Mom was charmed by Curry and Kerr

This Warriors’ championship run will always hold a tender place in my heart.

Because it was when I lost my mother.

Mom died in early May, when the Warriors were in the midst of their series with New Orleans. However, she would have been pleased with how things turned out in June. She thought Stephen Curry and Steve Kerr were “the greatest.” No higher praise than that from Dorothy Killion.

Mom was a stealth sports fan. For most of her life the only sports events she was interested in were the games her grandchildren played in, and the Big Game. An Oakland native, she was a proud Cal alum, but it was the festive atmosphere, not the football, that inspired her.

Her most memorable sports story was of leaving our home in Mill Valley on a 100-degree day with my father, a devoted Giants fan, sometime in the early 1960s. Dad had finally convinced mom to attend a game. You probably can guess the rest: She didn’t even bring a sweater, the temperature

was in the 50s at Candlestick, and they only lasted an inning or two. I don’t think my mom attended another baseball game in person until the team moved to AT&T and her children convinced her it would be different.

But, later in her life, two things happened. First, her daughter became a sportswriter. My mother had been a journalist after World War II, covering the San Francisco waterfront for the Daily Commercial News, the only woman on her beat operating in an all-male world. Hmm. Sounds kind of familiar.

The second thing that happened was my dad lost his eyesight to macular degeneration later in life. Mom read the Sporting Green and my work, while I was working for a different newspaper, aloud to my father and was soon offering up her own opinions on the sports world. My mother was my barometer as to an athlete’s popularity. If my 90-something-yearold mother was interested, that meant the player or coach had transcended the boundaries of the sports world. That was particularly true of Curry. My mother wasn’t particularly interested in basketball, but, like people of all ages, she was captivated by Curry.

My mom also fell victim to macular degeneration, but she wasn’t going to let a little thing like blindness keep her

My mother wasn’t particularly interested in basketball, but, like people of all ages, she was captivated by Stephen Curry.

from reading. She read, by my brothers’ and my count because we ordered books on tape for her, an average of 206 books a year — more than one every two days.

She also asked my brothers to read her my columns aloud to her. And she would still engage in feisty discussions about sports — proclaiming someone terrible, or great.

In her final days, I kept her updated on how the Warriors were doing in the playoffs, funny things that Kerr had said, what we should expect next.

“That’s wonderful,” my mother said over and over. “And how’s Steph Curry doing?”

Mom, you’ll be glad to know — he did fine.