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
Even for Stephen Curry, that Olympic gold-medal game performance was ridiculous
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
‘Everything I imagined, and more’: Team USA’s gold medal game seals NBA stars’ legacies
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)
Whatever you do, don’t think of a bird.
Now: What kind of bird are you not thinking about? A pigeon? A bald eagle? Something more poetic, like a skylark or a nightingale? In any case, would you say that this bird you aren’t thinking about is real?
Before you answer, read this poem, which is quite literally about not thinking of a bird.
Human consciousness is full of riddles. Neuroscientists, philosophers and dorm-room stoners argue continually about what it is and whether it even exists. For Wallace Stevens, the experience of having a mind was a perpetual source of wonder, puzzlement and delight — perfectly ordinary and utterly transcendent at the same time. He explored the mysteries and pleasures of consciousness in countless poems over the course of his long poetic career. It was arguably his great theme.
Stevens was born in 1879 and published his first book, “Harmonium,” in 1923, making him something of a late bloomer among American modernists. For much of his adult life, he worked as an executive for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, rising to the rank of vice president. He viewed insurance less as a day job to support his poetry than as a parallel vocation. He pursued both activities with quiet diligence, spending his days at the office and composing poems in his head as he walked to and from work.
As a young man, Stevens dreamed of traveling to Europe, though he never crossed the Atlantic. In middle age he made regular trips to Florida, and his poems are frequently infused with ideas of Paris and Rome and memories of Key West. Others partake of the stringent beauty of New England. But the landscapes he explores, wintry or tropical, provincial or cosmopolitan, are above all mental landscapes, created by and in the imagination.
Are those worlds real?
Let’s return to the palm tree and its avian inhabitant, in that tranquil Key West sunset of the mind.
Until then, we find consolation in fangles.
When the director Rob Reiner cast his leads in the 1986 film “Stand by Me,” he looked for young actors who were as close as possible to the personalities of the four children they’d be playing. There was the wise beyond his years kid from a rough family (River Phoenix), the slightly dim worrywart (Jerry O’Connell), the cutup with a temper (Corey Feldman) and the sensitive, bookish boy.
Wil Wheaton was perfect for that last one, Gordie Lachance, a doe-eyed child who is ignored by his family in favor of his late older brother. Now, 40 years later, he’s traveling the country to attend anniversary screenings of the film, alongside O’Connell and Feldman, which has thrown him back into the turmoil that he felt as an adolescent.
Wheaton has channeled those emotions and his on-set memories into his latest project: narrating a new audiobook version of “The Body,” the 1982 Stephen King novella on which the film was based.
A few years ago, Wheaton started to float the idea of returning to the story that gave him his big break — that of a quartet of boys in 1959 Oregon, in their last days before high school, setting out to find a classmate’s dead body. “I’ve been telling the story of ‘Stand By Me’ since I was 12 years old,” he said.
But this time was different. Wheaton, who has narrated dozens of audiobooks, including Andy Weir’s “The Martian” and Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One,” says he has come to enjoy narration more than screen acting. “I’m safe, I’m in the booth, nobody’s looking at me and I can just tell you a story.”
The fact that he, an older man looking back on his younger years, is narrating a story about an older man looking back on his younger years, is not lost on Wheaton. King’s original story is bathed in nostalgia. Coming to terms with death and loss is one of its primary themes.
Two days after appearing on stage at the Academy Awards as part of a tribute to Reiner — who was murdered in 2025 alongside his wife, Michele — Wheaton got on the phone to talk about recording the audiobook, reliving his favorite scenes from the film and reexamining a quintessential story of childhood loss through the lens of his own.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
“I felt really close to him, and my memory of him.”
Wheaton on channeling a co-star’s performance.
There’s this wonderful scene in “Stand By Me.” Gordie and Chris are walking down the tracks talking about junior high. Chris is telling Gordie, “I wish to hell I was your dad, because I care about you, and he obviously doesn’t.”
It’s just so honest and direct, in a way that kids talk to each other that adults don’t. And I think that one of the reasons that really sticks with people, and that piece really lands on a lot of audiences, and has for 40 years, is, just too many people have been Gordie in that scene.
That scene is virtually word for word taken from the text of the book. And when I was narrating that, I made a deliberate choice to do my best to recreate what River did in that scene.
“You’re just a kid,
Gordie–”
“I wish to fuck
I was your father!”
he said angrily.
“You wouldn’t go around
talking about takin those stupid shop courses if I was!
It’s like
God gave you something,
all those stories
you can make up, and He said:
This is what we got for you, kid.
Try not to lose it.
But kids lose everything
unless somebody looks out for them and if your folks
are too fucked up to do it
then maybe I ought to.”
I watched that scene a couple of times because I really wanted — I don’t know why it was so important to me to — well, I know: because I loved him, and I miss him. And I wanted to bring him into this as best as I could, right?
So I was reading that scene, and the words are identical to the script. And I had this very powerful flashback to being on the train tracks that day in Cottage Grove, Oregon. And I could see River standing next to them. They’re shooting my side of the scene and there’s River, right next to the camera, doing his off-camera dialogue, and there’s the sound guy, and there’s the boom operator. There’s my key light.
I could hear and feel it. It was the weirdest thing. It’s like I was right back there.
I was able to really take in the emotional memory of being Gordie in all of those scenes. So when I was narrating him and I’m me and I’m old with all of this experience, I just drew on what I remembered from being that little boy and what I remember of those friendships and what they meant to me and what they mean to me today.
“Rob gave me a gift. Rob gave me a career.”
Wheaton recalls the “Stand By Me” director’s way with kids on set, as well as his recent Oscars tribute.
Rob really encouraged us to be kids.
Jerry tells the most amazing story about that scene, where we were all sitting around, and doing our bit, and he improvised. He was just goofing around — we were just playing — and he said something about spitting water at the fat kid.
We get to the end of the scene, and he hears Rob. Rob comes around from behind the thing, and he goes, “Jerry!” And Jerry thinks, “Oh no, I’m in trouble. I’m in trouble because I improvised, and I’m not supposed to improvise.”
The context for Jerry is that he had been told by the adults in his life, “Sit on your hands and shut up. Stop trying to be a cutup. Stop trying to be funny. Stop disrupting people. Just be quiet.” And Jerry thinks, “Oh my God. I didn’t shut up. I’m in trouble. I’m gonna get fired.”
Rob leans in to all of us, and Rob says, “Hey, guys, do you see that? More of that. Do that!”
The whole time when you’re a kid actor, you’re just around all these adults who are constantly telling you to grow up. They’re mad that you’re being a kid. Rob just created an environment where not only was it supported that we would be kids — and have fun, and follow those kid instincts and do what was natural — it was expected. It was encouraged. We were supposed to do it.
They chanted together:
“I don’t shut up,
I grow up.
And when I look at you I throw up.”
“Then your mother goes around the corner
and licks it up,”
I said, and hauled ass out of there,
giving them the finger over my shoulder as I went.
I never had any friends later on
like the ones I had when I was twelve.
Jesus, did you?
When we were at the Oscars, I looked at Jerry. And we looked at this remarkable assemblage of the most amazingly talented, beautiful artists and storytellers. We looked around, and Jerry leans down, and he said, “We all got our start with Rob Reiner. He trusted every single one of us.”
And to stand there for him, when I really thought that I would be standing with him to talk about this stuff — it was a lot.
“I was really really really excited — like jumping up and down.”
The scene Wheaton was most looking forward to narrating: the tale of Lard Ass Hogan.
I was so excited to narrate it. It’s a great story! It’s a funny story. It’s such a lovely break — it’s an emotional and tonal shift from what’s happening in the movie.
I know this as a writer: You work to increase and release tension throughout a narrative, and Stephen King uses humor really effectively to release that tension. But it also raises the stakes, because we have these moments of joy and these moments of things being very silly in the midst of a lot of intensity.
That’s why the story of Lard Ass Hogan is so fun for me to tell. Because in the middle of that, we stop to do something that’s very, very fun, and very silly and very celebratory.
“Will you shut up and let him tell it?”
Teddy hollered.
Vern blinked.
“Sure. Yeah.
Okay.”
“Go on, Gordie,”
Chris said. “It’s not really much—”
“Naw,
we don’t expect much from a wet end like you,”
Teddy said,
“but tell it anyway.”
I cleared my throat. “So anyway.
It’s Pioneer Days,
and on the last night
they have these three big events.
There’s an egg-roll for the little kids and a sack-race for kids that are like eight or nine,
and then there’s the pie-eating contest.
And the main guy of the story
is this fat kid nobody likes
named Davie Hogan.”
When I narrate this story — whenever there is a moment of levity or humor, whenever there are those brief little moments that are the seasoning of the meal that makes it all so real and relatable — yes, it was very important to me to capture those moments.
I’m shifting in my chair, so I can feel each of those characters. It’s something that doesn’t exist in live action. It doesn’t exist in any other media.
“I feel the loss.”
Wheaton remembers River Phoenix.
The novella “The Body” is very much about Gordie remembering Chris. It’s darker, and it’s more painful, than the movie is.
I’ve been watching the movie on this tour and seeing River a lot. I remember him as a 14- and 15-year-old kid who just seemed so much older, and so much more experienced and so much wiser than me, and I’m only a year younger than him.
What hurts me now, and what I really felt when I was narrating this, is knowing what River was going through then. We didn’t know. I still don’t know the extent of how he was mistreated, but I know that he was. I know that adults failed him. That he should have been protected in every way that matters. And he just wasn’t.
And I, like Gordie, remember a boy who was loving. So loving, and generous and cared deeply about everyone around him, all the time. Who deserved to live a full life. Who had so much to offer the world. And it’s so unfair that he’s gone and taken from us. I had to go through a decades-long grieving process to come to terms with him dying.
Near the end
of 1971,
Chris
went into a Chicken Delight in Portland
to get a three-piece Snack Bucket.
Just ahead of him,
two men started arguing
about which one had been first in line. One of them pulled a knife.
Chris,
who had always been the best of us
at making peace,
stepped between them and was stabbed in the throat.
The man with the knife had spent time in four different institutions;
he had been released from Shawshank State Prison
only the week before.
Chris died almost instantly.
It is a privilege that I was allowed to tell this story. I get to tell Gordie Lachance’s story as originally imagined by Stephen King, with all of the experience of having lived my whole adult life with the memory of spending three months in Gordie Lachance’s skin.
Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about printed works that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions and more. This week’s challenge highlights offbeat television shows that began as comic books. Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the comics and their screen versions.
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