Book excerpt

An excerpt of Taking the Shot, John Akers said last night at the game, is in the current issue of Basketball Times.

Stephen and the Pistol

David Sink brought it up on DavidsonCats.com.

Bob Huggins brought it up on The Dan Patrick Show.

John Akers brought it up in his cover story in this month’s Basketball Times.

I brought it up, briefly, last month in Staying Stephen in Charlotte mag.

It’s hard not to start doing the math in your head. All of this is totally cart-before-the-horse, but let’s say Stephen stays four years, and let’s say he keeps scoring the way he’s scoring, and let’s say he plays in all of Davidson’s games. Let’s say that’s 60 more games. Let’s say he scores 30 points per. That’s 1,800 points. Add that to the number of points he has now, which is 1,948 going into Purdue.

That’s more than Maravich.

“Pistol” Pete Maravich was not big, 6-foot-3 and 150 pounds in his senior year of high school at Raleigh Broughton, and he was skinny and even gaunt during his years at LSU. But he scored like no one had ever scored before and like no one has ever scored since. He scored from all over the court. The points just piled up. He drew crowds everywhere LSU went. People just had to see him play.

He scored 40 or more 56 times.

He scored 50 or more 28 times.

He scored 3,667 points in his college career, the all-time college record, thought to be all but unbreakable, and he did it in three years because freshmen were ineligible to play varsity back then, and he did it, too, with no three-point line. He averaged more than 44 points a game. What made Maravich all the more compelling was that he didn’t look like he should have been able to do what he did.

Which gets to Stephen.

If he comes back for his senior season the Pistol talk is going to get loud.

But they’re more different than they are alike.

Read Mark Kriegel’s Pistol. Read Phil Berger’s Forever Showtime. Read the stories from Sports Illustrated in the archives on SI.com.

Maravich played, consciously and purposefully, to put on a show.

“If I have a choice whether to do the show or throw the straight pass, and we’re going to get the basket either way,” he told SI in 1969, “I’m going to do the show.

“Sometimes,” he said, “when we start out and I see the play developing, I just want to shout out, ‘Hey, here we go. Hey, everybody watch this.’”

He never won a game in the NCAA tournament.

He never played a game in the NCAA tournament.

In the NBA, he led the league in scoring, and he was an All-Star, but he seldom played on a team that won more than it lost.

The most points he ever scored in a game, college or pro, came against Alabama. He had 69. LSU lost.

He hurt his knee -- the injury that hastened the end of his career -- while throwing a between-the-legs pass on a three-on-oh break.

And then there’s this: He scored a ton of points, and he made a ton of money, but for most of his life he was very, very unhappy. His father was obsessive and pushed him mercilessly. His mother was mentally ill and committed suicide. He drank too much. He drove too fast. He felt old when he wasn’t. In the last few years of his life, before he died of a heart attack, at 40, he found some personal peace, finally. But during his career in the NBA, he often seemed moody or joyless, and he talked at times about aliens and UFOs and at one point painted a message to them on the roof of his condo in Atlanta.

“Take me.”

Pete Maravich played basketball as an escape from who he was.

Stephen Curry plays basketball as an extension of who he is.

Cover boy

Stephen is on the front of this month’s Basketball Times. The long story inside, the latest addition to StephLit, is by John Akers, the editor of the venerable monthly magazine for hoop heads.

From the text:

On his own team, Curry’s new fame is a source of amusement. Teammate Steve Rossiter recently noticed a crowd at a spot on campus where it wouldn’t normally congregate and found Curry there, signing napkins for a group of prospective students. Rossiter alerted security to the potential fire hazard.

And Curry remains the Wildcat who can barely dunk or beat his old man in H-O-R-S-E.

The son has never beaten the father on their driveway. There, Steph said, Dell Curry can step out of his car after a long drive, after months without playing, and still shoot as if he was participating in the NBA’s 3-point contest. But on the Davidson court last spring, in front of coaches and teammates, Steph Curry finally got the better of Dell Curry.

About last night

1. So much talk obviously about Stephen at the point and not the two, going into the season, still now. I don’t know. 30 points, 13 assists, three turnovers: That pretty much works for me. It’s Steve Nash-y. Steve Nash in his prime-y. I’ve thought for months and months, spring, summer, fall, now with a handful of games so far in this new season, that one of the very few not good things about Stephen at the point is that Stephen is not also at the two. That’s not a knock on Bryant or Will -- more just an acknowledgment that Stephen at the two was an extraordinary thing. But Stephen at the point? Other than the fact that he can’t play two positions at once ... what’s not to love? Another thing to consider: John Akers of Basketball Times leaned over on press row last night and made the point that Stephen is shooting a lot of free throws, more than last year, maybe a lot more -- although I’d rather not go look up the numbers right now -- and that’s because (duh) the ball’s in his hands more and he’s exceptionally difficult to guard. That’s going to be especially true in games against Southern Conference teams. Or teams like Winthrop. How do you score 30 points on 16 shots? One way: You take 10 free throws and make nine of them.

2. Good line from Gary McCann of the Rock Hill paper: Curry, he wrote, “has made the transition from shooting guard to point guard seamless. He plays like he was born there and shoots like he believes everything is going in.”

One thing I think people sometimes forget, though, is that Stephen kind of WAS born there. That’s the position he played at Charlotte Christian, every year, before he came to Davidson and played the two because Jason played the one. Just worth remembering as we continue to watch Stephen keep improving at the point. And that IS what he will do. Because that's what he does.

3. Andrew. Taking all sorts of grief from (some) posters at DavidsonCats.com after the Oklahoma game. In the Oklahoma game, of course, he was going up against not only Big XII competition but first-team All-American competition. Against Winthrop, though -- and this will be the case, I’m thinking, in most Southern Conference games, too -- he was the mannest man out there. Rebounds? If they were anywhere NEAR him? They were his. It was one of those efforts where you looked at his final line of 20 points and 15 rebounds and you sort of said to yourself: “Hmm. Seemed like even more.”

4. Will. Forget the numbers, and forget the shooting, even though they were plenty promising. The most important thing was that there was absolute energy in him and the way he played last night.

Here he comes.

Watch.

5. First time for me last night in the new and improved Belk Arena with the Seats That Stephen Built. Strange, but strange in a great way, for those of us who were there for Monday night SoCon games against, say, East Tennessee State, with attendance checking in at an (exaggerated) 1,128 or something like that. Stating the obvious but it really is an amazing thing going on right now on our campus and in our village.

Two numbers:

30.

5,223.