Culture
Thompson: In Paris, the world beheld the joy of Steph Curry
PARIS — The atmosphere of the mixed zone for track and field, on the bottom floor of Stade de France, felt like a locker room and a pizza kitchen sharing a space. Hot and stanky enough to sweat while merely standing. Waiting became like a cruel prank. And Rai Benjamin, the clutch anchor leg who secured gold for the U.S. men’s 4×400 relay team, was taking forever.
Suddenly, my phone was vibrating like a massage gun. This has happened many times before. I knew exactly what it was without looking. So I didn’t look.
On this assignment, I was a track and field reporter, which is the definition of hectic at the Olympics. Benjamin was my focus. Not whatever had this stream of notifications coming my way. But the longer the relay team took to come out, the harder to avoid taking the bait. Eventually, I caved and stole a glance. The most recent notification was a text.
“GET THIS MAN SOME HELP”
Still no relay team. Still getting messages. Still sweating like an extra in an antebellum film.
All right, Steph Curry. You win.
I turned the game on just in time to see the shot heard ’round the world. I knew it was going in as soon as he launched. Being in the building wasn’t necessary to witness what was happening. It was an all-too-familiar vibe coming through the screen.
The actual shot — the punctuating 3-pointer in Saturday’s gold-medal victory over France, his 17th three in two games on a mere 26 attempts — was absent novelty. The best shooter in the world getting hot is about as normal as “Freed From Desire” being played at a sporting event in Paris. (Warning: Clicking that link will expose you to a song with the addictive properties of a kid’s commercial.) And Team USA winning a gold medal isn’t exactly breaking news.
Yet, this moment was whisking across the globe like a fabled spirit. The global superstar rendered a global performance. The world, through the lens of Paris — fittingly known as the City of Art, the City of Light, and the City of Love — beheld the Joy of Curry.
GO DEEPER
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All I could do was smile at the fortune of the Paris crowd two trains and 11 metro stops away from me at Bercy Arena, and the unaffiliated around the world drawn to basketball by the prestige of the Olympics. They can now claim the privilege of a uniquely American adventure.
Because Curry — when he finally arrived in Paris three days earlier, per Anthony Edwards — provided the latest presentation of Curry’s lasting legacy. It’s larger than him being the game’s greatest shooter. It’s even bigger than four world championships and two NBA MVPs.
His greatest legacy, a long-known principle to Warriors and Davidson fans and devoted Curry followers, is the experience of him itself. Curry’s greatness isn’t truly understood until it’s felt. It can’t be fully grasped until it’s beheld.
SPLASH AFTER SPLASH AFTER SPLASH AFTER SPLASH! 💦
Steph Curry couldn’t miss in the final minutes! #ParisOlympics pic.twitter.com/jM8xnR80Tx
— NBC Sports (@NBCSports) August 11, 2024
In this virality era where everything is recorded and aggregated, nothing gets missed, and impressive things are consumed to the point of mundane, Curry manages to be a had-to-be-there thing. The confluence of his talent and skills, his dichotomic personality of arrogance and humility, his work ethic, his limitations and his story produce its own kind of magic. It’s unique enough to maintain its entertainment value despite the frequency.
Now put that on the Olympic stage, against the French national team, featuring the future of basketball in Victor Wembanyama, in a close game, in Paris, with the gold medal on the line.
The magnitude of this one was different.
Seismic enough to wow LeBron and KD. Watching those three hug in the same uniform, scream at each other with unbridled unity, had all the warmth and feels at the end of a Tom Hanks film.
Makes you realize the waste in all those years of pitting them against each other, in which the athletes themselves participated. Makes you shake your head at the people who then and still looked for ways to diminish Curry in the name of another star. (And vice versa).
No. 1: Comparison is the thief of joy, so the tribalistic obsession with rankings only robbed them of one of basketball’s purest pleasures. It’s borderline ungrateful to watch Curry and LeBron James and Kevin Durant play and not be impacted by the privilege of the opportunity. No. 2: They were ALWAYS going to end up here, rivals turned to homies, competitors who become brothers. They’re all in such an exclusive group, they’d be lonely if they didn’t eventually come to embrace the few who can relate to their level. The way these guys are built, the way they think about the game, the love fest we witnessed during these Olympics was inevitable. And the dividing lines between their kingdoms were destined to look silly once the kings embraced.
Stephen Curry, LeBron James, Anthony Edwards and Kevin Durant of Team USA celebrate on the podium during the Men’s basketball medal ceremony at Bercy Arena on August 10, 2024 in Paris, France. (Jean Catuffe/Getty Images)
That’s another layer to this ultimate moment — just how much this means to Curry. Everything about him is Team USA. All of the feels and intangibles of the honor coupled with how his game translates. Dell Curry, and then Davidson coach Bob McKillop, groomed him with so many of the aspects that maximize the experience of USA Basketball. The selflessness. The camaraderie. The brotherhood of hoopers. The sportsmanship. The appreciation for putting on the jersey and playing against those with their own national pride. Curry has been indoctrinated this way his whole life.
I remember finally getting an answer from him about the Rio Olympics. He’d slipped on the sweat of Donatas Motiejūnas in the first round of the 2016 Western Conference playoffs and sprained his knee. He missed the next four games, but even when he returned he was compromised. Toward the end of the playoff run, he finally had to acknowledge his reality as the Warriors pushed forward in the playoffs: The offseason would be devoted to healing that knee. He was so dejected just saying it out loud.
He was injured in 2012, though a long shot to make the team. He was injured in 2016. He opted out of the quarantined Tokyo Games in the aftermath of the pandemic (which pushed the games back a year) and a grueling season with the Warriors. He was 0-for-3 on one of the most important perks of his rise to stardom.
So you can imagine how much he valued being there, and still being great enough at 36 to produce so spectacularly.
And the other part clearly important to him, sentimental even, is doing it with James and Durant. Doing it with the young stars to whom he gets the honor of passing the torch.
Curry has had a completely full career. He’s had incredible games and bad ones. Stellar moments and embarrassing ones. The highest glory and the heartbreak that never leaves. Huge wins and massive losses. You’ll never meet another NBA player who appreciates all of it more than Curry. They’re all rites of passage into the fraternity of NBA superstars. And as the kid who grew up around them, following his sharp-shooting father, Curry values that honor incredibly.
This is all that was missing, an Olympic gold, the Team USA experience.
So delivering as teammates of all-time greats, players he’s battled against for so many years, is greater than any shot he made. Greater than gold he now adorns.
He was with LeBron for this one. With KD. With Devin Booker and Jrue Holiday. With Carmelo Anthony. With Ty Lue and Erik Spoelstra, who for years sought to prey on his weaknesses. His entire biological family was with him for this international soiree. The chantilly on top: Curry was alongside Steve Kerr, his championship coach, with his basketball brother Draymond Green in the crowd, to which Curry yelled “Don’t worry ’bout me!” This was a significant moment for a significant figure.
GO DEEPER
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But, to answer many of the texts I received: Yes, I am in Paris. No, I was not there there. That was fine by me, too.
I’d just watched Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone run a 47.71 split on the second leg of the women’s 4×400 relay — the world record in the women’s 400 meters is 47.60 — and it was so fast and smooth everyone else on the track felt like stop animation. I’d earlier witnessed the greatest men’s 100-meter race of my lifetime, maybe ever, as Noah Lyles won by .005 seconds. That’s how long it takes a butterfly to flap its wings 10 times. I watched Cole Hocker shock the world in the men’s 1500-meter race. I watched Sha’Carri Richardson pierce the rain and stare down the runner-up as she paced her for gold.
That’s the beauty of the Olympics. It’s two weeks of had-to-be-there moments across multiple sports. Curry provided one of the most seismic ones, but not the only one. The Olympiads are chock full of legends.
Speaking of which, here comes Rai Benjamin. Finally.
GO DEEPER
Merci, Paris: We needed these Olympics
(Top photo of Stephen Curry: Michael Reaves/Getty Images)
On Dec. 16, 1775, a girl was born in Steventon, England — the seventh of eight children — to a clergyman and his wife. She was an avid reader, never married and died in 1817, at the age of 41. But in just those few decades, Jane Austen changed the world.
Her novels have had an outsize influence in the centuries since her death. Not only are the books themselves beloved — as sharply observed portraits of British society, revolutionary narrative projects and deliciously satisfying romances — but the stories she created have so permeated culture that people around the world care deeply about Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy, even if they’ve never actually read “Pride and Prejudice.”
With her 250th birthday this year, the Austen Industrial Complex has kicked into high gear with festivals, parades, museum exhibits, concerts and all manner of merch, ranging from the classily apt to the flamboyantly absurd. The words “Jane mania” have been used; so has “exh-Aust-ion.”
How to capture this brief life, and the blazing impact that has spread across the globe in her wake? Without further ado: a mere sampling of the wealth, wonder and weirdness Austen has brought to our lives. After all, your semiquincentennial doesn’t come around every day.
By ‘A Lady’
Austen published just four novels in her lifetime: “Sense and Sensibility” (1811), “Pride and Prejudice” (1813), “Mansfield Park” (1814) and “Emma” (1815). All of them were published anonymously, with the author credited simply as “A Lady.” (If you’re in New York, you can see this first edition for yourself at the Grolier Club through Feb. 14.)
Where the Magic Happened
Placed near a window for light, this diminutive walnut table was, according to family lore, where the author did much of her writing. It is now in the possession of the Jane Austen Society.
An Iconic Accessory
Few of Austen’s personal artifacts remain, contributing to the author’s mystique. One of them is this turquoise ring, which passed to her sister-in-law and then her niece after her death. In 2012, the ring was put up for auction and bought by the “American Idol” champion Kelly Clarkson. This caused quite a stir in England; British officials were loath to let such an important cultural artifact leave the country’s borders. Jane Austen’s House, the museum now based in the writer’s Hampshire home, launched a crowdfunding campaign to Bring the Ring Home and bought the piece from Clarkson. The real ring now lives at the museum; the singer has a replica.
Austen Onscreen
Since 1940, when Austen had a bit of a moment and Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier starred in MGM’s rather liberally reinterpreted “Pride and Prejudice,” there have been more than 20 international adaptations of Austen’s work made for film and TV (to say nothing of radio). From the sublime (Emma Thompson’s Oscar-winning “Sense and Sensibility”) to the ridiculous (the wholly gratuitous 2022 remake of “Persuasion”), the high waists, flickering firelight and double weddings continue to provide an endless stream of debate fodder — and work for a queen’s regiment of British stars.
Jane Goes X-Rated
The rumors are true: XXX Austen is a thing. “Jane Austen Kama Sutra,” “Pride and Promiscuity: The Lost Sex Scenes of Jane Austen” and enough slash fic and amateur porn to fill Bath’s Assembly Rooms are just the start. Purists may never recover.
A Lady Unmasked
Austen’s final two completed novels, “Northanger Abbey” and “Persuasion,” were published after her death. Her brother Henry, who oversaw their publication, took the opportunity to give his sister the recognition he felt she deserved, revealing the true identity of the “Lady” behind “Pride and Prejudice,” “Emma,” etc. in a biographical note. “The following pages are the production of a pen which has already contributed in no small degree to the entertainment of the public,” he wrote, extolling his sister’s imagination, good humor and love of dancing. Still, “no accumulation of fame would have induced her, had she lived, to affix her name to any productions of her pen.”
Wearable Tributes
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a Jane Austen fan wants to find other Jane Austen fans, and what better way to advertise your membership in that all-inclusive club than with a bit of merch — from the subtle and classy to the gloriously obscene.
The Austen Literary Universe
On the page, there is no end to the adventures Austen and her characters have been on. There are Jane Austen mysteries, Jane Austen vampire series, Jane Austen fantasy adventures, Jane Austen Y.A. novels and, of course, Jane Austen romances, which transpose her plots to a remote Maine inn, a Greenwich Village penthouse and the Bay Area Indian American community, to name just a few. You can read about Austen-inspired zombie hunters, time-traveling hockey players, Long Island matchmakers and reality TV stars, or imagine further adventures for some of your favorite characters. (Even the obsequious Mr. Collins gets his day in the sun.)
A Botanical Homage
Created in 2017 to mark the 200th anniversary of Austen’s death, the “Jane Austen” rose is characterized by its intense orange color and light, sweet perfume. It is bushy, healthy and easy to grow.
Aunt Jane
Hoping to cement his beloved aunt’s legacy, Austen’s nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh published this biography — a rather rosy portrait based on interviews with family members — five decades after her death. The book is notable not only as the source (biased though it may be) of many of the scant facts we know about her life, but also for the watercolor portrait by James Andrews that serves as its frontispiece. Based on a sketch by Cassandra, this depiction of Jane is softer and far more winsome than the original: Whether that is due to a lack of skill on her sister’s part or overly enthusiastic artistic license on Andrews’s, this is the version of Austen most familiar to people today.
Cultural Currency
In 2017, the Bank of England released a new 10-pound note featuring Andrews’s portrait of Austen, as well as a line from “Pride and Prejudice”: “I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading!” Austen is the third woman — other than the queen — to be featured on British currency, and the only one currently in circulation.
In the Trenches
During World War I and World War II, British soldiers were given copies of Austen’s works. In his 1924 story “The Janeites,” Rudyard Kipling invoked the grotesque contrasts — and the strange comfort — to be found in escaping to Austen’s well-ordered world amid the horrors of trench warfare. As one character observes, “There’s no one to touch Jane when you’re in a tight place.”
Baby Janes
You’re never too young to learn to love Austen — or that one’s good opinion, once lost, may be lost forever.
The Austen Industrial Complex
Maybe you’ve not so much as seen a Jane Austen meme, let alone read one of her novels. No matter! Need a Jane Austen finger puppet? Lego? Magnetic poetry set? Lingerie? Nameplate necklace? Plush book pillow? License plate frame? Bath bomb? Socks? Dog sweater? Whiskey glass? Tarot deck? Of course you do! And you’re in luck: What a time to be alive.
Around the Globe
Austen’s novels have been translated into more than 40 languages, including Polish, Finnish, Chinese and Farsi. There are active chapters of the Jane Austen Society, her 21st-century fan club, throughout the world.
Playable Persuasions
In Austen’s era, no afternoon tea was complete without a rousing round of whist, a trick-taking card game played in two teams of two. But should you not be up on your Regency amusements, you can find plenty of contemporary puzzles and games with which to fill a few pleasant hours, whether you’re piecing together her most beloved characters or using your cunning and wiles to land your very own Mr. Darcy.
#SoJaneAusten
The wild power of the internet means that many Austen moments have taken on lives of their own, from Colin Firth’s sopping wet shirt and Matthew Macfadyen’s flexing hand to Mr. Collins’s ode to superlative spuds and Mr. Knightley’s dramatic floor flop. The memes are fun, yes, but they also speak to the universality of Austen’s writing: More than two centuries after her books were published, the characters and stories she created are as relatable as ever.
Bonnets Fit for a Bennett
For this summer’s Grand Regency Costumed Promenade in Bath, England — as well as the myriad picnics, balls, house parties, dinners, luncheons, teas and fetes that marked the anniversary — seamstresses, milliners, mantua makers and costume warehouses did a brisk business, attiring the faithful in authentic Regency finery. And that’s a commitment: A bespoke, historically accurate bonnet can easily run to hundreds of dollars.
Most Ardently, Jane
Austen was prolific correspondent, believed to have written thousands of letters in her lifetime, many to her sister, Cassandra. But in an act that has frustrated biographers for centuries, upon Jane’s death, Cassandra protected her sister’s privacy — and reputation? — by burning almost all of them, leaving only about 160 intact, many heavily redacted. But what survives is filled with pithy one-liners. To wit: “I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal.”
Stage and Sensibility
Austen’s works have been adapted numerous times for the stage. Some plays (and musicals) hew closely to the original text, while others — such as Emily Breeze’s comedic riff on “Pride and Prejudice,” “Are the Bennet Girls OK?”, which is running at New York City’s West End Theater through Dec. 21 — use creative license to explore ideas of gender, romance and rage through a contemporary lens.
Austen 101
Austen remains a reliable fount of academic scholarship; recent conference papers have focused on the author’s enduring global reach, the work’s relationship to modern intersectionality, digital humanities and “Jane Austen on the Cheap.” And as one professor told our colleague Sarah Lyall of the Austen amateur scholarship hive, “Woe betide the academic who doesn’t take them seriously.”
W.W.J.D.
When facing problems — of etiquette, romance, domestic or professional turmoil — sometimes the only thing to do is ask: What would Jane do?
A famous poet once observed that it is difficult to get the news from poems. The weather is a different story. April showers, summer sunshine and — maybe especially — the chill of winter provide an endless supply of moods and metaphors. Poets like to practice a double meteorology, looking out at the water and up at the sky for evidence of interior conditions of feeling.
The inner and outer forecasts don’t always match up. This short poem by Louise Glück starts out cold and stays that way for most of its 11 lines.
And then it bursts into flame.
“Early December in Croton-on-Hudson” comes from Glück’s debut collection, “Firstborn,” which was published in 1968. She wrote the poems in it between the ages of 18 and 23, but they bear many of the hallmarks of her mature style, including an approach to personal matters — sex, love, illness, family life — that is at once uncompromising and elusive. She doesn’t flinch. She also doesn’t explain.
Here, for example, Glück assembles fragments of experience that imply — but also obscure — a larger narrative. It’s almost as if a short story, or even a novel, had been smashed like a glass Christmas ornament, leaving the reader to infer the sphere from the shards.
We know there was a couple with a flat tire, and that a year later at least one of them still has feelings for the other. It’s hard not to wonder if they’re still together, or where they were going with those Christmas presents.
To some extent, those questions can be addressed with the help of biographical clues. The version of “Early December in Croton-on-Hudson” that appeared in The Atlantic in 1967 was dedicated to Charles Hertz, a Columbia University graduate student who was Glück’s first husband. They divorced a few years later. Glück, who died in 2023, was never shy about putting her life into her work.
But the poem we are reading now is not just the record of a passion that has long since cooled. More than 50 years after “Firstborn,” on the occasion of receiving the Nobel Prize for literature, Glück celebrated the “intimate, seductive, often furtive or clandestine” relations between poets and their readers. Recalling her childhood discovery of William Blake and Emily Dickinson, she declared her lifelong ardor for “poems to which the listener or reader makes an essential contribution, as recipient of a confidence or an outcry, sometimes as co-conspirator.”
That’s the kind of poem she wrote.
“Confidence” can have two meanings, both of which apply to “Early December in Croton-on-Hudson.” Reading it, you are privy to a secret, something meant for your ears only. You are also in the presence of an assertive, self-possessed voice.
Where there is power, there’s also risk. To give voice to desire — to whisper or cry “I want you” — is to issue a challenge and admit vulnerability. It’s a declaration of conquest and a promise of surrender.
What happens next? That’s up to you.
Cold weather can serve as a plot point or emphasize the mood of a scene, and this week’s literary geography quiz highlights the locations of recent novels that work winter conditions right into the story. Even if you aren’t familiar with the book, the questions offer an additional hint about the setting. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the books if you’d like to do further reading.
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