Winning cures many things. But winning gold might just cure everything. For that, thank Stephen Curry.
By beating France, 98-87, in Paris in the gold medal game of the 2024 Olympics on Saturday, the USA men’s basketball team didn’t just keep its country where it belongs in the pantheon of international basketball. The Americans silenced all the drama that accompanied them to this spot.
Jayson Tatum getting benched in multiple games? The near loss to South Sudan in a warm-up game? Serbia dominating most of their semifinal before a late charge by Curry & Co.? Steve Kerr’s questionable rotations?
It was all suddenly gone, replaced by the glitter of gold, flattened in a flurry of Curry 3s — eight of them! — that set another mark of his greatness and lifted USA to the heights of international basketball.
Curry scored a game high 24 points, was 8 of 12 from 3-point range, and had 12 crucial fourth-quarter points. He showed again why he is a top-five player in the history of the game.
Even Kevin Durant’s Twitter barrage lamenting Nikola Jokic fans praising the Serbian in his loss to Team USA on Thursday — which I, for one, would certainly tag as a bizarre and petty social media spree — faded under the greatness of Curry’s performance and the magnitude of Olympic gold.
That’s the thing about winning for your country, and just winning, especially when it has that particular hue of an all-time great performance: The ultimate goal has this way of erasing the details of how it was accomplished.
Just like the Tatum saga would’ve gone full DEFCON 1 had America lost a couple days ago, the end result is often more important than what we remember, even more important than the truth. The details that accompany these moments along the way almost always give way into a history painted in much broader strokes — it’s the magic we remember, not the other stuff.
Not if you win, like Team USA did Saturday.
And Saturday was magical. It was special. And it does matter.
“Two years ago, when we won our last [NBA] championship, I knew that this was going to be on the horizon as something I was excited to go after,” Curry told NBC after winning gold in his first Olympic Games. “…These last five weeks together with this group has been nothing but ‘1-2-3 gold.’ That’s all we’ve been saying. So, for us to finally accomplish that, for me to get a gold medal is insane.”
Take LeBron James and Kevin Durant, too, the pillars along with Curry of this generation of basketball. This will likely be their final Olympics for their country, and the excellence they showed en route to the medal they earned was nothing short of spectacular.
LeBron notched in this run what was then only the fourth triple double in the history of the Olympics, and his gray beard and his aging body seem to enhance the effect of realizing how special this was, how fleeting his greatness must surely be.
Durant, too, had moments of sizzling greatness that would defy belief if we hadn’t seen it before. Early in this Olympic run in particular, he was able to step up and set the tone for American dominance.
And Curry, of course, provided one of the greatest Olympic performances we’ve ever seen in the fourth quarter of this gold medal game.
The drama, the mistakes, the close calls, the Twitter tantrums, the questions we all had — they were real when they happened, and they were mostly legitimate, too.
But that’s what all-time greats do: they push aside the real life struggles and doubts and mistakes and difficulties that would fell most of us lesser men, and turn such things into the background noise of success.
Their performance — particularly Curry’s Saturday night — will be remembered so much more for its gold medal history than the histrionics surrounding it.
