Stephen Curry takes viewers behind the scenes in new show
There’s a really cool scene in the opening episode of “Stephen vs. the Game,” a new Facebook Watch series that strives to get to the heart of what Steph Curry is all about.
It’s 1:15 a.m. — several hours after Curry’s Warriors opened the 2018-19 NBA season at Oracle Arena by beating Oklahoma City and hoisting their third banner in four years. The Golden State point guard has retreated, with family members, to the quiet comforts of home. The kids are in bed. Red wine has been poured. All three of Curry’s ultra-glitzy championship rings are on the kitchen counter.
A toast is made as a reflective superstar slips the rings onto the hand that has become one of the most lethal weapons in NBA history. He smiles widely and snaps a selfie.
“I pinched myself when we got that moment on film,” says Gotham Chopra, who directed the six-episode docu-series that debuts on Thursday, May 2.
Indeed, intimate, revealing and relatable moments such as this are what makes “Stephen vs. the Game” a joy to watch and Chopra knows it. He previously earned acclaim with “Tom vs. Time,” another entry in Facebook Watch’s growing sports franchise. That series took fans into the off-season training regimen and family life of New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady.
But Chopra quickly realized that Curry would present a very different challenge. Brady, after all, was somewhat of a mystery — despite his rousing success — largely because he doesn’t have a high profile on social media. Curry, in contrast, is all over social media, with 25 million Instagram followers and his own YouTube series. And the details of his life — including his upbringing as the son of an NBA star, his marriage to Ayesha, his role in the NBA’s three-point revolution and his deeply felt faith — have been exhaustively chronicled.
Is there a side of Stephen Curry we haven’t seen?
“Scarcity kind of drove the interest in the Brady project,” Chopra says. “With Steph, it was all about how do we find things that get us underneath that very well-known public narrative?”
Judging from the single episode made available for preview, Chopra and his collaborators have mostly succeeded. You want a fresh look at Curry? Here’s some home-video of him as toddler shooting baskets on a tiny Fisher-Price hoop. (He misses several times before making one). Or how about footage of a spindly grade-schooler hooping it up in a youth-league game with his jersey hanging down to his knees?
“To see home video of how and where he started is pretty great,” says Chopra. “It’s like his parents (Dell and Sonya) had an instinct about their son — that they knew he might be pretty special. They documented everything and let us have at it. That stuff was like a treasure chest.”
Other examples of trying to get under — or flesh out — that public narrative: Most fans are well aware of Curry’s work ethic, but the Facebook Watch series actually takes us into his arduous — and unorthodox — offseason routine. Likewise, most Curry devotees know about his passion for golf, but Chopra’’s cameras follow him as he participates in his favorite celebrity tournament in Lake Tahoe. Along the way, we learn that golf isn’t just a relaxing hobby for our star. It’s an obsession.
“I think about golf way too much,” Curry admits. “I’m haunted by it.”
Viewers will also come to realize just how important the women in his life — Ayesha and Sonya — are to Curry. His fiercely competitive spirit apparently stems more from mom than dad. At one point, Sonya, who played college volleyball, speaks about being a “yeller in the stands” during her son’s youth games.
Mom’s advice to her boy? “I just want you to beat people down!” (It is said with a sly smile).
Chopra admits that, as a storyteller, his natural instinct it to seek out forms of “conflict.” But he apparently discovered that Curry’s nice-guy image is refreshingly real — “so we decided to embrace and celebrate that.”
In future episodes, however, the series will delve into the Warriors’ regular season and playoff run, which have had featured more turbulence than many expected.
“Maintaining greatness is much harder than attaining it. And the fatigue of winning is very real,” Chopra says. “Steph talks openly about that. There have been cracks in that on-court, zen-like thing, for sure. He’s hyper-competitive and he gets very frustrated when things aren’t going right.”
Contact Chuck Barney at cbarney@bayareanewsgroup.com. Follow him at Twitter.com/chuckbarney and Facebook.com/bayareanewsgroup.chuckbarney.