THE SHOT THAT SHOULDN’T EXIST
The video starts in grainy, off-center cell phone footage, the kind that usually captures locker room celebrations or pre-game hijinks. Stephen Curry, in his Warriors warm-ups, is standing not on the court, but in the concrete bowels of the arena. The tunnel. The industrial, fluorescent-lit passageway meant for moving equipment and people from Point A to Point B.
It is the least basketball place in the entire building. The hoop is a distant speck of orange, a full 70 feet away, around a corner, through an opening, at the opposite end of a corridor of cinderblock and pipes.
He dribbles once. Twice. There is no crowd roar here, just the echo of the ball on concrete. He doesn’t set his feet in a stance. He doesn’t seem to aim. It’s a fluid, almost dismissive motion a flick of the wrist that looks like he’s tossing a crumpled piece of paper toward a trash can.
The ball sails down the tunnel, a lone astronaut on a silent mission. It disappears from the frame, arcing into the arena’s light. A beat of silence. Then, a sound the pure, nylon swish that is the same in an empty gym as it is in a packed Finals game. The camera pans, zooming down the tunnel to prove it wasn’t a trick. There it is, nestled in the net. The people holding the phones lose their minds, screaming, collapsing in disbelief.
But Steph? He just smirks. A little shoulder shimmy. He turns and walks away like he just checked the mail. This is the clip that broke the internet in 2025. Not a game-winner. Not a record-breaking three. A shot taken in a hallway, for no reason, with no stakes.
The comments exploded: “He’s not human.” “How does he even see the rim?” “The league needs to drug test TUNNELS now.” It was treated as a magic trick, a party trick, a freakish display of otherworldly talent. But everyone got it wrong.
This shot wasn’t an anomaly. It was an autopsy. It was the final, undeniable proof of who Stephen Curry has always been. That swish in the empty tunnel wasn’t born in 2025. It was born in a Charlotte gym in 2002, when a scrawny high school kid was told he’d never play for a major college. It was born in Davidson, North Carolina, when he was the punchline of a “mid-major” joke.
“TOO SMALL”: THE TWO WORDS THAT BUILT AN EMPIRE
To understand the tunnel shot, you have to understand the first shot that ever mattered. It was never taken. It was the shot nobody would let him take. Wardell Stephen Curry II was born into NBA royalty the son of Dell Curry, a legendary shooter in his own right. But genetics are funny.
Dell was 6’6″. Steph stopped at 6’2″ on a good day, with a frame so slight he looked like a strong gust of wind from the Carolina coast might snap him in half. In high school, he wasn’t just overlooked; he was invisible. He poured in 40-point games for Charlotte Christian School, but the letters from college coaches didn’t flood in.
The big programs North Carolina, Duke, Virginia glanced at the scouting report and saw a liability. “Too small to defend.” “Too weak for the ACC.” “A defensive turnstile.” They saw a body. They didn’t see the brain, the hands, the heart.
The only school that offered him a glimmer of hope was Davidson, a tiny liberal arts college whose basketball program was a cute footnote in the basketball-crazed state. Even his father, who knew better than anyone what his son could do, tried to steer him toward a more secure path.
He begged Steph to consider Virginia Tech, where Dell was a legend, where he could ride the bench safely for a few years and get a good education. Steph looked at his father and said no. He would go to Davidson. He would play. He would prove it. This was the first tunnel shot.
It was the first time he looked at a target no one else could see a future from a program no one respected and took the shot everyone told him was foolish. He wasn’t just choosing a college; he was choosing the harder path, the path of having to be undeniably, historically great just to get a footnote of the respect automatically given to less-talented players at bigger schools.
THE DAVIDSON PROPHECY: WHERE “IMPOSSIBLE” BECAME A WARM UP
Davidson wasn’t a stepping stone; it was a laboratory. It was here, in front of crowds smaller than some high school games, that Curry began conducting the experiments that would warp the very fabric of basketball. Coach Bob McKillop gave him the ultimate gift: freedom.
The freedom to shoot from anywhere. The freedom to fail. In practice, they didn’t run plays for 25-footers. They didn’t have to. Steph would just pull up from that distance because he could. Teammates would shake their heads. Coaches would stifle a grin. It was absurd. It was also repeatable.
Then came March 2008. The NCAA Tournament. Davidson, a #10 seed, against the #7 seeded Gonzaga Bulldogs. This was supposed to be a polite first-round exit. With Davidson down by four with under a minute to play, Curry caught the ball on the right wing.
He was 28 feet from the basket a laughable distance for a college kid in a clutch moment. He rose, and the Gonzaga defender, respecting the drive, took a half-step back. It was all the space he needed. Swish. The shot that cut the lead to one wasn’t just a big shot; it was a manifesto. It screamed that the geometry of the game was wrong.
The three-point line wasn’t a boundary; it was a suggestion. Davidson would win that game, and the next, and the next, storming all the way to the Elite Eight, within a shot of the Final Four. Curry became a national phenomenon. But the old doubts just got louder.
“Great story, but it’s a mid-major.” “His shot won’t translate against NBA athletes.” “He’s a system player.” The tunnel was getting longer, the target smaller. And all he did was keep shooting.
THE NBA’S $4 MILLION MISTAKE AND THE ANKLE THAT ALMOST ENDED IT ALL
The 2009 NBA Draft should have been a coronation. Instead, it was a referendum. Six teams passed on him. The Minnesota Timberwolves, holding the fifth and sixth picks, took two point guards Ricky Rubio and Jonny Flynnbefore the Warriors finally stopped the slide at seven.
His rookie contract was for four years, $12.7 million. For context, the #1 pick, Blake Griffin, got $23 million. The league valued the explosive power forward nearly twice as much as the revolutionary shooter. This was the NBA’s $4 million mistake, and it was the best thing that ever happened to basketball.
But then, the physical doubters seemed prophetic. The ankles. The cursed, brittle ankles. In his third season, they betrayed him completely. He played only 26 games. He underwent reconstructive surgery. The whispers weren’t whispers anymore: “Bust.” “Injury-prone.” “Too fragile.”
The Warriors, unsure of what they had, offered him a contract extension that was widely seen as an insult—four years, $44 million, a “prove it” deal for a player they didn’t fully believe in. Steph, betting on himself the only way he knew how, signed it. Then, he went to work.
He rebuilt his body, his gait, his strength. He turned his greatest weakness into the foundation of his immortality. The broken-down ankles became the launchpad for the greatest shooting career in history. People forget how close Curry was to being written off, not as a star, but as a NBA player, period. The tunnel was dark, and the only light was the faint glow of a rim 94 feet away that everyone told him he’d never reach.
THE FOURTH RING AND THE FOREVER ARGUMENT
The final, lingering doubt was always, “But can he do it without…” First, it was without a stacked team. Then, after the KD championships, it was, “But he didn’t win Finals MVP.” The goalposts kept moving because his game was so unorthodox, so predicated on skill over athletic dominance, that the old standards of greatness didn’t fit. Then came 2022.
The Warriors were written off. Klay Thompson was coming off two catastrophic injuries. Draymond Green was aging. The league belonged to Giannis, Jokic, and the new giants.
And Steph Curry put on a performance for the ages. In the clinching Game 6 of the NBA Finals in Boston, he scored 34 points, grabbing his first Finals MVP. But it was more than stats. It was a masterclass in sustained, pressurized greatness. It was the final seal on his legacy.
He had now done it all: the unanimous MVP, the scoring titles, the 73-win season, and now, a championship as the undisputed, carry the team alpha, silencing the last of the haters. He completed the journey from “too small” to “too great.” The fourth ring wasn’t just another trophy; it was the period at the end of the sentence. The argument was over.
THE TUNNEL SHOT, DECODED: IT WAS NEVER ABOUT THE SHOT
So, back to the concrete corridor. Back to the flick of the wrist. Why does this shot, more than any of his game-winners, feel so quintessentially Steph?
Because it has zero practical value. There is no game situation, ever, where he will need to shoot from a tunnel. There are no points awarded for it. No defender is guarding him. It is basketball reduced to its purest, most childish essence: Can I make that? For Steph Curry, that question has never been answered by logic or physics. It’s answered by repetition, by belief, by a lifetime of shooting at targets everyone else said were foolish.
The tunnel shot is the spiritual successor to every crazy shot he took in his father’s gym as a kid. It’s the cousin of the half-court shots after practice. It is the physical embodiment of his entire philosophy: There is no such thing as a bad shot if you’ve practiced it enough.
The rim isn’t 70 feet away. The rim is wherever he decides it is. The court, the tunnel, a parking lot they’re all just backdrops. The only thing that matters is the space between his brain, his hands, and the hoop. And he has spent 30 years shortening that space until it became nonexistent.
