Maybe it would be different if Eddy Curry had lived a different life, if he’d had a different experience, if he was one of those late-blooming teenagers who don’t know what it’s like to be tall until the back end of high school, if he hadn’t had eyes lasered on him and fingers pointed at him since he was 13 years old.
Maybe then this would all bother him more, the growing ugliness directed his way every night at Madison Square Garden, where fans still vividly recall what it was like to have one of the greatest centers ever born patrolling the paint every night.
It’s funny, too: so many of these same patrons who now wish to genuflect whenever Ewing’s name is mentioned, they spent an awful lot of Ewing’s time here focusing on everything he wasn’t, and on the one thing he lacked: namely a fat diamond-encrusted ring for his finger, and a banner to flank the retired No. 33 lying in state from the Garden’s pinwheel ceiling. Now, in memory, Ewing is a cross between Russell, Chamberlain, Reed and Mikan.
“I don’t ever compare myself to Patrick,” Eddy Curry said quietly yesterday morning at the Knicks’ training facility, a few hours before he would have another go at matching up with Yao Ming and the Houston Rockets at the Garden. “I mean, I would love to be able to be compared to him some day, but I have a lot of work ahead of me to get there. I’m just trying to improve more day by day. I’m still young. I’m still learning.”
Certainly Isiah Thomas has never been wary of reminding anyone who will listen that Curry is just 23 years old, that he won’t turn 24 until Dec. 5. Curry was exactly six days old when Ewing, then a Georgetown sophomore, met Ralph Sampson, a Virginia senior, in their only matchup as college phenoms, a game Sampson won but Ewing dominated.
It was a game that featured two big men who chose to play four years of college back when that was still a viable option (though both were tempted to come out after each of those four years) and who prove on the one hand (Ewing’s) that playing four years of college can be a springboard toward greater things, and on the other (Sampson’s) that just because you log those four years you’re bound for a shingle in Springfield.
Those who wring their hands about Curry suffering for missing out on the “development” offered him in college the same hands constantly wrung about Kwame Brown miss the greater point about the current state of Curry’s career. For him, it will never be enough to be a solid player which, even his critics must concede, he is this year, at 13 points and 6 ½ rebounds a game.
Because Curry has been tabbed for greatness from the moment he walked into a gym towering over teammates and classmates. That’s how it happens. That’s how it’s always happened, going to the very beginning of the sport.
“The center match-up is just that, one of five match-ups in a game,” Thomas insisted again yesterday morning. “To make it more than that is to forget that basketball is supposed to be all about the team.”
But Isiah surely knows better. His whole life, he had to prove and re-prove himself because he was an averagesized kid, and an averaged-sized man, in a game that worships height and always has. It was the spring of 1997 when Eddy Curry Sr. was first approached by sneaker-company representatives about his son, when Eddy Jr. was first being showered with offers of gifts and trips and all manner of graft.
He was 14 years old. He was 6-9. He was an eighth-grader at Dirksen Elementary School.
“My whole life,” Curry said, “people have asked me why I wasn’t as good as they wanted me to be. I’m used to it.”
Big men get that their whole lives, no matter who you are. As Jeff Van Gundy said yesterday, “People are far less patient when it comes to big men as to small men. Small players get a lot more time to develop. Tonight, someone is going to get criticized, no matter what happens. Ether Yao will, or Eddy Curry will.”
That should probably be no surprise to Yao by now. It certainly isn’t to Curry.