“Boomshakalaka.”
Mark Turmell was a remarkably odd teenager who became an enormously successful adult for two reasons. The first was that he recognized from a young age what he wanted to do for the rest of his life and never strayed from his ambition. The second explanation for his phenomenal success was that he was a pyromaniac.
When he was a kid in the 1970s, he strolled around his Bay City, Michigan, neighborhood lighting matches along the gutters, walking away, and turning around for a peek, which provided him with the little thrills required to survive childhood. In that fleeting moment when he looked behind him, the unpredictability was so overwhelming that it felt to him like anything was possible. Sometimes there was nothing. Sometimes there was smoldering. And sometimes there was a raging fire. Mark Turmell loved when there was fire.
Turmell managed to keep himself occupied between his infernos by fiddling with computers. He had a friend whose father was a professor at the local community college, and every so often he let the boys play with the computer terminal in his office. Turmell quickly became obsessed with computers. To be more specific, he became obsessed with the video games on computers. He loved them more than he loved fire. Turmell began to sense that he was meant to make video games. He was so confident about his future line of work that he once told his algebra teacher that he didn’t need to study for her class because he wouldn’t need algebra when he was designing video games. The most amazing part of his pathetic excuse for not doing his homework was that he was actually right.
He was soon going to high school in the morning, taking computer science classes at that local community college in the afternoon, and staying on campus in the computer lab all night. “The only problem with having someone like Mark,” one of his professors said, “is that they never want to go home.”1 He was so maniacal about his craft by the time he was fifteen years old that he’d stopped playing his favorite sport, basketball, even though he had the advantage of being one of the taller kids in town, because any time on the basketball court was time that could’ve been spent playing with computers.
When he decided to buy his own computer, he pooled the money that he’d saved mowing lawns to purchase a brand-new Apple II. Turmell’s investment paid off almost immediately. All it took for him to spin a profit was some borderline criminal behavior. Turmell used his Apple II to hack into the community college’s network and poke around the sensitive information that schools pay large sums of money to keep private. Once he confessed to his intrusion, the college hired Turmell. It became his job to make sure no one else did what he’d already done. As word of his skills got around town, business got even better for Mark Turmell. Bay City’s engineers were so desperate for the expertise of a computer geek that at one point they put software for the local sewage system in the hands of this teenager who didn’t have a driver’s license yet.
While he was quickly becoming the richest kid in the neighborhood, Turmell wasn’t satisfied with his oversight of critical infrastructure. He dreamed of doing bigger things than cleaning the poop of Bay City. He still wanted to make video games, and now there was nothing stopping him. He’d bought the right computer, subscribed to the right magazines, and taught himself the right programming languages. The raw, teenage energy raging in his body kept Turmell awake late at night in his childhood bedroom tinkering on his Apple II. “I kept plugging away waiting for some roadblock that I couldn’t surpass,” he says. “The roadblock never came.”2
Turmell’s innate talent revealed itself in 1981 with the very first game he made. Anyone who played his shoot-’em-up called Sneakers could see it was the work of someone who knew precisely what he was doing, even if what he was supposed to be doing was studying algebra. Turmell shipped a copy of Sneakers using a new service called Federal Express to the company that made his favorite games, Sirius Software, not knowing if he would ever hear back. His phone rang a few days later. Sirius wanted to buy his game and guarantee him monthly royalty checks of $10,000. “My dad opened an account, bought some mutual funds, and poured some money in,” he says. “I had no idea what was happening.” When the most respected Apple II magazine named Sneakers one of its most popular releases of the year, the critical and surprising commercial success of Turmell’s first game only deepened his resolve. Sirius called again to dangle his dream job: a full-time position making video games. There was no longer any need for school. He moved to California to be with his people.
His reputation on the West Coast preceded him. One of the many people who knew Mark Turmell’s name before they met him was the guy who happened to be responsible for his computer. Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak’s company had recently gone public and made him a millionaire,3 and he decided to celebrate by asking his girlfriend to marry him. Wozniak had recently earned his pilot’s license and purchased a single-engine plane, and he thought it would be fun to fly down the coast to San Diego to visit her uncle, a jeweler who could help design their rings. But they never made it there. His plane crashed upon takeoff into the parking lot of a nearby skating rink. Wozniak was badly injured and spent the next few months battling a type of amnesia that prevented him from making new memories. He remembered everything that happened before he reached for the throttle and nothing in the five weeks afterward. Only later did he learn that he spent a significant chunk of that time playing Apple II games. When he recovered and felt well enough to finally get married, Wozniak sent a wedding invitation to the man who made one of his favorite Apple II games, a nifty little thing called Sneakers. It was the least he could do. Mark Turmell had restored his sanity.
Turmell was something of a celebrity at Wozniak’s wedding. At one point he was approached by another young geek.
“Mark Turmell!” he said. “We love your games.”
This stranger eventually got around to introducing himself. He had recently founded a software company near Seattle, and he wanted Turmell to come work for him. Would he be interested? “No, man!” Turmell said. He was too busy making video games.
And that was how Mark Turmell blew off Bill Gates. But only in retrospect was turning down the opportunity to be one of the first employees at Microsoft an unfortunate decision. The early 1980s were a great time to be the same brand of geeky as Turmell. He drove a red Porsche convertible. He was profiled in People magazine. He received hundreds of fan letters and even some marriage proposals in the mail. Teenage boys wanted to be Mark Turmell. Teenage girls wanted to be with Mark Turmell. By virtue of his talent making video games, he’d turned himself into a bona fide celebrity. He could have worked anywhere he wanted.
The only place anyone who could’ve worked anywhere he would’ve wanted to work was Midway. Midway’s office was the industry’s epicenter of innovation. The companies that worked together in this one Chicago building were responsible for creating or distributing a staggering number of iconic video games: Ms. Pac-Man, Mortal Kombat, Galaga, and so many others that it would be silly to keep listing them because that would mean omitting even more. It’s safe to assume that any American arcade game that gobbled your quarters was almost certainly launched by the Midway crew—which soon included the guy who had invented Sneakers.
Turmell was so highly valued at Midway that when the company president would walk into his cramped office to ask when his latest game might be done, “I would be able to literally say, ‘It’ll be done when it’s done. And get out of my office,’” Turmell recalls. He could tell his boss to scram because they both understood the harsh reality of their business: Midway sold games to distributors, the distributors sold games to arcades, and the arcades told the distributors how a game was performing. The distributors bought truckloads of that game from Midway if and only if that game was performing well. “There was no amount of marketing, hype, or promotion that could inflect sales,” Turmell says. “It was all about cashbox. Nothing else mattered. It had to make cash.” And Turmell’s gift was for making games that made cash.
The creation of games at Midway followed a meticulous process. Before they were ready to be unleashed on people who would hopefully feed trillions of quarters into the machines, Midway’s employees spent hours and hours playing and tweaking these games. Only when Turmell’s games had been poked and prodded and probed every which way did they make it to the world outside the Midway office. They didn’t travel very far. Their next stop was one of the experimental arcades nearby.
“You don’t know what you have in terms of a success or failure until you get it in front of a test audience,” Turmell says. “So we’d go sit there and watch.”
Mark Turmell was an expert at sitting there and watching. He’d been sitting there and watching for so long that he could predict within a matter of minutes whether one of his games would be a hit. When he visited Midway’s favorite test arcade one night in 1992, he realized that his latest creation was going to be the biggest hit of his career. The name of this game was NBA Jam.
There is nowhere the world’s most talented basketball players would rather come to work than Madison Square Garden. This arena smack in the middle of New York City has been the site of so many divine individual performances over the years that it’s amazing it also happens to be the home court of the moribund New York Knicks. But for all those majestic feats in the long history of the game’s most hallowed arena, there were three games that stood apart. Three players had returned to the visitors’ locker room having scored the most points in the arena’s history: Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, and LeBron James. The list of people who had conquered the Garden was an exclusive club of all-time NBA greats.
There was nothing to suggest that Wardell Stephen Curry would join their ranks when he walked into the Garden on February 27, 2013, as the evening commuters flooded Penn Station below. But it was strangely appropriate that no one was expecting much from Curry that night. He’d been very good at proving people very wrong for his entire life. Curry went to a small private high school and wasn’t supposed to be a big-time college player. When he became a big-time college player, he wasn’t supposed to be a good NBA player. When he became a good NBA player, he wasn’t supposed to be a great NBA player. He was baby-faced, unassuming, and about as intimidating as a cockapoo.
But there was one thing that Stephen Curry could do better than anybody who had come before him: shoot the basketball. While everyone in the NBA could shoot, no one in the NBA could shoot like him. The most dominant players had always been the ones who made extraordinary things look ordinary. Stephen Curry’s genius was making ordinary things look extraordinary.
As he trudged into the Garden that night, Curry was approaching an inflection point in his career. His bum ankles had sidelined him for most of the previous season, and his potential to change the game was still hiding somewhere inside of him. If you think of being a professional basketball player as a normal day job, which in many ways it is and in many more ways it is not, then Curry was similar to most twenty-four-year-olds who’d held the same job at the same company since college. His bosses had given him more responsibilities, and his annual raises and yearly bonuses paid him enough that he didn’t bother looking around for better opportunities. In the alternate universe where he sat behind a desk every day, Curry’s performance reviews would’ve been excellent, his recommendations for business school would’ve been glowing, and his adoring colleagues would’ve invited him to their weddings. He would’ve been the ideal corporate employee: highly competent, quietly confident, and extremely useful on the company softball team. He had come closer to working that sort of job than you might think.
When Curry was a college sophomore, his parents bumped into an NBA general manager after one of his games. His mother couldn’t help but indulge her curiosity. “Do you think Steph can make it in the NBA?” Sonya Curry asked. There was a reason that not even she could be sure that his future was in basketball. For all the genetic and socioeconomic advantages he’d inherited as the son of an NBA player, there was one severe disadvantage that he couldn’t overcome. “On every team he ever played on,” says Dell Curry, his father, “he was the smallest guy.”
The only way he could hold his own with bigger and better players, especially as they got even bigger and even better, was by changing the way he shot the basketball. This put Stephen Curry in a deeply ironic predicament. His shot had been his one great skill ever since he’d toyed around with the Fisher-Price baskets in his childhood home. But now someone was telling him that it wasn’t good enough. He listened only because that person was his father.
Dell Curry knew that Stephen’s strength would soon be his weakness. He could see that his son’s low release point meant that anyone taller than him would be able to block his shot. He could also see that everyone was taller than him. Dell took the drastic measure of making Stephen take a break from competitive basketball for a while. In the summer between his sophomore and junior years of high school, when other kids his age were juggling college scholarship offers, Stephen was busy teaching himself to shoot again. By lifting the ball above his head and releasing as he ascended, he was essentially making himself taller. But his learning curve was steep. He took hundreds of shots every day on the court outside his family’s stucco two-car garage, where crepe myrtle trees prevented the ball from bouncing into the pool when he missed,4 and he missed so often that he began to hate shooting. It was a brutal summer that made him miserable. He almost quit basketball altogether.
But that painful summer produced a weapon that Curry would have for the rest of his life. In that summer he became the best shooter the sport of basketball had ever seen. It was that summer that made him a college star and then an NBA player.
He was still in for another rude awakening once he got to the pros. He was good. He wasn’t great. When the Warriors played the Knicks in his rookie season, his first time in the Garden as an NBA player, Curry found himself planted firmly on the bench. He could have resigned himself to the fact that he would never be valued properly by the NBA and nobody would have blamed him.
Curry’s weapon was the slingshot of basketball. There was an obvious reward for anyone who could wield it: his shots were worth three points instead of two. And not since a biblical shepherd boy named David had the slingshot been used to such a devastating effect. But the slingshot wasn’t a bazooka. He still had to be selective about when he shot, where he shot, and why he shot. He couldn’t shoot too early in the twenty-four-second shot clock. He couldn’t shoot too far behind the three-point line. And he couldn’t shoot too much. That restriction was the one constant of his entire career until that February night in Madison Square Garden. Stephen Curry couldn’t shoot as much as it made sense for him to shoot.
But what if he could?
There is no getting around it. NBA Jam was a spectacularly bizarre rendition of basketball. The characters had cartoonish heads that were bigger than their entire bodies. It was perfectly legal for them to shove, elbow, or pummel the players on the other team. They swished full-court shots and somersaulted above the basket for breathtaking slam dunks. Mark Turmell’s creation defied the conventions of sports games because it wasn’t supposed to be like existing sports games. His inspiration was a sci-fi game called Primal Rage. This video game about basketball was modeled after dinosaurs fighting in a postapocalyptic society.
But from the very beginning, Turmell thought NBA Jam had the potential to be a big hit. His careful process for making video games started with turning his colleagues at Midway into guinea pigs, and his test subjects played his games so often they soon needed incentives to keep playing. So they bet. They became compulsive gamblers when they beta tested his games. They usually wagered candy bars. But when it was time for them to troubleshoot NBA Jam, their showdowns were unusually competitive. The developers chose a different form of currency for their bets: cold, hard cash. That was interesting, Turmell thought.
It wasn’t long after NBA Jam migrated to a local arcade called Dennis’ Place for Games that Turmell started hearing that something was wrong with his new game. The NBA Jam machine was malfunctioning. Turmell went to the arcade to check for himself. He quickly deduced the problem. It was true that the machine couldn’t take any more quarters, but not because the machine was broken. It was because the coin boxes were stuffed. The kids in Dennis’ Place for Games were feeding quarters into NBA Jam at such a furious pace that employees had to empty the machine every hour so they could keep playing. That was even more interesting, Turmell thought.
The usage statistics as they continued testing the game were off the charts. Every shred of data suggested that NBA Jam would be a sensation unlike any video game ever created. But Midway’s executives didn’t believe the data at first. “We thought the numbers that came back were screwy,” said Neil Nicastro, the president of Midway at its peak. “We hadn’t yet tested anything that had made that much money.”5
For a game to be successful in the summer of 1993, it had to earn about $600 per week in the test arcade. There was a thin line between groundbreaking hit and epic flop. If a game made $150, it was a bust. If a game made $1,500, it was a smash. NBA Jam made $2,468 in a week when no other game at Dennis’ earned more than $750. That number was so ludicrous that Turmell saved a physical copy of the earning report as proof. “Do the math,” he says. “It takes ten minutes to play a game. The arcade’s open for twelve hours. For that kind of revenue, you have to be playing almost nonstop every day.”
The commotion inside Dennis’ Place for Games was a preview of the delirium that would infect arcades across the country. Midway needed to sell about two thousand machines to make the game financially worthwhile, and NBA Jam would have blown away expectations with ten thousand sales. NBA Jam wound up selling more than twenty thousand machines. The mania surrounding Turmell’s game was neatly encapsulated by a nasty letter that one out-of-stock distributor wrote to Midway. “Your programmers have created a monster,” he wrote.
NBA Jam was too successful. It turned out to be one of the most lucrative video games ever made. In less than a year, NBA Jam earned $1 billion in quarters.
But why?
There was nothing obvious about NBA Jam’s success. The suits who had been skeptical of the numbers never could have imagined that even NBA players would play NBA Jam. It wasn’t because of the abnormal body types or the acrobatic dunks or even because it felt rebellious and a little bit cool to exhibit such a blatant disregard for the rules of basketball. They became obsessed with NBA Jam because of a subtle quirk in the game mechanics.
It was critical to Mark Turmell that each of his games included a goal other than beating the computer. There had to be an elevated state of ability that would compel people to keep stuffing coins into the cashbox. But the inherent problem with sports games was that they were difficult to gamify. They were already games. It was satisfying to win a basketball game, but so what? It wasn’t a superpower. Turmell was noodling on this problem one day when he went to Burger King for lunch. He ordered a chicken sandwich with cheese and only cheese. Turmell was always working, even when he was at lunch, and he mentioned his dilemma to another Midway developer named Jamie Rivett. “We need some kind of mode,” Turmell said.
By the time Turmell’s chicken sandwich with cheese was ready, Rivett had suggested an idea they both knew immediately was brilliant: on-fire mode. They sketched out the details over lunch, walked back to the Midway office, and implemented on-fire mode that afternoon. If a player made two shots in a row, they decided, then he would be heating up. If he made three shots in a row, then he would almost certainly make his next shot. It didn’t matter what kind of shot it was. The ball would burst into flames. He would be on fire!
This is why Mark Turmell’s arcade game was so addicting. Our minds are programmed to search for patterns. He simply programmed a tendency of the human brain that already existed into NBA Jam. We see one, two, three shots in a row and intuitively seek out the fourth. We crave order in chaos. Turmell made sure there was a reward for that behavior. He turned the hot hand into NBA Jam’s superpower.
Not long after that working lunch at Burger King, Turmell offered the voice-over role for his game to a local comedian named Tim Kitzrow. The script for the gig was two pages. It was exactly the sort of job that no one should have known about. But the test audiences in Dennis’ Place for Games became infatuated with Kitzrow’s voice. They kept feeding quarters into the NBA Jam machines because they wanted to hear a few of the game’s catchphrases.
“Boomshakalaka!”
“He’s heating up!”
And what they really wanted Kitzrow to bellow were the three words that came next.
“He’s on fire!”
Mark Turmell could relate. When he was the age of those kids in the arcade, he had a soft spot for NBA players who caught fire, the ones who made one, two, three shots in a row and everyone in the building knew they were making a fourth. His favorite player was the Detroit Pistons guard Vinnie Johnson, and his nickname was “the Microwave” because he heated up instantly. It wasn’t surprising that Turmell idolized Johnson, given his three childhood loves. The first was playing with computers. The second was playing basketball. But it was his third childhood love that explains why he insisted his basketball explode into a fireball when a player was hot. He would have been captivated by NBA Jam if he hadn’t invented it first.
NBA Jam became unavoidable for boys and girls of a certain age. They played so much that it was as if Mark Turmell had brainwashed a generation of young, impressionable minds into believing the concept of the hot hand. It was systematically drilled into them that anyone who made three shots in a row was almost certainly going to make the fourth. And there was one person who would never be convinced otherwise. This child had an excuse to play NBA Jam because his dad was in the game, and he could even pretend to play as himself since they technically shared a name. But nobody called this kid Wardell Curry.
They called him Steph.
The Golden State Warriors were late. There were three buses leaving for Madison Square Garden for their game against the New York Knicks, and Stephen Curry was supposed to be on the second bus. He was always on the second bus. But on this night, for some reason he can’t remember, Curry took the third bus. “Which I never do,” he tells me a few years later. He regretted the decision almost immediately. The third bus took an illegal turn out of the hotel, and the Warriors were pulled over by unsuspecting traffic cops.
When the bus finally chugged into the bowels of the arena, the players were tired and cranky, and this wasn’t entirely the bus driver’s fault. The night before had been a rough one for the Warriors. They had lost to the Indiana Pacers in a game that was spoiled by a nasty brawl. They boarded a plane, landed at some ungodly hour, and woke to the news that one of their teammates had been suspended and Curry had been fined for their roles in the fight.
So it had been a lousy day even before Curry found himself stuck on the third bus, dealing with the New York Police Department. But there was nothing he could do about that now. It was time for him to begin his warm-up routine in the Garden. This would be his escape. He started close to the basket, and he kept moving farther and farther back. Finally, as the fans took their seats, he was shooting from several feet behind the three-point line, the strip of paint on every court that was about to redefine the way the game was played.
The three-point line had been introduced to the NBA decades earlier because the biggest people in basketball were too dominant. The sport had become unfair. It discriminated against players like Curry on the basis of their height. With fans tuning out and the game desperate for a jolt, the most democratic solution the NBA could muster was simple math. They slapped a line on the court twenty-three feet, nine inches from the hoop for no reason other than it seemed like the right distance. Any shot within this line would be worth two points. Any shot behind this line would be worth three points.
There is another way of thinking about this radical shift in how basketball was played. The people responsible for the overall health of the NBA were tweaking the algorithm. The word “algorithm” today brings to mind geeks in front of computer screens writing the code that has come to govern our lives. But really an algorithm is a set of rules for solving a problem. When the NBA had a problem, the NBA rewrote the algorithm. The league changed the rules to make the game more exciting and to give players an incentive to stay behind the three-point line—the first in a series of unconnected events that allowed for the hot hand of Stephen Curry.
But the players didn’t respond to that incentive right away. In the 1979–1980 season, 3 percent of their shots were three-pointers. Only when their curiosity outweighed their suspicion did NBA players begin to recognize the three-point line as something other than a silly gimmick, and the proportion of three-pointers inched higher until it had reached 22 percent of the total shots in a season by the late 2000s. And then something funny happened. After nearly three decades of steady growth, the percentage of three-point attempts held steady for the next five years. It flatlined. NBA teams were behaving as if they had determined basketball’s optimal ratio. The sport had found its equilibrium.
But two things were about to happen that would blow that assumption to bits. The first thing was that Stephen Curry was drafted by a team that he didn’t want to draft him: the Golden State Warriors. They were so putrid and their owner was so reviled that he decided to sell the team not long after Curry fell into his lap. The second thing was that a collection of extremely wealthy people with little experience in basketball paid a record fortune to buy the Warriors. They rebuilt their NBA team around the bold notion that they should ignore every orthodoxy of building an NBA team. The construction process took many twists and turns, and there were times when it could have failed, but the eventual dominance of the Warriors can be traced back to one of the most unusual strategies they embraced. It was the notion that the three-point line was a market inefficiency hiding in plain sight.
For almost the entire history of basketball, ever since James Naismith slapped a couple of peach baskets on the wall of a gymnasium and created a sport, the most important area of the court had been around those hoops. The best shots in basketball were always the ones closest to the basket. Or at least that’s what people thought. The Warriors weren’t sure anymore. “When you can exploit the three-point line,” their general manager says, “closer is not necessarily better.”
The Warriors came to believe the three-point arc was a boundary in time. Inside the line was the game’s past. But the future of basketball was behind the line.
They were one of the first teams to realize they weren’t taking nearly enough three-pointers. But the great mystery and baffling paradox of modern basketball is what took so long. At the end of the 2009 season, right before Curry’s rookie year, a wonk for ESPN published an article in which he outlined the formula for basketball success: “If you want to exceed expectations, start bombing away from downtown. And if you want to disappoint everyone, stop.”6 He added, “It’s no wonder the rate of 3-pointers goes up every season . . . and why it’s likely to keep heading in that direction for some time.” Except it didn’t. At least not for a while. ESPN’s basketball expert wasn’t such an expert when it came to predicting the behavior of human beings.
How could a group of sophisticated thinkers be so wrong for so long about something that was so important? Pete Carril never understood it. Carril, the legendary coach of Princeton’s basketball team, was known as Yoda partly because he looked frighteningly similar to the Star Wars character and partly because he was a Jedi master himself. He recognized the value of three-pointers before anyone in his line of work. “I love the three-point shot,” Carril once wrote. “You know why? Because it means they’re giving us three points for the same shot we used to get two for.”7 It was so obvious that teams should be taking shots that were worth one more point that it was in the name of the shot. That common sense somehow made him a contrarian. But it wasn’t what he was saying as much as when he was saying it. Carril was encouraging his players to take advantage of the three-point line when Curry was still a baby.
The last win of Carril’s career came in the first round of the NCAA tournament in 1996. Princeton beat the defending national champion UCLA in an upset that was about as likely as Carril becoming an underwear model. And the world of college basketball reacted appropriately. It went completely bananas. But overlooked in the aftermath was the statistical omen that explained the shocking outcome: more than half of Princeton’s shot attempts that night were three-pointers.
As the game was ending, the television cameras panned to the UCLA bench and settled on a player stress-eating his shirt. He was exactly what they were looking for: the face of agony. Many years later, that very same player was hired by an NBA front office, and the team he built would shoot a whole bunch of three-pointers.
His name was Bob Myers. He was the general manager of the Golden State Warriors.
Born and raised in the Bay Area, Myers was a good high school basketball player who never intended to play college basketball. His plan was to join a crew team. The only reason he was on the bench during that game against Princeton was that he’d come to UCLA a few years earlier looking for the rowing coach. It hadn’t crossed his mind that he could play basketball there. In fact, before a similar visit to an Ivy League university, he’d written to that school’s basketball coach to schedule a meeting. Myers couldn’t even get the courtesy of a response. But as he wandered around the UCLA sports complex, he bumped into a basketball coach, who noticed that he was tall and encouraged Myers to attend a tryout. Myers took him up on the invitation. He made the team as a walk-on. He was on the bench as the Bruins won the national championship, and he soon found himself celebrating on the cover of Sports Illustrated. That was the thing about Bob Myers. He had a knack for being a part of big things as they happened. “We refer to Bob as our Forrest Gump,” his UCLA coach said.8
By the time he was a senior, he wasn’t just playing for UCLA. He was starting for UCLA. The same kid who couldn’t get a meeting with an Ivy League university that didn’t offer scholarships was now on scholarship as one of the five best players for a basketball powerhouse. And everybody loved Bob. That was actually the headline of a story about him in the school newspaper: “Everybody Loves Bob.”
He parlayed that experience, his charming personality, and the handy fact that everybody loved him into a successful career as a sports agent once he graduated. He was good at that, too, and he might have been content negotiating contracts forever. But when his local NBA team was sold, Myers asked for a meeting with the Warriors. He was itching to join another basketball team like the one he’d known in college. As he walked out of his meeting with Joe Lacob, the brash Silicon Valley venture capitalist who’d bought the team, Myers was absolutely positive that he would never be hired by the Warriors. For a while, he was right. Days passed. Weeks passed. Months passed. Myers had the same number of communications with Lacob as he did with that Ivy League coach. And then one day he got an unexpected call.
“Were you serious when you said this might be something you’d be interested in doing?” Lacob said.9
Myers quit his job to join the Warriors, and he was quickly promoted to general manager, the top basketball decision-maker for his favorite NBA team. Stephen Curry was one of the foundational pieces of the roster that he inherited. He was the reason Bob Myers would once again be a part of a big thing as it happened.
Myers had always sensed there was a psychological incentive to shoot more three-pointers. He knew from firsthand experience how demoralizing the three-pointer could be for the other team. He was still a little scarred by UCLA losing to Princeton. “I remember viscerally feeling that when you were rooting for a team and the other team hit a three-pointer, it felt like five points,” he says. NBA teams had stopped taking more three-pointers by then. That didn’t make any sense to the Warriors. It seemed like a good idea to take more of the shots that were worth one more point. “There are analytical reasons to do it,” Myers says, “but then I’m not sure many thought it was possible or prudent.” But sometimes the most obvious ideas are the most radical. Every now and then they’re also the most successful. “What’s really interesting in venture capital and doing start-ups is how the whole world can be wrong,” Lacob says. “No one really executed a game plan, a team-building architecture, around the three-pointer. Could you win with that?”10
It turned out that you could. But first your best shooter had to stop treating his weapon like a slingshot and start using it like a bazooka.
Only because of something beyond his control did all those loosely connected strands of wisdom braid together for Curry in the game against the Knicks. When the NBA reviewed tape of the brawl with the Pacers the night before, Curry had been one of the first players involved in the fight, when he charged a seven-foot-two, 280-pound giant named Roy Hibbert. The outcome was similar to what might happen if a mosquito attempted to tackle a moose. “I didn’t even feel him,” Hibbert would later say.11 What saved Curry was his size. He wasn’t big enough to do any damage in a fight involving NBA players. For his entire life, Curry had been smaller than everyone on the basketball court, and it had always been a disadvantage. But for this one night it worked to his improbable advantage. The league decided to fine him $35,000 instead of suspending him.
He was amazingly fortunate to lose so much money. The Warriors needed scoring against the Knicks. They had no choice but to free Curry. He was going to shoot more than ever before, and they could only hope that he got hot.
It took him until the second quarter to make his first three-pointer. But one minute later, he made another, longer three-pointer. He was heating up. The next one came a minute later. By any objective measure, it was a bad shot. Curry stole the ball and sprinted across half-court in a straight line on his way to the rim. But instead of continuing toward the basket, which is what almost everyone who had ever played basketball would have done, Curry stopped. He was choosing to stay behind the three-point line. There were two defenders between Curry and the rim who appeared to be shocked by his audacity. Curry was trying a low-percentage shot when a higher-percentage shot was available. He was taking his chances with three instead of accepting two. When the ball dropped through the net, he could hear Tim Kitzrow shouting the NBA Jam catchphrase.
Stephen Curry was on fire.
He tried another three-pointer one minute later as he was falling away from the rim several feet behind the arc. This shot was as outrageous as it was ridiculous. It didn’t look like it was going in. And then it did. Of course it did! He had the hot hand. “Most locked in I’ve ever been,” he recalls. “Any time I got a glimmer of daylight, I let it go.”
When athletes like Curry get hot, they take a puff of the powerful, legal performance-enhancing drug otherwise known as confidence. In the same way that getting a compliment from your boss makes you work harder, hitting one, two, three shots in basketball makes you want to shoot again. The normal chemistry of your brain gets washed away by a flood of dopamine. The frontal lobe begins to act like it’s temporarily disconnected from the nervous system. Your muscles melt into Jell-O. You stop thinking. You start behaving intuitively.
But you don’t have to be Stephen Curry to be familiar with the feeling of being soaked with adrenaline. One person who could relate to him was Creighton University forward Ethan Wragge. Heavily bearded and slightly overweight, like a lumberjack who got lost on his way to the forest, the closest that Wragge would ever come to an NBA game was buying a ticket. By almost every basketball metric, he was completely mediocre. Except for one. Wragge was a magnificent shooter.
There were practices when he made so many shots in a row that he lost count. It wasn’t difficult to figure out how to defend him. The most important part of the scouting report on Wragge—maybe the only important part of the scouting report on Wragge—was knowing not to let him shoot. But there was one night when Creighton played Villanova University and the ball went to Wragge on Creighton’s opening possession. He swished it. That one shot was all it took for Wragge to feel like he was heating up. He was seeing things in slow motion. It was like everyone around him was staggering drunk and he was dead sober. As soon as he hit one shot, he wanted another shot. Wragge tried a deeper shot the next time Creighton had the ball. Again: swish. So he hunted for a third shot. “I feel like it’s going in no matter what,” he says. He was right. Wragge’s third shot went in. So did his fourth shot. And his fifth shot. And his sixth shot. And even his seventh shot. By the time he finally missed, Wragge had scored twenty-one of his team’s first twenty-seven points, one of the most amazing shooting exhibitions anyone had ever seen. “It was, like, this automatic, unconscious feeling,” he says. “I don’t even know how to describe it.”
The unscientific name for that automatic, unconscious feeling is “the zone.” The zone is a lovely place to be. As it happens, if you needed to describe the zone in two words, you could do worse than “automatic” and “unconscious.” The scientists who have actually bothered studying these “flow states” have begun to recognize that acquiring the hot hand is a result of thinking less, not more. The person who pioneered this line of work is a Hungarian American psychologist named Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who has spent almost sixty years thinking about the flow state. That’s a lot of thinking about flow. What he learned is that being in a flow state is an immensely pleasurable experience. “The way a long-distance swimmer felt when crossing the English Channel was almost identical to the way a chess player felt during a tournament or a climber progressing up a difficult rock face,” he wrote. “What they did to experience enjoyment varied enormously—the elderly Koreans liked to meditate, the teenage Japanese liked to swarm around in motorcycle gangs—but they described how it felt when they enjoyed themselves in almost identical terms.”12
The hot hand made them happy. That’s the reason Curry, Wragge, and everyone who has felt the hot hand remembers it so fondly.
That night in the Garden was not Curry’s first experience with flammability. The first that others remember was when he was six years old and played for a team that was actually called the Flames. But the first that he remembers was in the eighth grade. The Currys had moved to Canada, and Stephen and his younger brother, Seth, enrolled at Queensway Christian College.13 “We were a small little Christian school where everyone who tried out made the team,” says their coach James Lackey. “It was the two of them and a bunch of guys who’d won three games the year before.”
Queensway won every game the year that Stephen Curry arrived. He caught fire so frequently that his coach often shook his head in sheer wonder and thought, What the heck just happened? Curry’s last explosion came in front of an abnormally large crowd for a basketball game between eighth graders. Queensway was playing a team that bullied Curry as if NBA Jam rules were in effect. It worked. Down by six points with one minute remaining, Lackey called time-out. He figured his team had no chance to win. Since this was still nominally a middle school basketball game, he wanted to remind his players to keep their composure after the loss and congratulate their opponents when the game was over. Or at least that’s what he was planning to say. Curry stopped him in the middle of his sportsmanship lecture.
“We’re not losing,” he said. “Give me the ball. I’ll make sure we win.”
“Okay,” Lackey said. “I guess that’s the play from now on.”
They gave Curry the ball. He proceeded to make four three-pointers in the next thirty seconds. Queensway won. Curry’s past is littered with so many of these tales that they begin to seem mythological. Lackey swears this one is true. And there is no reason not to believe him: the guy teaches at a Christian school in Canada.
Why did Curry have the hot hand that day? Why did Curry have the hot hand on any day? Was it physical? Was it mental? Was it some bowl of cereal that he scarfed down that morning or a lucky seat on the bus that got pulled over on the way to the Garden? Curry himself doesn’t know. He can’t predict when he’ll be in the zone. But he knows he must do everything in his power to remain in that flow state for as long as possible.
“Once it happens,” Stephen Curry says, “you have to embrace it.”
Curry missed his next shot against the Knicks. If he were in NBA Jam, he would have returned to his normal ability. In this real NBA game, Curry didn’t take another three-pointer for the rest of the first half. But it wasn’t because he suddenly decided that he was lukewarm. It was because the Knicks understood as well as the Warriors that Curry was still hot. His teammates refused to touch his right hand because they didn’t want to cool him off. “There was nothing anybody could do,” said Carmelo Anthony of the Knicks, “except hope he misses.”14
But there was something they could do: not let him shoot. The Knicks sent double-teams at Curry. They trapped him whenever he touched the ball. Their goal was no longer to beat the Warriors. The only thing they cared about was not letting Curry shoot.
Curry knew what it was like to be the sole focus of five other basketball players. When he was a budding star at Davidson College, there was one game when Loyola University Maryland’s coach tried to beat Davidson by not letting Curry shoot. His strategy was to double-team Curry no matter where he was on the court and no matter whether he actually had the ball. This coach would rather his team play three-on-four than five-on-five. Curry realized the folly of the plan, stood by himself in the corner, and dragged two Loyola defenders with him. That meant one of his teammates would always be open. Curry could have been eating nachos with fans in the front row and he still would’ve been helping Davidson. When he noticed that two guys were shadowing him everywhere he went, Curry figured he might as well get to know his babysitters. “Are you guys really double-teaming me the whole game?” he asked them. They didn’t know what to say, so they didn’t say anything. The gimmick would have been interesting if it weren’t such a complete disaster. Curry was college basketball’s leading scorer, and he finished the game against Loyola with zero points. Davidson won in a blowout.
But now the Knicks were more or less going with the Loyola game plan. Curry knew that meant one of his teammates had to be open, and he passed to those open teammates for easy shots. His shooting demanded so much attention that it had become easier for everyone around him to succeed. There’s actually a delicious basketball term for this: “gravity.” Curry always had the gravity to suck a defense close to him. But his gravity when he had the hot hand made Curry more like a black hole. His momentum warped the game around him. Both teams behaved as if Curry was probably going to make his next three-pointer, and their collective belief in the hot hand was as powerful as the hot hand itself. There was no one on the court who didn’t believe in the hot hand. In fact there may not have been anyone in the NBA who didn’t believe in the hot hand. “I haven’t met that person yet,” Curry says.
It wasn’t any easier for him to find open shots when the second half started. The Knicks chased him around the court like they were trying to drench him with a bucket of ice water. But his first shot after halftime was all it took to convince him to keep shooting. As soon as he touched the ball, he reminded himself to remain under control when his defender charged at him. He pump-faked—not unlike my own pump fake when I had the hot hand—and watched that defender fly past him. He centered himself, launched the shot, and took in the supreme beauty of his swish.
Curry hadn’t cooled off. Once he confirmed that he was scorching, he launched three-pointers that would have earned anyone else a permanent spot on the bench. One from three feet behind the line while double-teamed. One from five feet behind the line. One with a gigantic seven-footer in his face as Curry fell on his butt.
There was a certain sound that accompanied these shots. It began as he released the ball and fans drew a collective breath of anticipation. The pitch rose as their lungs filled. It peaked in a hysterical crescendo as the ball traced a parabola toward the rim. But his shots originated from so far away and followed such a high arc that all these fans ran out of oxygen. That was the noise: the Curry note. It was more recognizable as a shriek.
The last Curry note of the night came at the end of the fourth quarter, when he grabbed a rebound and seemed to be running to the other basket before he even had the ball. He took two dribbles to cross the half-court line. He took one more dribble to slow his momentum. And then he shot. In the millisecond it took for him to levitate, the equation of the possession had tilted Curry’s way. His defenders were caught flat-footed. Curry was rising above them. The ball hadn’t even swished through the net before he was backpedaling across the court in celebration. He galloped the length of the floor until he was underneath his own basket again. It was as if Curry were literally on fire and needed to extinguish himself. He was that hot. “I’ve never been to quite that place before,” he said afterward. “Not ever.”15
The stunned Knicks fans gave this player from the other team a standing ovation. They didn’t know what else to do. Curry had scored fifty-four points—the most points he’d ever scored in a basketball game. In the history of the NBA, no one had taken so many three-pointers and made as many of them. He’d discovered the sweet spot of volume and efficiency.
The three-pointer was no longer a slingshot. Stephen Curry had made it his bazooka.
What happened in the Garden that night wasn’t an anomaly. It was an epiphany. His performance emboldened Curry to believe that he could shoot more and that he should shoot more. He’d been fully unleashed for the first time, and the results had been astonishing. He’d broken the game.
Curry had the full encouragement of the Warriors’ brass to keep shooting after that night. Their decision was part strategy, part stumbling upon something that worked, and part being smart enough to see that Curry would be at his most effective only if he was permitted to do things that nobody had ever done. In his career before that game, he averaged eighteen points, attempting five three-pointers per game. In his career after that game, Curry averaged twenty-six points, attempting ten three-pointers per game. Curry began shooting as many three-pointers as possible, which was more three-pointers than anyone ever thought possible. There was nowhere on the court that other teams could afford to leave him open. He was a better shooter from thirty to forty feet than the average NBA player was from three to four feet. He turned heaves from near the half-court logo into better shots than slam dunks. He set a record for the most three-pointers in a season, and then he shattered his own record by more than 40 percent. It looked more like a statistical error than a statistical outlier. What he did was almost beyond comprehension. It was the equivalent of Roger Bannister running his four-minute mile in two and a half minutes.
That night in Madison Square Garden when he had the hot hand turned out to be the night that changed Stephen Curry’s life. Within two years he was the most valuable player of the NBA. Within three years he was the first unanimous most valuable player in the history of the league. Within four years he was the most influential basketball player alive. The Warriors became an NBA dynasty built around Curry’s ability to shoot a basketball. At the peak of his popularity, fans were coming to Warriors games hours early to watch his warm-ups. But what they really hoped when they paid to see Curry in person was that it would be a night when he got hot. There was simply nothing in sports more thrilling than watching Stephen Curry get hot.
If you ask him for his career breakthroughs, those transcendent moments when he began to feel that he’d achieved what he could only imagine when he was a child playing NBA Jam, Curry will tell you about three.16 There was the time he won his first championship. There was the time he was invited by the White House to golf with Barack Obama. But none of this would have been possible if not for the third moment: the time that he was on fire.
The surfers were catching the last waves before sunset as I walked into a beachfront restaurant on a typically perfect evening near San Diego. The sky was pink. The windows sucked in a soft breeze. The air smelled of salt and grass and sweat. And yet I had the nagging feeling that something was off. I finally realized why. It was such a pleasant summer night that no one was playing with their phones. And the only person who had any reason to be upset about that was the person I was meeting for dinner.
Mark Turmell was now in his midfifties. He was still tall enough to be a basketball player, but he was softer in the belly, and his sandy hair was short and spiky, as if it were apologizing for all those years that his perm fell below his shoulders. Turmell sat down and ordered a cheeseburger with only cheese, just the way he liked his Burger King chicken sandwich. He whipped out his iPhone and scrolled through photos of his wife, whom he had met online, which seemed appropriate. Of course he married someone who was in his life because of a computer. Before long he was scrolling through his apps to show me what he was doing at work these days. It was the same thing he’d been doing for almost forty years. Turmell was still making video games.
He was working for Zynga, the company to blame for addictive games like Words with Friends and FarmVille, and it was his job to keep people glued to their computers and phones in a way that felt so natural they didn’t even notice. He was outstanding at his job. Turmell could’ve built an actual farm with the productive hours that people had wasted playing Zynga games.
When he was hired by the company, his bosses had begged him to make a “Ville” game. But once again Turmell had another, more ambitious idea.
The first game he released was called Bubble Safari. It had all the makings of an arcade classic and would’ve fit right into Dennis’ Place for Games. It was also stupendously dumb. The main character was a monkey named Bubbles, and he was on a mission to rescue his girlfriend, who had been captured by poachers. The only way that Bubbles could sustain himself on his chivalrous expedition was by gathering fruit, and the only way he could gather fruit was by matching pieces that popped the protective bubbles around the fruit. And that was basically it. That was the entire game.
Bubble Safari went live in May 2012. It was the fastest-growing game on Facebook by June. It was more popular than FarmVille and Words with Friends by July. It spawned Bubble Safari Ocean—which was like the original but set in an ocean instead of a jungle and with baby crabs instead of monkeys—and by January that game had become equally addictive. There was a time when more than thirty million people were playing Bubble Safari.
That the most popular game on Facebook was about a monkey gathering coconuts and strawberries on his way to rescue another monkey wasn’t as fanciful as it sounded—at least not to Turmell. It reminded him of an experience from earlier in his life. Bubble Safari had a surprising number of things in common with NBA Jam.
“The mechanics are the same,” Turmell says. “The key to being successful in this type of market that’s so saturated is to have innovation, surprise, and delight around every corner.”
NBA Jam had secret characters and crazy dunks. Bubble Safari had sticky bombs, paint splats, and double rainbows. And there was one more thing they had in common.
When a Bubble Safari player made three matches in a row, Bubbles’s ammunition turned the color of a basketball. He was no longer shooting fruit. Now he was spewing flames. Boomshakalaka! Bubbles the monkey was on fire. Turmell swore to himself after the success of NBA Jam that he would use the hot hand in every game he developed for the rest of his life. This childhood pyromaniac was still playing with fire.
Was there more at stake for the Golden State Warriors than the kids inside Dennis’ Place for Games? Of course there was. But the great insight of Mark Turmell was that Stephen Curry and some pimply teenager with a few quarters in his pocket were really chasing the same thing. They both wanted to take advantage of the rules that controlled their environments to transcend their places in the world. The reward for the NBA Jam player was a brief feeling of invincibility and the sound of Tim Kitzrow saying a bunch of funny words. The reward for Curry was an NBA championship.
There was a whole universe of people who had devoted their careers to understanding why NBA players and NBA Jam players behaved in similar ways. Mark Turmell had been too busy making video games to know this. He actually didn’t know much of anything about this idea called the hot hand. And he didn’t know exactly how much he didn’t know.