Let Us Now Praise Giant Men | Things That Must Be Done

Let Us Now Praise Giant Men is a basketball column by Liam Baranauskas. This edition is about Steph Curry’s shot and the 1996 Republican primary for U.S. Senate in Alabama.

I recently bought a massive hardcover copy of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, an entertaining if dubiously sourced Victorian-era account of historical episodes in which groupthink trumped logic, including but not limited to the Dutch tulip craze, the Crusades, and the science of alchemy. I lost the copy I’d had (for some reason) on my childhood bookshelf, but have found myself thinking about it a lot lately, for probably obvious reasons.

The used edition I bought online came with a long inscription on the flyleaf, next to a helpful Post-it on the facing page reading “Frank—Note on flyleaf. –Bud.”

“To Frank McRight—It is a fact that groups of people behave in ways that are most illogical. And I used to believe that such behavior was unique to the times I live in. Where I got such a notion is a mystery.

This book will convince you that such totally illogical behavior, exhibited by groups, has been with us always and will continue. That’s the bad news. The good news is that such periods of idiocy always come to an end. So not only is there always hope, that hope is always well founded.

You have my admiration and gratitude for the personal sacrifice you are making to accomplish some things that must be done. –Bud Albritton 2/29/96.”

Listen: I love finding other people’s ephemera in used books. Usually it’s simply a receipt (rarely for the book itself) or a bookmark from a long-shuttered bookstore, but sometimes I find a more charmed object. A newsprint-thin 1980s LIRR ticket in a Virago edition of Lolly Willowes. A card from a funeral in Darcy O’Brien’s Murder in Little Egypt. Did someone actually bring this trade paperback of Donald Barthelme’s City Life to Metallica and GNR at the Meadowlands in 1992? These are glimmers of other lives, other stories, layered over the ones in the books’ pages, unrelated yet somehow making those printed words more real by deepening their histories with unexpected but oddly intimate detours on their paths from the authors’ consciousnesses to mine. I always find myself imagining the books’ former owners falling asleep while reading them. I picture their bedrooms. Rain hits their windows. I wonder what they dreamt of.

Inscriptions tend to be short and somewhat vague, but this one was a jackpot. First and last names of both giver and recipient. The weirdest date on a calendar. Multiple paragraphs. Conspicuous underlining! The tonal certainty, and the vague but portentous ending. Of course, I looked up the principles, trying to figure out exactly what these things that must be done were, twenty-five years ago.

William P. “Bud” Albritton was a degreed engineer who founded a technical services corporation in Huntsville, Alabama, primarily doing business with NASA and the Department of Defense. He passed in 2014 of pancreatic cancer, according to his obituary in the Huntsville Times. Frank McRight, on the other hand, is still with us. A labor lawyer who once argued a case before the Supreme Court, in 1996 he ran for the U.S. Senate, losing in the Republican primary to eventual winner (and future Trump administration Attorney General) Jeff Sessions. Was this his “personal sacrifice”?

My research didn’t lead me to anything about his campaign platform or shed any light on any things that must be done, circa 1996, and I even masochistically watched an archived debate on C-Span between Sessions and his Democratic opponent Roger Bedford to see what issues in mid-90s Alabama might have rivaled the Dutch Tulip craze for crowd-driven insanity. Bedford (a comically wooden Krasdale-brand Bill Clinton in a baggy suit) and Sessions talked about taxes, gun control, and NAFTA. By the standards of today’s politics, they agreed on more points than you might expect.

I emailed McRight at the address on his law firm’s page, telling him I’d bought a book that was once in his collection and was curious about its inscription. I didn’t really expect a reply.

He wrote back: “Received your email and would like to help.”

When Kevin Durant left the Warriors after the 2019 Finals (a series in which he tore his Achilles and Klay Thompson’s knee exploded, injuries that would cost each player more than a full season), a weird thought was in the ether around what would be, once again, the Steph Curry–led Warriors. Curry had spent three seasons of his prime deferring to Durant (almost Curry’s equal as a shooter, and certainly a more complete player) while the two were teammates, but before that, he had spent two years in a wild, deeply strange ascent to stardom. It was reflected in shooting percentages and points per game but was more than that; no one had ever made shots from as far out as often, and plenty of those long threes early in the shot clock had, before Curry, been universally considered “bad shots,” to be excised from the offensive diet of any winning team. What’s more is that Curry’s shot simply didn’t look like anyone else’s. On television, the ball broke the top border of the screen almost as soon as it left his fingertips, and hung above that upper margin for a beat or two longer than normal before reentering the frame. Essentially, sometime in 2014, Curry expanded the boundaries of the court in every dimension—length, width, height, and time—and played on this court alone for two years, a living ghost slipping through the other nine bodies on the floor.

Everyone seemed to recognize it. By the 2015–16 season, Curry’s ascendance was a cultural moment of a type that now seems quaint in its universality, more like the finale of M*A*S*H* than like anything that’s happened since. It seemed to be a moment when even people who didn’t care about sports were cognizant of something unique happening. And it doesn’t matter if this is actually true—this is what it felt like. During this era, as his shot was in the air, everyone watching believed it was going in. In a road arena, the crowd would quiet for that split second, while in Oakland they got even louder. Watching on TV, you believed too, as sure as if you were watching a replay. I know he already hit this shot, even though it’s still falling. Even if you were rooting against him, it felt, on some level, like your part in that collective belief guided the ball as it dropped almost vertically from the rafters, often through the rim, frequently barely seeming to disturb the net, as Curry ran back downcourt with the shit-eating grin of an amateur magician half-shocked that, yes, that really was your card.

So before the 2019–20 season, it didn’t seem ridiculous to wonder if, without Durant or Thompson to help shoulder the offensive burden, we’d see if Curry truly could get his shot anytime he wanted. What would it look like if he shot with Iversonesque volume? Would he hit ten threes a game? Could he average forty points? Fifty?

He didn’t come close. Curry got hurt four games into the season, to return last year shooting about as often and efficiently as before, no more, no less. Now, even with Curry healthy and the Warriors in the Finals, the dream of that hyperbolically incendiary 2019–20 season seems more absurd than what actually happened: the playoffs held in empty gyms at Disneyland, players in jerseys with acceptably socially-conscious slogans in lieu of their names, surrounded by flickering magic-lantern projections of fans’ faces. Golden State, with Curry shut down, was not invited.

This year, the Warriors—again healthy and with a roster dotted with talented young players developed during those two lean years—are very good again, but Curry spent the latter half of this season in a slump, one that’s extended through the playoffs. It’s weird to call it that; I’m writing this after Golden State’s win in Game 4 of the finals against Boston, a series in which Curry is so far averaging 34.3 points on 49 percent shooting from three. He was named the best player in the Western Conference playoffs and finished eighth in the MVP race this year. But his shooting percentages were near career lows through large stretches of the season and his stat line in this series is inflated by the very beginning of Game 1, when the Celtics inexplicably and repeatedly left Curry open and he made six of his first seven three-pointers. He scored just two points in the fourth quarter, when Boston went on a 40–13 run to close the game out.

The simple explanation is that this is the beginning of the end, that age and injuries are starting to catch up to him, but like his ascent, Curry’s decline feels different. It’s not just the oddly inconsistent free throws (around 80 percent for the playoffs, practically Ben Simmons territory for one of the best foul shooters of all time) or the spidery dribbling through brambles of defenders’ hands that now seems to lead to a turnover as often as a miraculous emergence near the rim. It seems like the collective belief in the singularity of his shot has waned, to the point that I wonder if it was ever really, actually there. There’s rarely any hushed anticipation anymore when the ball leaves his hand. Even when he hits shots, they seem flatter, ordinary, nothing like those beautiful, high-arching rainbows that took forever to find the bottom of the net. They could have been shot by Otto Porter. All that’s special is a glimmer, the memory of some strange, intangible magic that might not exist anymore in whatever world we live in now.

Frank McRight can’t say exactly what Bud Albritton is referring to in his inscription, though he agrees the time matches up, more or less, with the beginning of his Senate bid. I’ve been somewhat dreading our conversation since he agreed to it, worried, mainly on the basis of my own preconceived notions, that the trail of coincidence I’ve followed is going to lead to a dead end of diatribes about rigged voting machines and Critical Race Theory in kindergartens. But though we’d probably have fundamental disagreements about any number of specific issues, McRight—eighty-three years old and “mostly retired” from his law practice—speaks thoughtfully and with nuance and warmth. I like him. The Alabama in his voice is less in his drawl and more the way he’ll begin an answer to my questions with “Well, Liam,” and a long pause, which even over the phone reads as the bemused, appraising eye contact I’ve felt before from Southern men of a certain age.

He explains that he got into politics campaigning for Jimmy Carter in the wake of the “outrage” of the Nixon administration before unsuccessfully running for Congress in 1984 as a Democrat. Belying the stereotypes I was dreading, he launches into an explanation of how the conservative embrace of trickle-down economics presaged our current political state of near-collapse. “[Much of the] Republican policy favored people with money and disfavored people without money, who needed it,” he says. “They couldn’t package that into a winning political message, so they came up with the so-called supply-side economic theory. What was it, in the Depression, in the late twenties and early thirties, I think we proved that supply-side didn’t work so well. And it was really putting enough money in the hands of people such that the demand-side theorists were proven, maybe, to be more predictive in terms of economic outcome.”

Eventually, embracing an economic theory that went against the interests of those they were selling it to, in McRight’s view, led the Republican party to focus on culturally conservative grievances—gun ownership, immigration, racial issues, moral permissiveness, etc. “The people that make their living off of running campaigns,” he says, referring to his own Senate run, “will say to you that you’ve got to find out what messages sell. That is, what people believe.”

The problem, he says, is that negative messages are far more influential with voters than positive ones. McRight believes that condoning his campaign’s early negativity diluted the less salable, positive messaging on traits he thought would have made him an effective senator. He seems to genuinely regret, on a moral level, what sounds to my ears like a fairly tepid anti-Sessions slogan on his bumper stickers.

“Even though I’m not a participant anymore, I still worry a lot about where this country is headed,” McRight tells me. “I hate the signs of giving up democracy.”

For all its charms, the issue with Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds is that it takes the fact of a bubble’s popping as evidence of its fundamental worthlessness. But bubbles are indicators of value (economic, moral, or otherwise) created from nothing more than belief, which is actually kind of amazing in the power it gives to the human mind. It’s the direction of that belief—to be reductive, whether it’s a belief in something that’s cool or something that sucks—that determines whether that bubble is worthy or not. Tulips: cool. The Crusades: sucked. Alchemy, especially as a science based on metaphor (lead and gold being analogous to base and holy levels of the human soul) practiced by scores of the world’s wildest minds despite (or perhaps because of) the apparent impossibility of its central premise: very cool.

You know how drug commercials state how effective a pill is versus a placebo? What’s unsaid is that the placebo also worked, and often quite well. The fraudulence of wellness hucksters selling ayurvedic CBD-infused Covid-19 repellent spleen pillows doesn’t mean your mind doesn’t have the incredible ability to cure your body, at least somewhat effectively, based on an incorrect belief.

It’s McRight, not me, who puts forth that the current political environment in the United States resembles something from the book Albritton gave him. “I’m not sure the conditions are right for any kind of fundamental change,” he says.  “I don’t see anything in the near horizon that would cause it other than some sort of failed experiment with autocracy, which I honestly believe would be so fundamentally flawed that there may be some sort of uprising.” In response, I read him the inscription Bud Albritton wrote near the beginning of his Senate bid. “Not only is there always hope,” I read. “That hope is always well founded.”

McRight is quiet for a while before saying, “I think Bud is the sort of person that would be more optimistic than I feel is justified at this moment.” He pauses again and then says, “I liked him a lot. And he was someone that would be easy to like a lot.”

Bud Albritton, McRight says, was a believer.

In Game 2’s third quarter, Curry breaks a spurt of mediocre play by hitting a three from the top of the circle over the futilely waving arms of both Al Horford and Jaylen Brown, Horford recovering after Curry dances him into the hardwood. A few minutes later, Curry navigates a screen and hits another three from almost the same spot. The form on his shot is as concise as always, the ball leaving his hand almost before you realize he’s entered his motion, but they’re line-drive shots from right behind the line, and though the crowd explodes when they go in, there’s no time for any anticipation of inevitability to build, even if it were going to.

In a few days, Curry will explode in the second half of Game 4 to beat Boston almost single-handedly, mostly with an accumulation of plays like this; difficult but not unlikely three-point shotmaking, along with some savvy midrange floaters and well-timed and-ones. For most of Game 4, the Warriors trail and until Curry goes off, it has the flavor of a game in which the better team will slowly but inexorably pull away, and in its push against narrative headwinds, this game is maybe more impressive than anything else he’s ever done—Curry’s virtuosity defeating the Celtics’ superior size, athleticism, and teamwork. But the result is also a surprise, closer to the story of an unlikely mythological hero than one of collective triumph. Think of it as supply-side sports, Curry’s individual glory trickling down with dubious adequacy to the rest of us.

But on this possession late in the third quarter of Game 2, Curry walks the ball up court and willfully dribbles into a thicket of Boston defenders near the sideline. After this, Curry will defer to Jordan Poole for the rest of the quarter and then come out of the game for the final twelve minutes of a Golden State blowout. It’s Poole, not Curry, who’ll hit an absurd, forty-foot three at the end of the quarter. Everyone plays on a court with the dimensions of the one that was Curry’s alone just a few years ago.

Curry rises from the “A” in the Chase Center logo, at least five feet behind the line. This time, the crowd gets louder, slightly but perceptibly, as his wrist flicks and the ball leaves the top of the frame. They—and I—illogically believe again. This shot is cool. It’s a throwback to when these Steph Curry shots expanded our collective boundaries around not just what’s possible, but what is. Our hope is always well founded. The ball stays gone for longer than it seems it should.

Liam Baranauskas is a writer from Philadelphia.