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martin
Posts: 79010
Alba Posts: 108
Joined: 7/24/2001
Member: #2
USA
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http://chicagosports.chicagotribune.com/sports/basketball/bulls/cs-051003curryview,1,2512545.story?
Curry full of humor, humility
Forget the wondrously athletic and agile plays Eddy Curry could get his 6-foot-11-inch frame to perform.
Forget his maddeningly inconsistent spurts of defense and rebounding.
Forget, even, the unfortunate and messy health situation that spelled the end of his four seasons in Chicago.
The best memories of Curry—at least for this observer—always came off the court. That's where his sense of humor showed through.
After a March 13 matinee against the Clippers, I flew from Los Angeles to Chicago with Curry's mother, Gayle, then-fiance, now-wife, Patrice, and their two children, helping to entertain the kids during a two-hour flight delay.
The next day at practice in Chicago, Curry, who had flown with the team on a private charter jet, approached me with as imposing a scowl as he could muster.
"Don't ever touch my kids again," Curry said.
Then he burst out laughing and said thanks.
Anyone who knows Curry knows that the scowl is a dead giveaway for an imminent joke. Curry doesn't have a mean bone in his body.
People can argue left and right whether that characteristic prevented him from reaching his full potential and becoming a dominant, dunk-on-your-head force.
Curry, who may really never love playing basketball the way some people want him to, wouldn't mind.
He would just as soon go home to his wife and kids and play video games or pool. This is, after all, just a big kid of 22 himself.
Because of his salivating potential, Curry took his turns as a punching bag. From the time former Bulls coach Tim Floyd spoke derisively of giving him "entitlement minutes" during his rookie season to the classic time that current coach Scott Skiles said "jump" when asked how Curry could be a better rebounder, Curry took his lumps.
Publicly, Curry acted as if the comments didn't bother him. Privately, they hurt him, sometimes even enough for him to take a path other than the one offering the least resistance.
At such moments Curry's on-the-court effectiveness matched his off-the-court likeability.
There's a reason why Skiles, general manager John Paxson and Curry's teammates and Bulls assistant coaches were united in their genuine disappointment over the heart situation that forced Curry to miss the 2004 NBA playoffs: They felt badly for him on a personal level.
Even at his most exasperatingly inconsistent times on the court, Curry was as well liked a teammate as the Bulls had. His honesty, humility and humor kept everyone in his inner circle and everyone else loose.
Simply put, Curry never took himself too seriously.
His impersonations inside the locker room of teammates' ugly jump shots or bad turnovers always included some of his own miscues. And when a reporter once tried to offer up a softball question about leading the league in field-goal percentage in his second NBA season, Curry cut him short.
"Yeah, but I got dunked on by Shaq," Curry said.
Curry had his serious moments too.
Visibly upset over former general manager Jerry Krause's exit in 2003, he etched Krause's initials on his sneakers for several games. And his concern over his heart condition on March 30 in Charlotte, the night it first became public, was genuine and palpable.
But that's the Knicks' concern now. Reached at Knicks training camp in Charleston, S.C., former Bull Jamal Crawford could barely express his thoughts over the acquisition of Curry, such was his shock and excitement.
"Me and him playing together again?" Crawford said. "We're going to be really, really good. And we're going to really, really have a lot of fun."
Writing about Curry always was that.
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