Every sports fan has that moment, usually in college, when they can finally say that they're watching professional athletes who are younger than them. For me, a 23-year-old, it was a relatively recent realization. And the frequent thought that occurs simultaneously — or at least did for me — is one that can be a little disheartening.
They're doing this incredible stuff and making millions of dollars at just 19/20/21 years old. What was I doing then?
But even the best professional athletes can sometimes relate to us on that front. Take Stephen Curry, for instance, who was asked what he was doing when he was 19 years old, which is the age of his rookie teammate James Wiseman. His answer should give you hope that, hey, maybe what we're doing in our late teens and early 20s isn't so bad after all.
No, no. I don't buy that. Someone like Steph Curry couldn't have been "searching" for frat parties. Frat parties were probably begging for Curry to be in attendance and choose them over any others.
And Curry was smart to hold his tongue about what exactly he was doing at those frat parties. He was just 19 years old, after all. We wouldn't want to set a bad example for Riley, Ryan and Canon, would we?
As usual, Curry was a little bit humble here, too. Sure, he could have been looking for some parties to go to and wasn't yet in the NBA like Wiseman. But he wasn't just some average dude, because average dudes don't average 21.5 points per game in their first college campaign, scoring 30 points to go along with four rebounds, three assists and three steals in that aforementioned loss to Maryland.
And if his NBA future wasn't clear then, it definitely became clearer as he got better every season and capped off his college career with a remarkable March Madness run.
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Meanwhile, Wiseman's future became fairly obvious earlier on. The No. 1 prospect in the RSCI Top 100 of 2019, all Wiseman needed was a total of three career games at Memphis — though he ideally would have played more — to secure his future and go as a top-three pick in the NBA Draft the following year.
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