Overlooked kids get their chance
Stephen Curry, the Warriors’ two-time NBA Most Valuable Player, has a wellspring of motivation at his disposal and on demand. It is fed by the dismissive, sometimes harsh critiques of his basketball acumen (including his own selfdoubts) he suffered along the road to super-duper stardom. He’s not shy about sharing.
To wit, from an essay Curry published Wednesday on The Players Tribune: In the summer of 2001, the AAU national championships were in Tennessee. It didn’t go well for a certain 13-year-old.
“I fell short. Way short,” Curry writes. “(T)here was only one possible lesson to take away: that I just wasn’t good enough.”
He recalls his parents giving him “probably the most important talk of my entire life.” He recalls his mom telling him, “NO ONE gets to write your story but you. Not some scouts. Not some tournament.”
There was still a lot to overcome, Curry writes. For starters, he was painfully skinny. He perked up when an assistant coach from Virginia Tech, his father’s school, asked to meet with him. Sensing a scholarship in the offing, Curry arranged a very public lunch in his high school’s cafeteria. “WHOLE SCHOOL seems like it’s buzzing about me and my meeting,” he writes. “Got a room full of people doing the ‘I’m not looking (I’m 100% looking)’ thing.”
At the end of the meeting, the assistant coach said, “Thanks for meeting. Really a pleasure. We’d like to invite you to walk on.” Airrrrr ballllll! Curry writes on. He attended Davidson and enjoyed it, but it was the antithesis of a basketball factory. Before the NBA draft, one analyst judged there were six other point guards “with a higher upside than I had.” Cold.
“It’s hard to even describe how much comments like that bugged me,” he writes.
Curry is not spilling for your sympathy (though he writes, “That chip on my shoulder has never gone anywhere”). He has something important to offer:
“A while back, I had an idea,” he writes. “It’s called ‘The Underrated Tour’ — and it basically goes like this. You’ve got all of these camps out there, right? (A) cross the country, around the world. And it’s great man. Those camps are how a lot of NBA guys originally made names for themselves.
“Taking nothing away from those kids, those bluechip prospects. But what about the other kids … who, for one reason or another, because of one perceived shortcoming or another, are getting labeled as two or three-star recruits.”
Curry wrote his essay to announce a series of camps for the current generation of would-be Stephs. The Underrated Tour is coming to seven hoops hotbeds this winter and spring — beginning Jan. 19-20 in Los Angeles and ending March 2223 in Oakland, with stops in Washington, D.C., Phoenix, Charlotte, Philadelphia and Oklahoma. The camps are open to anyone rated a three-star recruit or less.
“One of the biggest things I’ve really come to understand about myself over the last 17 years,” Curry writes, “the way that (being classified) underrated might start off as just some feeling the world imposes on you. But if you figure out how to harness it?
“It can become a feeling that you impose on the world. That ... is why we’re announcing this today. That’s why I’m launching The Underrated Tour. Because I already have one camp, and it’s awesome. But guess who wouldn’t have been invited to it? “Me.”