Stephen Curry was perfect, now he’s just Stephen Curry

The shot fell from his fingertips, and Stephen Curry induced mania. The 2015-16 Golden State Warriors snapped viewership records. Fans swarmed them on the road, lining up hours before the game to watch the aficionado hone his greatest trick: A jumper that could withstand any distance, pressure or resistance thrown its way. 24-0. 73-9. The NBA’s first unanimous MVP.

I documented the phenomenon a year ago: Curry was not only magnetic; his magnetism was based in a desire to witness history in the making. His brilliance turned the Warriors into a stand-in for inevitable victory. For fans, there was a veiled promise: follow him to the end of the earth, and you will be rewarded with a transcendent story, delivered by this generation’s emotional stand-in for Michael Jordan. Sick of hearing what it was like to watch His Airness? Check out the millennial version. And oh how the old guard hated him. He was ours.

His style was revolutionary yet familiar. He fired off haymakers, and in the same minute, ceded ball control to Draymond Green. Curry had an old schooler’s individual bravado but he didn’t offend modern basketball sensibilities. Menacing like Kobe, yet righteous like LeBron, Curry was a well-adjusted hero. His lack of discernible interior flaws felt like a refreshing change of pace. He seemed, in our fragmented era, like an incorruptible good, a safe haven of sorts.

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But just as soon as I fell in love with inevitability of Curry, I became bored by it. He went from being awe-inspiring in his perfection, to representing a form of perfection that felt blase. Today, Kevin Durant leads the Warriors. Under Armour is bleeding. Curry’s reputation has cratered from that of a top-3 player to a short-lived phenomenon, an extended Linsanity.

I wasn’t the only person felled over by a weird emotional attachment to Curry, which is probably why his fall has been as precipitous as his rise. And his trajectory, more importantly, has taken an increasingly familiar route in the online age: A hero rises, seemingly defying odds, and inspires. He captures us, and takes on the status of a deity. Time passes. The hero suffers from overexposure, we find out one or two things we don’t like about him. Worse yet, the hero eventually proves he isn’t perfect. He’s merely human. Our sense of betrayal, considering the psychic toll he’s taken over us, is scathingly acute. It’s not his fault, but we lash out anyway. The Curry 2 What Are Those edition. Nauseatingly gender normative Ayesha. But don’t let that spouse or those shoes distract you from the fact that the Warriors blew a 3-1 lead in the Finals.

At one point, he was so easy to love. And then, too easy. It tugged: no struggle; no redeeming arc. It occurs to me now that, aside from from playing basketball at a small college and being, like, sort of small for the NBA, Curry’s upbringing left him with very little to adjust to. That Curry was afforded the luxury of practicing his jumpers under the tutelage of a former NBA player as his father was no fault of his own, but it become a point that, in light of how inspired I was by his levity, became increasingly hard to ignore.

Consider, for a moment, a variant of the Stanford marshmallow experiment, conducted in 2012, wherein the ability to delay gratification is tested. Children were given a marshmallow, and told if they waited a specific amount of time before eating it, they would be rewarded with a second marshmallow. Those placed in an environment where the experimenter was deemed as reliable, as opposed to unreliable, were more likely to wait. In another variation, published in 2016, wait-times fell on socioeconomic lines. People who grew up in environments where they could trust in authority, or in the arrival of a reward that was not always tangible, are more likely to be able to delay gratification. So of course Curry ceded ball control, and welcomed Kevin Durant to his team with open arms. It’s easier to convince the son of an NBA player that sacrifice is always rewarded. It’s likely the examples that contradict that ethos are, in his experience, anomalies. Under this light, it becomes hard to ignore that the reason he can be both squeaky-clean, affably nice, and an a uber-talented alpha guard — the baby assassin and all — is rooted in privilege. Even perfection is imperfect. It shines too bright a light on everyone else’s reality.

This, too, becomes hard to ignore: A year ago, I marvelled at how Curry, in our fragmented era, could represent everything. Today, I’m increasingly inclined to believe it’s because he was a blank slate for us to project our desires on. In the age of micro-marketing and unfettered access to niche entertainment, we’re already conditioned to demand relatability. When we think we’ve found it, we’re moved, and when it falters, we experience collective disillusionment.

Curry’s numbers mimic that of his first MVP tour, and his bedazzling accuracy still has the power to overwhelm. There are moments, too, when the old sense of inevitability creeps in. It was this season, after all, that he broke the single-game record for 3-pointers, unleashing thirteen long bombs on the New Orleans Pelicans. He remains sensational, yet he pales in comparison to that Steph Curry, the one who retired to memory’s attic.

That Steph Curry was perfect. Maybe one day, we’ll stop hating him for it.