’ll be the right one because he’ll have good information. It’ll be the right one because he’ll make it for sound reasons. It’ll be the right one because it’ll be his.

2. Here, so far as I can tell, and in severely condensed form, is what he’s said publicly about this to this point: He loves Davidson. But there’s some risk in coming back. He’s 50-50 right now.

Anybody can parse in any number of ways the available snippets of quotes. But ultimately what they add up to is what we already knew: He has a decision to make. It’s not an easy decision. He’s got a lot to think about.

And he doesn’t know yet.

3. The only time I’ve ever talked about this with anybody in the basketball office was last summer. The answer I got was essentially: We haven’t even talked about it. Why would we? There’s a season to play. We’ll talk about it when it should be talked about. That means after the season.

Which is now.

Which is another way of saying: He just started really thinking about it.

4. Last June, when I was up in North Carolina doing the work for the book, one evening in Charlotte I visited for a couple hours with Sonya Curry.

Sonya told me the story most everybody’s heard by now about the evening in September of 2005 when Stephen decided on Davidson. This was in the living room of their home. Stephen committed, Sonya told McKillop they’d “fatten him up” for college, and McKillop on his way out the door smiled and told Sonya that he’d take Stephen “just the way he is.”

But Sonya also told me what happened after that door closed and when she went back inside.

“Boy!” she said to Stephen. “What did you do?”

Stephen had surprised everybody but himself by committing where he did and when he did.

Sonya thought Davidson was too close, but also, and more importantly, she thought if Stephen had waited and played his senior season at Charlotte Christian he could have and would have earned offers from bigger schools with more high-profile basketball programs. She was probably right.

“The competitive side of me,” Sonya told me in June, “wanted Stephen to wait.”

That evening in their home, she said, she asked her first-born why. How had he come to this decision?

Stephen told his mother he didn’t want to drag out the process. He saw an opportunity to play right away, and he liked the coaches, and he liked the players, and he liked the school. What was the holdup?

But what convinced Sonya that her son had made the right decision, she said, was what he said next.

He said he had prayed not long before on a school retreat up to Windy Gap. He told his mother that what had popped into his head was Romans 12:2. “Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”