‘My momma won’t let me’

Marcus on Stephen:

But quietly, Curry experiences a tiny bit of reservation. The love he receives, the hype that follows him, comes with a price.

Curry doesn’t want to inconvenience his loved ones. He doesn’t want to upstage his teammates. He doesn’t want to come off as a glutton for glory.

“He doesn’t take anything for granted, and he doesn’t think he’s entitled to anything,” said Steve Rossiter, one of Curry’s closest teammates at Davidson. “That’s not who he is.”

Curry said his parents, his high school coach, his girlfriend -- whom he first met six years ago in their church youth group -- and a couple Davidson teammates serve as his escape. They allow him a welcome relief from life on the pedestal.

Curry said he’s confident he won’t fall off, nor does he want off his high place. In his mind, it’s his calling to be humble while exalted.

“It’s possible to keep that forever,” Curry said of his pristine image. “It can’t be just for show. It’s got to be who you are. I’ve thought about this. I think it’s just who I am, who I was made to be.”

The Currys, the community and TCC

Reed Jackson on Cats.com:

About 20 minutes prior to the start, mama Curry arrived with garbage bags, scanned our section, and despite having only met a couple times, waived both mom and boys up. At which point she delivered a big hug to my surprised wife, and gave the boys two of the 30 Curry TCC towels. It was a moment that I think said a lot about moms and their common journey with their boys. Both what they hope for them, and what they hope they aspire to be as young men.

The TCC towels.

Best advice Stephen’s gotten?

Here: “From my mom -- finish school.”

Stephen’s GQ diary

On opening night:

They introduced every single person on the team, starting with the reserves, and building up to the starters. I was second-to-last to be introduced, and so everybody was on the court. It was pretty much just like when you announce yourself as a kid. I heard my dad in all those starting line-ups, so I mimicked that growing up: “Starting guard, 6-3 from ...” -- back then, I didn’t know what school I was going to yet. It was a pretty intense moment. My mom said she cried.

And the first road trip: The one thing was that it was good to get an up-close-and-personal look at Steve Nash. We have a lot of similarities, but he out-performed me by a lot in that game. I’m glad I got that experience early.

True Hoop noticed. And the Bay Area Sports Blog thinks he’s a blogging superstar.

Sonya

The Sacramento Bee: She’s the debt collector. Blog.

A week from tonight

Green room.

Washington

Michael Lee:

When the Wizards met Curry in Chicago, he wowed them in the interview from what I hear. Curry is probably the most NBA ready of the three point guards at Verizon Center that are expected to go in the lottery. He seems grounded and has a great basketball IQ (At one point, Wizards Coach Flip Saunders shouted up toward Grunfeld and tapped his right temple, which I assumed was a signal that Curry was pretty smart. After all, the guy is still studying for his college degree at Davidson).

Dan Steinberg:

Curry has just one tattoo: the letters TCC and “-30-” on his wrist. TCC is a Davidson motto that stands for “Trust Commitment Care,” while 30 is Curry’s number. Of course, -30- also means the end of a newspaper story, which I guess Curry wasn’t referring to. He also said he would never become a tatted-up NBA star.

“I’d go home, my mom would slap me around,” he said. “Can’t do that.”

June 11, 2008

Sonya Curry in Charlotte: “Starting in March, and that whole experience, for me it was like he passed more into manhood. Watching how he handled that, on the court, off the court, I thought: I can let him go. He’s going to be okay.”

Sonya Curry

Tonight on the phone: “The night before, I said, ‘I think he’s staying,’ and Dell said, ‘I think he’s going.’”

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.”

A Square Game!

On The Big Lead: Perhaps if Dell and his wife had spelled his name properly Davidson wouldn’t have to make ironic t-shirts.

The Curry brothers

Jeff Hartsell on Stephen and Seth: “I could shoot myself.”

That’s what Winthrop coach Randy Peele said last week about his failure to seriously recruit Seth Curry out of high school.

Peele should put away the rhetorical gun. A lot of sheepish college basketball coaches are feeling the same way about the Curry brothers, Davidson superstar Stephen and Liberty freshman Seth.

Brothers

Scott Fowler in this morning’s Observer: It’s funny to listen to Stephen, who has had so much national acclaim, talk about his little brother. Since Stephen played first Saturday, he came to Seth’s game -- something he’s rarely been able to do the past couple of years. Although the two once had a vicious driveway rivalry, Stephen can also sound like a star-struck fan when he talks about Seth.

“I’m going to ride down to Rock Hill and see Seth play,” Stephen said after scoring 21 points in Davidson’s 76-55 win against Samford. “I’m excited to see him up close. I’ve seen him on TV a lot and heard great things, but now I get to see him play in person.”

The Brothers Curry

“Stephen has the ability to be one of the best basketball players ever to put on a Davidson jersey.” -- Davidson coach Bob McKillop on Stephen Curry in September 2006

“I think he has a chance to be one of the best players ever to put on a Flames jersey.” -- Liberty coach Ritchie McKay on Seth Curry in November 2008

Stephen Curry.

Seth Curry.

Dell’s boys.

Everyone knows the story of Stephen by now. Skinny kid in ACC country. No big-time offers. Now look: from a good mid-major get to Southern Conference star to first-team All-American. One of THE faces of all of college hoops. The questions, of course, all along the way: What didn’t the big coaches see? What did they MISS?

Well, it’s still early, but Seth had 23 points in the first college game he played, he had 26 in Liberty’s upset over VIRGINIA, he had 21 in a double-overtime win over William & Mary …

Is it happening AGAIN?

This is the new wrinkle in the Stephen Curry story: It’s not just Stephen anymore. Seth, too, now. I don’t want to get all crazy here, and oversell, and overshoot, but I can’t help but think that within the story of these two brothers -- the story of this FAMILY -- are some of the most compelling reasons we watch sports.

We want to know what makes some people succeed and others fail. We want to know what makes some of us overachieve when most of us don’t. And we want in the worst way to believe in the things we can’t scout, or measure, or even explain.

Curry genes

People are starting to notice.