‘This hook that he’s become’

Claire on why we watch:

This room -- okay, this cavern -- is brimming with people that I love. They gave my Davidson meaning, they’ve shared good days and bad days, unbelievable games and shitty games. So many together, uncommonly wonderfully so. The ’08 boys, Joe Pierce Nathan JB Chris, haven’t seen them all at once since their graduation, haven’t watched a game with them since 3/30/08, and tons before that. Pete, who, when I saw him, all I could think of was sitting in the Dearborn Doubletree cackling gleefully over countless newspaper articles. Morgan, Logan, Calucchia, dear faces a couple rows up, waving towels that the Currys gave out: TCC #30. Rachel, Grace, Laura, Sue. The Dails, connecting me to Davidson and Richmond, two families of mine. My professors. The Davidson athletics department. Wildcats. Michael and I had lunch when I got back this afternoon, and now I spot him right behind my section (and introduce him to Morgan -- WL -- at halftime, which is fun), I wave to David, Kate, and the Bakers in the upper bowl, I text Rob and Jessie over and over, I find Grace at the half. Michael Jordan has nothing on this family of mine, and our scattered cheers spill over into shared -- remembrance? sacredness? support? thanksgiving?

"Daaaaaav-iddddd-son!"

It drifts down from the nosebleeds, makes me laugh, another moment in another chapter in a good long story. Part of me wants to start it louder, hit the rafters, wants it to echo all through and knock the big million dollar franchises off their feet. But another part of me is content with keeping it soft, one voice speaking volumes. We know it. This is where we come from.

Read the whole thing. Claire references my question, that night at the Brickhouse, and of course kind of always: Why do we watch? And more than that: Why do we watch him, especially now, when he’s not wearing the name of our school on his chest anymore. He was a face of us. For many outsiders -- which is to say most people -- he was the face of us. For them, those outsiders, those most people, that hasn’t changed, and maybe it never will. Stephen Curry. Davidson. And I guess that’s fine. I mean I went to the game in Orlando earlier in the week before the game in Charlotte. Why did I go? Well I went to see him and talk to him because I figured I might have something to say to the people who might be interested in that. But also I was curious. I hadn’t seen him, or seen him play, live, with my own eyes, without a screen in between, for months and months. Why did I go that Saturday in Charlotte? Well I was in town and a lot of people were going. But I had the thought in my head in Orlando: What am I doing here? That thought was much, much louder in Charlotte: What am I doing here? Same thing when I heard that hundreds of alums in Atlanta came out the night before when he was down there: What had they gone to see, and why, and did they get it? Saturday, to me, for whatever it’s worth, probably nothing -- it felt a little uncomfortable. It felt a little ... disconnected. The space between us and him due to no fault of his own but the machinery that moves around the people who do what he now does where he now does it. It felt a little ... hero-worshippery. Clearly I overthink things, sometimes, this being a great case in point. I grant that. Claire’s answer, that night in Davidson, and in what she’s written about it here, is helpful and I think accurate: We’re there to see him, fine, I suppose, but more than that we’re there to see all the other people who are there to do the same.