Here’s the irony about having children. You start out thinking you’re going to teach them, mold them and make an impression on them. At some point, you are startled to realize you’re working a two-way street.
The light bulb is currently burning brightly above Stephen Curry’s head.
Curry, 30, is a father of three now, two of them wide-eyed young girls who are making an impression on dear old dad.
“Riley and Ryan are growing up so fast,” Curry wrote in an essay for The Players Tribune published Sunday. “And with Ayesha and I suddenly seeing things through the eyes of these daughters of ours, who we brought into this world, and now are raising to live in this world … you know, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that the idea of women’s equality has become a little more personal for me, lately, and a little more real.”
This can’t be overstated: Like the rest of the Warriors’ core five (and coach Steve Kerr), Curry is a thoughtful sort with an awareness of the world outside his own head.
“I want our girls to grow up knowing that there are no boundaries that can be placed on their futures, period,” he wrote. “I want them to grow up in a world where their gender doesn’t feel like a rule book for what they should think, or be, or do. And I want them to grow up believing that they can dream big, and strive for careers where they’ll be treated fairly.
“And of course: paid equally.”
Curry recounts his upbringing with a strong mother, “an incredible and fiercely principled woman” who opened a school. And if you’ve been playing along the past few years, you know that Curry’s wife Ayesha is a restaurateur.
Curry? He does more than just write about things. Earlier this month he hosted a basketball camp for 200 girls in Walnut Creek.
“But I think it was also something more than that,” Curry wrote. “I think it was also the sort of thing that can help to shift people’s perspectives. And so eventually we can get to a place where the women’s game, it isn’t ‘women’s basketball.’ It’s just basketball.”
The camp wasn’t merely about hoops. The campers heard from “several successful women in sports and business, which historically have been fields dominated by men.”
Curry wrote that 6-year-old Riley currently aspires to be a “basketball player cook.”
“In all seriousness,” Curry wrote, “to have a daughter who thinks her parents are alright enough role models that she wants to be like them… it’s a blessing.”
And (I’m guessing as a father of two girls), vice versa.