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afraidofdifference · 4 years

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steph curry is the antidote to toxic conceptions of competitiveness

In a radio appearance earlier this month, Steve Kerr compared Draymond Green’s competitiveness to Michael Jordan’s. In the same interview, Kerr also noted:

I've played with a ton of guys who are really competitive. Tim Duncan for example -- his competitiveness is more like Steph Curry's. You may not see it if you're just watching the game on TV. You may not see the eruptions, the anger.

Here’s Kerr elsewhere:

If you think about Steph, you think of this mild-mannered [guy]...but he's f---ing competitive. He wants to rip your throat out.

That word - competitive - is not one often brought up with regard to Curry. To be sure, worthy proxies are used; Steph “has an edge that’s second-to-none” and of course, he “likes to win too.” But competitive?

We have been conditioned to accept a single understanding of what it means to be competitive. You know the one. It is the competitiveness of Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant. Enough and more has been written about the legendary competitive drive of those two, their need to win above all else. Michael punching teammates in practice, riding Scott Burrell all season long, and so much more. Kobe’s embrace of “competitive rage as an elixir” is equally well chronicled. Both athletes have been valorized for these attributes; even Scott Burrell takes a ‘that’s just what it means to be competitive’ approach, one that could be chalked up to Stockholm Syndrome if it weren’t so prevalent everywhere in our discourse. Or perhaps we all suffer from a case of collective self-delusion, needing to build up the myth of manic competitiveness as a necessary precondition for basketball greatness. At best, a token head nod towards the more complicated aspects of such behavior is all that can be hoped for, “a way to skip past the discomfort and ambiguity of actually grappling with the acclaimed celebrity's monstrousness straight to the part where you congratulate yourself for having done so.” Turns out Kobe was wrong when, in reference to the Colorado sexual assault case, he said that people “didn’t want the gritty shit...and most people still don’t (side bar: That was language Kobe used in 2018 when talking about the sexual assault case, fifteen years after the incident took place. Let that occupy a pew in the back any time homilies about Kobe’s repentance are issued.) People are more than comfortable with the gritty shit. They have to be, lest the hollow cynicism of their fandom be laid bare.

This is not to deny the very real impact of that competitive drive - it is hard to argue against the weight of statistical achievements that people like Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant bring to bear. Moreover, denial is not even the point here; as a wise man once said, “you’re not wrong Walter, you’re just an asshole.” A more substantive reckoning with the competitiveness of Jordan and Bryant would involve acknowledging how their toxic competitiveness is inextricably bound with “the gritty shit”. Jordan’s execrable hall of fame speech was perhaps inevitable, “what fueled his fury as a thirtysomething now fuels his bitterness.” As one team executive in attendance that night in Springfield summed it up, “that’s who Michael is.” Far more serious is the case of Bryant. The sexual assault case has been treated as an unfortunate also-ran in the saga of Bryant, something either incidental or entirely orthogonal to everything else Bryant accomplished. Yet, as Bryant himself acknowledged, the Black Mamba persona was a product of Colorado. Depending on how charitable one wants to be, it was either a coping mechanism, or a deeply cynical ploy to turn scandal into gold. All manners of sin can be hidden in the euphemism “gritty shit”.

“During the Colorado situation, I said: ‘You know what? I’m just going to be me. I’m just going to be me.’ F--- it. If I don’t like a question from a reporter, I’m going to say it,” he says. “If they ask me a question about this thing, I’m just going to tell them the truth.”

His fist strikes the desk.

“Like me or don’t like me for me.”

This isn’t just competitiveness with a side of toxicity - this is competitiveness as toxicity. And it doesn’t have to be that way. Which brings me back to Steph. You know about the joy of Steph, even the secret rage of Steph, and the selflessness of Steph; “in accepting Durant, Curry may have sacrificed sports immortality for life.”

A quick tangent here, crossing eras, sports, and continents: Keith Miller is an all-time cricket great, a regular Australian hero. In addition to being one of the finest all-rounders of any era, Miller flew night missions over Nazi Germany during World War II. Following the war, Miller was once asked about pressure on the cricket field, prompting his now famous retort that “there's no pressure in Test cricket. Real pressure is when you are flying a Mosquito with a Messerschmitt up your arse!”

Cutting back to Curry, here’s his friend Chris Strachan: “[Curry] feels God put him on this earth to play, and he never wants to forget that that's what it's all about—play.”

At the risk of whiplash, let’s cut over to a recent profile of Sabrina Ionescu, the toast of New York basketball right now and torch-bearer for Kobe’s basketball legacy:

Like Bryant, Ionescu had struggled to relate to teammates. Nobody worked as hard. Nobody seemed to take losses in the same soul-crushing way. Oregon Coach Kelly Graves said that during Ionescu’s freshman and sophomore seasons, there were times when she would be sharp with teammates and they would shut down.

“It was brutal,” Ionescu said...“How competitive I am, there was nobody that compared to that,” she said. “There was just kind of this separation between me and the team.”

The story goes on to note that Ionescu, with counsel from Kobe Bryant, made amends with her teammates in order to be the leader they needed. So far so good. Except that I come back to that word “competitive”. I admire Ionescu’s game (and her speech at Kobe Bryant’s memorial moved me to my core); if conciliatory leadership was something that required overcoming a competitive drive viewed as burning hotter, there is something admirable in that. However, it need not be that way. There is another world. I will turn it over to Ayesha Curry in 2016, coming off the Warriors’ Game 7 finals loss to the Cleveland Cavaliers:

“As great an athlete as my husband is, one of his greatest gifts is his ability to keep losses in perspective...Last season could have devastated some people, changed their being, their whole personality. Steph was down for a little bit, and he wanted to reflect on how things could have been different. But by ‘a little bit,’ I mean two days—three at most. Steph wants that championship as much as anybody ever could. But he doesn't need that ring to complete his own sense of who he is and what he's worth. Win or lose, he's the same happy guy.”

Pressure is pressure and all the great ones want to overcome. Let’s cherish the ones who do so while acknowledging that pressure is having a Messerschmitt up your arse.

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