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REVIEW: “At six-foot-two, he’s extremely small for a shooting guard. Do not rely on him to run your team. He overshoots, doesn’t like it when defences are too physical with him – and he’s not a great finisher”
The reports on young basketballer Stephen Curry were not exactly full of praise. And yet he’s overcome those “deficiencies” to become one of the NBA greats, helping his beloved Golden State Warriors to four titles, while winning a number of individual accolades and breaking the record for three-pointers along the way.
Now aged 35 – and perhaps in the twilight of his top-level career – the father-of-three is the subject of a new documentary arriving on Apple TV+ this Friday.
Directed by Peter Nicks (whose previous subjects have included deep dives into America’s public schools, hospitals and police departments), Stephen Curry: Underrated actually focuses very little on his NBA career. Instead, it looks at how he was written off as a youngster and the parallels between the success he achieved with tiny North Carolina liberal arts tertiary institution Davidson College in the late noughties and helping transform the underwhelming Warriors (before their 2015 success, they had last won the championship in 1975) into one of the dominant forces of the past decade.
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Stephen Curry has helped his beloved Golden State Warriors to four NBA titles.
What comes across, as astutely observed by his high school coach, is an athlete who knows his art and possesses a drive to be the absolute best. Someone who has had his fair share of setbacks, injuries and a self-confessed feeling of being flustered and overwhelmed, but overcome them all through what legendary Davidson basketball supremo Bob McKillop describes as “emotional toughness”.
It was McKillop who took a chance on the teenage Curry and – even more importantly – stood by him after a disastrous debut full of missed shots, bad plays and turnovers – and was rewarded with a player who was key to Davidson achieving not only their first NCAA win in almost 40 years, but an incredible run to the Elite 8 of College basketball in 2008.
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The reports on young basketballer Stephen Curry were not exactly full of praise. And yet he’s overcome those “deficiencies” to become one of the NBA greats.
Told via a mix of modern-day interviews and eclectically variable in quality, but compelling archival footage, Davidson’s incredible run is an underdog story to rival any crowd-pleasing fictional basketball drama Hollywood has conjured up since 1986’s Hoosiers.
It’s the centrepiece in what is overall a surprisingly intimate, insightful and inspiring look at a sportsman who many non-NBA aficionados in this country are likely to most associate with his supervisory role on the US version of Holey Moley!
Basketball fans will naturally lap this up, but for everyone else, Underrated will leave you with a whole new respect for the man affectionately known as “Chef Curry” or the “Baby Faced Assassin”.
Stephen Curry: Underrated begins streaming on Apple TV+ on Friday, July 21.
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