What Steph Curry Taught Me About Manhood and Stability

Steph Curry Warriors Manhood kids NBA

It took Steph Curry’s domination of the NBA for me to fully realize the power and masculinity of stability.

As an athlete – at the high school, college and professional level – I bought the locker-room myth that chaos and struggle molded the most indestructible on-field warrior.

The narrative pervasive throughout black-jock culture goes something like this: “The toughest and most hungry players come from the struggle, the bottom. If you match up a kid from the suburbs and one from the ‘hood, the suburban kid can’t win because he’s not tough enough and doesn’t have the fight and desire as the other guy. You can’t be the toughest or the strongest without the struggle of a broken home and socioeconomic disadvantage. Street cred and the fear it provokes are important weapons. Good guys finish last in sports, too.”

As a man and professional athlete, you are always trying to be the alpha dog. Every man wants to be the biggest and baddest dude around. We want respect, credibility, clout, and money. In my life, the recipe for being alpha dog could be summed up in one quote: “Men do what they want. Boys do what they can.”

It’s a selfish mentality that can lead to sexual promiscuity and baby-mama drama, the abuse of alcohol and drugs, and irresponsible personal and financial decisions. The alpha-dog mentality certainly enhances your athletic-performance swagger. It makes you think you can accomplish all things through arrogance.

Derek Jeter is the exception, not the rule. His playing career seemed to be enhanced by remaining America’s top bachelor throughout his legendary baseball career. He managed to remain a bachelor and a gentleman.

But maybe the better path for athletes is choosing stability and a traditional home life? That’s what I believe I’m learning from Steph Curry. My favorite quote and life mantra – “Men do what they want” – is a path to hell? If not, it’s at least a path to not reaching your full potential personally or athletically.

I lived the dream of a professional athlete, but the mentality that got me there led me down a dangerous path.

How else do you explain a 6-foot-3 beanpole who couldn’t land a major scholarship being one of the best basketball players on the planet?

I believe Steph does what he wants on the court because off the court he’s remarkably grounded and stable.

Curry met his wife at a church function and married at just age 24. The absolute last thing I wanted to be at 24 was tied down to one woman and some sort of daily routine. I actually thought it would get in the way of achieving the respect I desired and that stability had no effect on my career. I now look at Curry’s life with his wife and his daughter’s famous press-conference appearances and wonder what the hell I was thinking.

Steph has defined himself as a man of faith, a loving husband, a devoted father, as well as an MVP basketball player and champion. Notice the order? Notice the priority? Curry focused on organizing his life properly, realizing this would help him organize his career properly. His life is consistent, his priorities are in order, and he realizes his purpose inside and outside of the NBA.

Deep down, I knew better.

I grew up in church and a two-parent home and the person I looked up to the most was a man of stability and integrity: My dad. I always admired the Tony Dungy’s and Kurt Warner’s of the world, but couldn’t reconcile the life I wanted with the life I created. When I was in the NFL, I chased alpha dog status and unwittingly created chaos. It was my drug. I juggled women and juggled all the drama that goes with that lifestyle. I had to be in the clubs with my boys. I thought those things would bring me happiness and I actually believed you reaffirmed your alpha dog status by being able to deal with drama. Stability was boring. I was a fool.

Steph Curry Warriors Man NBA

Steph Curry doesn’t fit the stereotypes of a superstar athlete, and that’s precisely what makes him so great.

Stability and consistency only help your life and make your life better. I have learned that in my own life. Even after I was done playing in the NFL, my life was unstable and chaotic. I didn’t even realize it. I had normalized chaos. I existed in a reality where lack of consistency was the routine.

I was failing in life personally. I was in and out of relationships and creating instability for my children. I was depressed. I reached a crossroads because of injuries and moving away from football. My mother always told me: “If you always do what you’ve always done, you will always get what you always got.” This made me return to my faith, and focus on rebuilding myself into the man I wanted to be.

I began to remove the chaos from my life and stopped trying to be the alpha dog and prove to everyone I was the man. I had to prioritize what I wanted in life and anything that wasn’t helping me achieve my goals had to go. When I changed, everything around me changed. My second career started to blossom. I got married. I embraced routine. Knowing what’s going to happen on a day-to-day basis and having that anchor of character and faith have been paramount to transforming my life. I am in no way perfect and still make mistakes. However, I can say with certainty that when I veer away from character and faith guiding my life, bad things happen. And when things start going left personally, I can attest that it impacts every area of your life.

Choosing the path of high integrity and character is difficult. It’s a struggle that builds toughness. That’s what I see in Steph Curry. He is one of the toughest guys I have ever seen on and off the court. He’s a hero. He’s a superhero. He’s a role model for kids, and grown men, too. He faces every temptation from complacency, hubris, sex, and drugs on a daily basis but he still stays focused and keeps his priorities in order. If you regularly fall into the traps of life, are you strong and tough? Or is the guy who stares them in the face daily and does the right thing the alpha dog?

It appears Curry doesn’t believe the lie. I bought the lie. Every now and then I catch myself making a comment that shows I am still a work in progress. I’m still battling a mentality that haunted me from childhood. I was a private school kid for most of my life, and guys I played with thought I was soft because of how I spoke and because I was “too nice.” I made poor decisions trying to disprove the thinking of small-minded individuals. Let me be clear. I loved my teammates. They were good guys. They were simply caught in the same culture and mindset I was.

The thinking is a bunch of garbage. Character trumps everything. I’ve seen rich kids who are the hardest workers and the most competitive. I have also seen people with special talents who didn’t have two nickels to rub together be extremely lazy. Your character and intestinal fortitude determine your toughness, competitiveness, and level of achievement as well as your ability to maintain it.

I’m glad Steph Curry is redefining for me and others how a real alpha dog handles his business. He puts a different spin on men doing what they want. Steph is doing EXACTLY what he wants, and he is the man.

The more men we have in this world, the better our future will be.

What My 5-year-old Kid Taught Me by Staging his Own Nike Protest

Kid Nike Protest NFL Colin Kaepernick
As the 2019 NFL season comes to a close, I imagine that people across America are still licking their wounds from heated discussions regarding Nike’s decision to build an ad campaign around Colin Kaepernick.
In my head, I see fathers and sons bitterly divided over whether the controversial quarterback’s decision to protest injustice is worthy of finacial reward off the field, or similarly, financial deprivation on the field.
I too, had a fight with my son about Nikes, and appropriate methods of sacrifice… but it had absolutely nothing to do with Colin Kaepernick.

Pajama Day

A few months ago, my kindergarten son and I had a fight. It wasn’t our first fight of the week. It wasn’t even our last fight of the day. These fights happen because one of us is absurdly bullheaded and strong-willed. I say it’s him, and nothing you’ll ever say or do can convince me otherwise.

So in that case, maybe it is me.

Back to the story- That day, As I readied to leave the house for the typical school drop-off routine, I learned that my son believed very strongly that his school was having a pajama themed-spirit day. I had no evidence to back his theory up. No email from his teacher. No note home. Nothing on the school website.

His mother was out of town on business, so I made the executive decision that, even if pajama day was really happening, he would not be participating.

I wasn’t going to chance having my kid be the only one at school wearing pajamas.

He didn’t like my decision, and made it very clear that he was willing to risk the embarrassment of a full day in a long-sleeved Paw Patrol flannels, regardless of whether or not it was actually pajama day. What he was absolutely not going to do, was miss his first ever school spirit day.

I packed an extra set of clothing in his backpack, in the event that the burden of a typical 105-degree day in the Arizona desert changed his mind, and away we went.

Something is Missing

When we arrived at his school, I noticed something was missing- his shoes.

In my frustration with his stubbornness, had I forgotten to put on shoes? No. I distinctly remember him making the task of strapping up his electric-blue Nikes as pointlessly arduous as five-year-olds love to make any and every run-of-the-mill task.

So if I put shoes on him, and now, we’re here at his school without his shoes, where in the hell could they be?

“I threw them out the window.”

His tiny voice took a moment to break through my exasperated parental haze.

You… did what?

“I threw my shoes out the window of the car.”

I was stumped. Of all the nonsense my little friend has pulled… why this? He’s difficult, but not impractical- stubborn in his actions, but far from obtuse.

I pursed my lips, but it took several moments for the breathy “wwwwwhy?” to fall out.

“Because you don’t wear shoes to bed.”

I laughed.

He wasn’t wrong. I mean, he was definitely wrong… but his assertion, if situationally abducted from our current reality, was correct. Wearing shoes to bed is not something one should do (I’d also like to contend that hurling footwear from a moving minivan is equally unacceptable).

We hopped back into the car and went searching for his Nikes. The irony was not lost on me that, at a time in our culture when the very same footwear company has prompted widespread protest (as well as praise) for their choice to name an ex-NFL quarterback, who has become more known for acts of evoking social consciousness and provoking debate than he is for his athletic exploits, my son chose to toss his sneakers out a moving car window in your his own fit of protest.

My son’s act of defiant nonsense almost perfectly personified the spirit of Nike’s new ad campaign.

“Believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything.”

Conviction makes the world go ’round

My son believes things very strongly. To him, your beliefs aren’t even beliefs, they’re simply knowledge. He didn’t just believe that it was pajama day, he knew. He didn’t believe that shoes aren’t part of a traditional pajama ensemble, he knew. That’s called conviction, and convicted people are what make the world go ’round.

Convicted people can also flip the world upside down, and that may or may not be a good thing. I suppose it depends on if the world being right-side up involves the “right side” being up.

I know my son is young, but the conviction he feels when making his decisions is already my most formidable opponent as a parent. He’s already willing to sacrifice the peace of our home to take the proverbial knee on any number of issues… issues that may feel trivial to me as his father, but issues that encompass his entire miniature kindergarten world.

Issues like turkey sandwiches being an acceptable breakfast food. Or whether standing directly in front of the television is the best way to consume content. Or pajama day.

Someday, his causes will be larger than food and dress. Someday his cause will be one that, when his stand is made, will make greater waves than making us late for school or planting the seeds for a blog idea in his father’s head.

When that time comes, as heroic as Nike’s “believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything” campaign might sound, some things might be worth hanging on to, even if they conflict with his beliefs.

This isn’t meant to be a comparison to Colin Kaepernick, or any of the connotations that come along with his mission to draw attention to racial injustice at the hands of authority figures. This is about my son throwing his shoes out the window.

Having those shoes on conflicted with his belief that he didn’t need them, so he tossed them away.

Someday the thing he doesn’t need in the moment might not be shoes. It might be might be something more consequential- like relationships. I need my son to know he can’t just throw out the people in his life in the times that he feels their presence conflicts with his current causes or needs.

Belief can certainly invite a need for certain sacrifices, but it doesn’t demand them. It’s my job to help him to never forget that he needs people, especially people that he doesn’t think he needs, to remind him that convictions are only worthwhile if shared with a community of people that can help see those convictions through.

Tucker Carlson Wants to End the War on Scrubs. As a Scrub, I say “What War?”

Tucker Carlson Fox News

I remember how hard it used to be to convince my wife to join Twitter. About the sixth time during each day that I’d burst into an immature cackle while scrolling through my feed, she’d roll her eyes, and I’d take that as my cue to try and convince her that Twitter was indeed a public good. I’d exalt the virtues of its use during instances of government suppression during the Arab Spring, or point out its real-time efficiency in figuring out traffic issues (people love to tweet about traffic while in traffic), but she knew the truth. I was in it for the nonsense.

Sometimes I wish I hadn’t have taken up the task of persuading her to join the fray. For one, I’d be able to avoid seeing all the Kliff Kingsbury-related tweets she favorites. (Apparently, he’s good looking?) But the biggest reason I regret my wife’s presence on Twitter is that she recently alerted me to a piece of video that has launched me into a tailspin of mind-numbing internal debate and dissonance.

“Studies Show”…

Maybe you’ve seen it, and perhaps I’m just reopening old wounds, but Fox News pundit Tucker Carlson recently let this bit of “wisdom” fly:

“Study after study has shown that when men make less than women, women generally don’t want to marry them. Maybe they should want to marry them but they don’t. Over big populations, this causes a drop in marriage, a spike in out of wedlock births and all the familiar disasters that inevitably follow, more drug and alcohol abuse, higher incarcerations rates, fewer families formed in the next generation.”

Here’s the point that Tucker Carlson was trying to make, summed up. White rural modern families now resemble urban families of the 1980s in that there’s rampant male unemployment, a drug epidemic, and an increased rate of births out of wedlock. And his culprit? Women making more money than men.
“This is not speculation; it’s not propaganda… it’s social science. We know it’s true.” Carlson opined, without citing any of the studies he so confidently referenced.
And who did Tucker Carlson blame for his assertion that poor white men can’t afford to put a ring on it? Rich, married folks.
“Here’s the bewildering and infuriating part. The very same affluent married people, the ones who make virtually all the decisions in our society, are doing pretty much nothing to help the people below them get, and stay married. Rich people are happy to fight malaria in Congo, but working to raise men’s wages in Dayton of Detroit? That’s crazy. This is negligence on a massive scale. Both parties ignore the crisis in marriage. Our mindless cultural leaders act like it’s still 1961, and the biggest problem American families face is that sexism is preventing millions of housewives from becoming investment bankers or Facebook executives.”

Modern Family

I don’t know where to start here. I suppose I’ll define where I’m coming from. I’m a work-from-home dad supporting a spouse whose income at her second job greatly outweighs my primary income. I know that on the whole, there’s little value in anecdotes, so take it for what it’s worth when I say I’m not just content in my complimentary role to my spouse, but that I feel, as much as anyone with four kids can, that we’re thriving. I mean, we’re drowning in life’s unceasing avalanche of responsibility, but as far as drowning goes, I feel like we’re doing a decent job. If we were on a metaphorical drowning talent show, I like to think Simon Cowell would be impressed.
Anyway, I’m happy. So maybe it’s the fact that I can’t relate that causes these comments to fail to resonate with me. Or perhaps it’s that I tend to be on the conservative side of things politically, which is where I thought Tucker Carlson resided. It’s hard for me to place the blame for society’s woes on the fact that women aren’t falling all over themselves to wear a white gown and recite vows across from “Cletus the unskilled laborer,” who grew up residing in a manufacturing graveyard and refused to pivot so he could support himself, much less an eventual theoretical family.

Correlation or Causation?

Is my gender having a crisis? Sure. And we always have been. The fact that some women make some money now isn’t the root of our ills. Correlation doesn’t prove causation. I seem to remember learning that one of the things that historically hyper-accelerates women’s participation in the workforce are the wars we testosterone-possessing Homo sapiens show an affinity for both generating and participating in.
There’s nothing more emasculating to me than Tucker Carlson’s assertion that the L’s that the male gender has been collecting aren’t even L’s that we earned. We’re all just victims in a dark timeline, and the reason we’re strung out on the trailer sofa, playing Xbox, and waiting for the coal mine to reopen, is so that we can at least enter some kind of tunnel since the fairer sex has abandoned us. And it’s all because some well-adjusted suburban couple was busy helping reduce the global malaria death rate 48% from 2000-2015. Those charitable bastards.

Is He Right?

Maybe Tucker Carlson is right. I mean, he isn’t. This is an aggressively anti-woman diatribe that also manages to make America’s men completely dependent on government assistance to get them a job and a partner. But for the sake of argument, let’s say that he at the very least has a point about the fact that women should be attracted to men who don’t make a whole lot of money.
I mean, that’s something I’m not going to spend too much time fighting him on. Especially since it worked out for me. My wife seems to have failed to heed the words of Rozanda “Chilli” Thomas, who once famously said, “Wanna get with me, with no money, oh no, I don’t want no scrub.”
I suppose another option for our gender would be to man up while manning up still implies exerting effort in order to overcome adversity. We could learn and develop marketable skills in order to attract a mate, and help take care of the kids we sire. Maybe we can stop acting like scrubs altogether?
But why would we do that when our TV talking heads are hanging out the passenger side of their Fox News ride, trying to holler that there’s someone else to blame?

LeBron James Should Not Regret Naming His Son LeBron Jr

Lebron James was on Uninterrupted and said that he regrets naming his oldest son LeBron James Jr. after him because there are so many pressures and expectations on him. I applaud LeBron for being a great dad who is concerned about the wellbeing of his son, but he is wrong here. Most people refer to his son as “Bronny,” not LeBron James, Jr. LeBron’s first name is not what creates the pressures and expectations on his son; it is his last name. That name carries a lot of weight and opens a lot of doors and opportunities out in the world. I would guarantee his son carries his name with enormous pride, and wouldn’t change it for the world. Think about the expectations of greatness that people will place on Blue Ivy, North West, or Mark Zuckerberg’s kids all because of their parents. Laila Ali, Ken Griffey Jr, Barry Bonds, and Brent Barry all had on them because of their fathers. When a kid has a parent that is highly accomplished, there are many unwarranted expectations placed on their children.

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The flip side of the last name is true as well. If your last name is Capone, Manson, Ridgeway, Madoff, Gotti or Kaczynski people will forms opinions and make judgments about you as well. It doesn’t matter what their family members first names are once people know who their father is.

People often forget the professional athletes and their children are human beings first. Just a couple weeks ago LeBron was at his son’s game, and people start chanting “overrated” to his 14-year old son. That was wrong and just mean-spirited to do to a middle-schooler. LeBron is used to the fans and heckling, but has to be fiercely protective of his kids like any other good parent. In the Uninterrupted clip, he says that the impetus for naming Bronny after him was to be everything his father was not; present and loving. He has accomplished his goal, but Bronny still has to forge his own path. It wouldn’t matter what LeBron named his son; his father would still be LeBron James.

I am George Wrighster, III. I am extremely proud to be the third generation and have my father and grandfather’s name. So, I know LeBron James Jr. is proud of his name as well. All good parents are concerned about their kids and worry about whether they are making all the right moves. LeBron can rest assure that he is doing all the right things for his kids. He is a present, loving, and positive example of a man, father, and husband to his sons. Most importantly, he is leaving a legacy for his kids that they are More Than an Athlete!

What do you think? Am I Wrighster or am I Wrong?