Internet Rabbit Holes: More Steph Curry and Other Gym Rats

I was just listening to the sports podcast The Distraction, which mentioned Tommy Craggs, a writer I like and haven’t bumped into in a long while. Which led me to Craggs’s personal website, which led me to a piece he wrote in 2009 about my hero Steph Curry – a lovely little piece that nicely captures what Steph was at that moment. I don’t remember seeing this at the time it was written.

I wrote recently how remarkable and unlikely it was that Steph Curry fell through the cracks of the recruiting system to wind up at Davidson College in the first place. In 2009, the rules and norms of getting into the NCAA Tournament allowed Steph, a celebrated and charismatic player on a 26-win team, to fall through the cracks and not make it to March Madness. This was bad business all around, and proved to be an intolerable situation. It led Davidson to change its athletic conference. It led the NCAA to adopt its current jerry-rigged 68-team format. 

"Basketball hoop" by Steve A Johnson is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Tommy Craggs aptly describes Steph Curry's special sauce on the cusp of his 21st birthday, blending the humility of an underdog with the knowing swagger of an NBA's player's son. I remembered that Lebron James made a pilgrimage to see Steph in person and size him up. I forgot about the Loyola game, when Loyola double-teamed Steph for 94 feet and he responded by standing in the corner and letting his teammates play 4 on 3. 

What Craggs doesn’t say is that we’ll be seeing Steph Curry in the NBA next year, because at that moment, nobody was sure that we would. (A Deadspin headline at the time: "Is This The End of Stephen Curry?") I for one was relieved when Steph got drafted in the first round in '09 – I was paying close attention, and I wasn’t sure that was going to happen until close to draft day.

Steph is a magician with the ball – a great pure shooter with a great handle. This is a type of player that often doesn’t achieve superstar stature in the NBA. Craggs names several Steph Curry comps. Pete Maravich was the best of the type, and Pete was an All-Star and a scoring champion, but played mostly on losing teams and never sniffed an NBA Finals.

The story of Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, born Chris Jackson, saddens me. His peers speak of Abdul-Rauf with awe, but like Maravich, his teams made only a small dent in the playoffs. His impact was marginal enough that he was vulnerable to getting blackballed for his religion and his politics. Colin Kaepernick could be described in similar terms.

Craggs’s anecdote about Rick Mount at the basketball camp reminded me: At my one basketball camp experience we attended a talk and ball-handling exhibition by Austin Lehmann. He was a former college player, too small for the pros, but for years he scratched out a living putting on clinics like this for kids, often accompanied by his older brother George. Austin Lehmann became an elementary school gym teacher who made the news for sinking (and documenting) 1 million free throws.  

There is a place in basketball for the gym rat, the solitary crank - for kids, be they stubborn or lonely or obsessive, who just like to practice their shooting. 

Steph As Comedian

 

With Steph Curry sidelined due to a hamstring injury, the Golden State Warriors bombed out of the NBA playoffs the other day. Curry being 37 years old, his chances to grab another brass ring may have run out. Patrick Redford took this occasion to publish a lovely piece at Defector about Steph.

Redford points us to a highlight video of Steph dissecting the Houston Rockets in the Warriors’ first-round series. In his signature fashion, Curry mixes impossibly long 3-point jumpers with tantalizing floaters that are enabled by the threat of the long 3’s.

That is rude, ingenious, and above all funny. An important thing about Steph Curry: He is foremost a comedian. His possessions have the structure of a joke, with setups, misdirections, and punchlines. 

This is the beautiful observation I want to bookmark: Steph-as-comedian.

I can add, for anyone who needs reminding, that Steph entered the NBA from Davidson College. Come to think of it, Steph playing his college ball at Davidson is a comical twist in his story. Davidson was not his Plan A, to say the least. It was an absurd collective blunder by all the major college hoops powers to allow Steph to wind up in the Southern Conference hinterlands. Somehow Plan B worked.

It is difficult to describe how Davidson people feel at having Steph Curry come into our lives and being entitled to root for him. We never dreamed our school would produce a world-famous sports star. And then to have him be such a fine person and loyal advocate for the school—it’s too much. We love Steph, and, amazingly, he loves us back, for giving him a longshot chance. Davidson’s love for Steph has the quality of unbidden laughter, of being surprised by joy.

Redford goes on:

As he explained in Court of Gold, Netflix's Olympic basketball documentary, the sense of freedom [Curry] plays with is only possible because he's made his peace with losing. He seems like someone who loves winning more than he hates losing, the opposite of how Michael Jordan and his sour peers ordered things and probably different from how his eternal foil, LeBron James, relates to losing.

Last year I wrote about Jerry West that he was more characterized by the hatred of losing than the love of winning. His playing career resembled a grim crusade, piling wounds upon indignities in pursuit of validation. West finally earned that moment of glory and seeming redemption, but did it truly redeem all the sour years?

Steph is different. He’s been doubted so many times during his career as being too small, too injury-prone, not a true point guard, and more. People seem to have forgotten that he was The Underdog for so long, and the essence of being The Underdog is that the possibility if not likelihood of losing is ever-present. Steph Curry is sublimely conscious of the unlikeliness of his own story--even now, when so many others have forgotten it and treat the Warriors like a presumptive Finals contender. Unburdened by outside expectations (although they are there), Steph is free to accept joy when and where he finds it. It’s all gravy.

 Photo by Keith Allison via Flicker and Wikimedia Commons. CC-BY-SA 4.0

Internet Rabbit Holes: Grudging Respect Edition

Chet Lemon died the other day; he was a very good major league outfielder during my youth and young adulthood, and was the center fielder on the 1984 world champion Detroit Tigers team. I re-read what Bill James said about Lemon in his New Historical Baseball Abstract: a player with some valuable qualities, notably defense and the ability to get on base, along with some flaws. Chet was good enough to hold down a starting job in the American League for 14+ years. This makes him the 48th best center fielder of all time in Bill James's book. 

An aside: A lot gets said and written about multi-championship sports dynasties, the Jordan-era Bulls or the Brady-era Patriots. Some of my favorite sports stories are of teams that hang around on the fringes of greatness for a number of years, and are only able to get it together for one season, break through and win a title. The '84 Tigers are a great example. They were a juggernaut for that one year; I think they started the season 35-5, and their winning the World Series became a default assumption which they made good on. That team had two (borderline) Hall of Fame players, Alan Trammell and Jack Morris. Around these two perennial stars were several other tenured members who were good but flawed: Lance Parrish, Willie Hernandez, Chet Lemon, Kirk Gibson. In 1984, everything went right; the strengths were accented, the flaws were obscured. The team cohered, everyone stayed healthy and sharp, and they steamrolled all comers. That is a more inspiring and relatable story than anything involving the Yankees. Here, incidentally, is a 1985 LA Times column about all the things that went wrong on the field for the Tigers that after-year. We learn that Chet Lemon inspired Lou Whitaker to join the Jehovah's Witnesses.

Anyway, the rabbit hole I followed started with the news about Chet Lemon, then my turning to Bill James to read about him. I then Googled "bill james new historical baseball abstract," I guess in hopes that the full text of it is available online. Answer: no, not for free. The links that popped up included some reviews of the Abstract, including one by Dan McLaughlin, aka The Baseball Crank, with whom I was vaguely familiar: he is a conservative pundit of the type I normally avoid. 

So I investigated Mr. Crank a bit. I was reminded that nerds-writing-about-baseball is a niche populated by quite a few conservative pundits: some decent writers like George Will, some hacks like Rich Lowry and Michael Brendan Dougherty. A vaguely disturbing realization for this nerd-writing-about-baseball. Yet Dan McLaughlin writes clearly and sensibly on aspects of baseball that are right up my alley. I feel I need to bookmark this piece about baseball's winningest pitchers, counting games won in the minor leagues and Negro leagues as well as the AL and NL. I also ran across McLaughlin's recent comment on the newly-elected Pope, an even-handed plea to conservatives, Catholic and otherwise, to give Leo XIV a chance.

Why the conservative-baseball axis? Off the top: Baseball history is steeped in traditionalism and nostalgia and American exceptionalism. It is also a protected space for talking about race. In my brief survey of his work I find McLaughlin making admiring references to Jackie Robinson and Moses Fleetwood Walker, Satchel Paige and Don Newcombe. To say these men were worthy players who faced injustice are broadly uncontroversial positions, yet they are an implied rebuke to the anti-woke philistinism of the Trumpers. Moreover, baseball seems to be an approved lighter-side to break up the relentless culture war fighting and ideological boundary-policing that right-wing punditry requires. If anyone ever needed an afternoon off in the bleachers, it's guys like NRO writers.

Superb Owl

 

It’s been 16 years – time for a Super Bowl post. I don’t watch much football in recent years, but I generally succumb to the NFL conference championships and the Super Bowl.

I also make exceptions for getting together with my father to watch the West Virginia Mountaineers, despite the travesty of WVU joining the Big 12 Conference, which turned out to be one of the early signposts along college sports’ highway to hell.

In 2019 I watched Jalen Hurts, as quarterback at Oklahoma, comprehensively take apart the West Virginia defense. He did it with his legs and he did it with his arm. I gather a big goal of Hurts’s 5^th year season at Oklahoma was to demonstrate that he had the arm to be an NFL quarterback. Goal accomplished. The memory of Hurts’s dominance in that game stayed with me, and I’ve halfway kept an eye on him since. 

Pro football is different than college football, and it doesn’t shock me when a great college football player turns out not to be the right fit for the NFL. But I really enjoy watching a quarterback use his legs. I hate the notion that every team needs a big strong pocket passer – a view that is less universal, but far from dead; a Carson Wentz still gets more love from Mel Kiper and more chances to win a starting job than a Jalen Hurts. Also, it raises my hackles every time a young black QB comes along and has a ton of nay-sayers, including ones who urge a position change, usually to receiver or safety. Hey, the 1960s called and wants its take back.

These things bias me in favor of Lamar Jackson and Jalen Hurts (and now “too skinny” Jayden Daniels. The pundits seemed to be trying to exile him to Canada). I hope each of them gets to lift the Lombardi Trophy before they are done. People sneer a bit at Hurts because he doesn’t throw the artistic deep ball that some other QBs throw. He’s a football player, he wins with his legs and his toughness and his improvisational gifts. He may have trouble making All-Pro rosters or winning MVPs because his individual stats may not dazzle. A QB like that can steal a Super Bowl now and then.

The better NFL teams and, more definitely, the great QBs of my childhood, Stabler and Staubach and Griese and Bradshaw, had distinguishable personalities. The younger crop coming along now have a more pleasing variety than the Tom Brady generation. I am ready to move on from the Mannings, from Roethlisberger, from Brady, from Aaron Rodgers.

So I can’t lose in tonight’s matchup, because Patrick Mahomes is unique and wonderful in his own right. I’ve admired Mahomes, still just age 29, for many of the same reasons I admire Hurts. He was somewhat unsung coming out of college, and he was never a mechanically perfect automaton in the pocket. I love his improvisations, with his legs and with unorthodox throws, backhanded and left-handed and falling down and what have you. I also admire Andy Reid, who’s claimed his due respect later in his career. For the longest time he was viewed as a second-tier head coach, fatally flawed in his game management skills – good enough to get you to the playoffs, maybe even to the Super Bowl, but never good enough to win it.

But I think I’d like to see Hurts take the trophy from Mahomes, and for Nick Sirianni to answer his detractors the way Andy Reid has.