Many ailments are cured by winning. But perhaps the gold could make all of this better. Thank you, Stephen Curry, for that.
The United States of America men’s basketball team not only kept their nation atop the international basketball hierarchy with their 98-87 victory over France in Saturday’s gold medal game of the 2024 Olympics in Paris. All the turmoil that accompanied the Americans to this location was muted.
Is Jayson Tatum being benched frequently during games? The close defeat to South Sudan at a pre-match? Before Curry and company mounted a comeback, Serbia dominated the majority of their semifinal match? The dubious rotations made by Steve Kerr?
It vanished in an instant, to be replaced by the shimmer of gold, which was flattened into a series of Curry 3s—eight of them!—that established yet another benchmark for his
The significance of Olympic gold and the brilliance of Curry’s play overshadowed even Kevin Durant’s Twitter tirade, which I would surely characterize as a strange and petty social media frenzy, criticizing Nikola Jokic fans for their praise of the Serbian in his loss to Team USA on Thursday.
The thing with winning for your country, and just winning, is that the end result has a way of obscuring the specifics of how it was reached, especially when it has that unique tint of an all-time great performance.
As the Tatum saga would have gone full DEFCON 1 if America had lost a few days prior, the outcome is frequently more significant than what we recall—in some cases, even more significant than the truth. The information that goes with these
Even Durant had flashes of explosive brilliance that we would find hard to believe if we had never witnessed them before. In particular, he was able to step up early in this Olympic cycle and establish the standard for American domination.
And in the fourth quarter of this gold medal match, Curry, of course, gave one of the best Olympic performances we’ve ever seen.
The drama, the errors, the near misses, the outbursts on Twitter, the queries we all had—all of these were genuine and, for the most part, real when they occurred.
However, that’s precisely what legendary figures do: they ignore the challenges, uncertainties, errors, and hardships of everyday life that would bring down most of us lesser people and make them into the background noise of achievement.
Their
