The College Court | March Madness highlights a new supestar

Emma Carmichael Columnist

I’m trying to imagine being Stephen Curry. The 20-year-old is Davidson College’s starting shooting guard and the baby-faced front man of this year’s National Collegiate Athletic Association’s (NCAA) basketball tournament. He single-handedly led his 10th-ranked team into the Elite Eight and almost the Final Four. As he wiggles his scrawny six-foot-three frame through a maze of perfectly set screens and floats three-pointers in the air with a release so delicately quick, you’re not sure if he’s actually seen the basket before he lets the shot fly.

When Curry shoots from behind the arc, a fan said while watching Davidson’s game against the Kansas Jayhawks in the Josselyn House Multi-Purpose Room on Sunday afternoon, the refs have their hands up before the ball has even rolled off of his fingertips. And when Curry drives to the hoop, as he did in Davidson’s win over Wisconsin last Friday in the Sweet Sixteen, his leaning body and angling limbs somehow cutting through the country’s top defensive team, even Lebron James has to show his respect. After getting an and-one call on one of those acrobatic reverse lay-ups against Wisconsin, Curry looked up at the Jumbo-tron and saw James standing and cheering for his play.

Try to imagine being Curry: 20 years old, arms about the same width as his nearly hairless ankles, playing for a school of only 1,700 students, and scoring 128 points over the course of four games to suddenly find himself the topic of on-air conversation between Bob Knight and Dick Vitale.

Yes, in the last few weeks, the barely-looks-like-a-baller Curry has been the most dominant force behind the Madness of March, steering his where-the-hell-is-Davidson-anyway team into the core of the NCAA’s best. He scored 40 points in the Wildcats’ first-round win over Gonzaga University and shot 8-for-10 from three-point range in that game, then hit for 30 points to lead his team past second-seeded Georgetown University, and with King James in attendance against Wisconsin he finished with 33—even with Michael Flowers, widely considered the best defender in college basketball, throwing a hand in his face on every shot attempt.

Curry was so dominant in the month of March that, as the star on a team of unknowns reveling in their underdog glory, you almost expected him to be wearing Cinderella’s silver slippers under his red and white Nikes. I mean, the guy comes down from his perfectly launched jump shots so gently and softly that he’s in no danger of breaking them if he is.

This is the beauty of March Madness. In two short weeks, Curry became the guy that every casual basketball fan was suddenly declaring was “seriously, dude, the most lights-out player, like, ever,” even though before the Gonzaga upset they had never previously heard of him or his father, former National Basketball Association (NBA) player Dell Curry.

Davidson’s Web site reported last Friday that after the Georgetown win, the younger Curry received over 1,800 friend requests on Facebook, and his name became the 11th most popular search on Google. In one of the Facebook groups created to honor him, a fan doctored the Barack Obama campaign poster (“Change we can believe in”) to read “Thirty Points we can believe in.” Indeed, Curry, only heavily recruited by Davidson, Winthrop and Virginia Commonwealth Universities out of high school, averaged 32 points per game in the tournament and broke the NCAA record for three-point field goals made in a season (162).

Curry and his fellow Wildcats were the self-made darlings of this year’s tournament, the sleeper team that woke with a start, rolled over a few teams and found itself in the Midwest Regional final against the number one seed. But it was Kansas that cut down the nets on Sunday after a last-second three-pointer attempt by Davidson’s Jason Richards missed left and ended the Cinderella run with the Jayhawks on top, 59-57. Kansas will join the three other number one seeds—University of North Carolina, University of Memphis, and University of California, Los Angeles—in this year’s Final Four.

And so David did not slay Goliath, Cinderella’s glass slipper shattered at the buzzer, and Curry went home empty-handed. Sports clichés abound. Simply put, Davidson lost. Curry went on an uncharacteristic shooting drought in the second half, managing just 10 points on four-for-13 shooting. He appeared frustrated with the constant perimeter pressure supplied by Kansas’s guards and couldn’t create an open shot for himself as time ran out, resulting in his teammate Richards’ miss at the buzzer. The Jayhawks stormed the court in celebration as the Davidson bench hung their heads in disbelief. No Final Four for Curry and the Wildcats.

It is the loss, though, that makes the now legendary Curry all the more human. He is no Michael Beasley, O.J. Mayo or Kevin Love (all college freshmen expected to be lottery picks in next year’s NBA draft), and although he stands an almost certain chance of being drafted himself one day, he’ll do it in the obscure Southern Conference, which had no nationally televised games in the regular season. March Madness is magical because each year, players like Curry and teams like Davidson confound all statistical logic and arise from their double-digit rankings to take on the best.

It’s when they lose—in spite of the beautiful feat of absolute effort and heart—and fall to the court in desperate anguish, that we fans can imagine, for a second, what it’s like to be Curry.

—Emma Carmichael ’10 is an urban studies major and a member of the Vassar women’s basketball team. This semester she is editorializing on issues in all divisions of college-level athletics.