Beyond the Game

Ronald Curry can’t help but give you the impression that he is a quiet person.

As he sits next to you answering all the questions you have, he leans over, forearms on thighs, and keeps his eyes forward for the most part. The eye contact comes, here and there, but it is far from constant.

His voice is softer than many of his teammates, perhaps bumping up a few decibels when he disagrees with something one of your questions implies.

But your impressions, your perceptions – these are things Ronald Curry is not very worried about if you are not a member of his family or someone he calls a friend.

Sitting there with Curry, you are somewhat automatically at arm’s length.

He attempts to explain why, not because he cares if you or any of the others understand, but because it is the polite thing to do.

“I’m not the loud guy out of the bunch, but I’m not a quiet guy,” Curry says. “I talk. Not a lot, but enough. My personality is not to feed off others, but to make sure everybody else is all right before I think about myself.”

That’s why he doesn’t really seem bothered by the fact that he’s clinging to an NFL dream instead of making millions in the NBA, the thing many people expected he would be doing at this point.

It’s why the losing is what bothers him – not the Achilles injury; not the three offensive coordinators in four years; not the way football changed his basketball future.

It’s why various tragedies in Curry’s family have affected him more than any game, season or career ever could.

But you don’t need to know about that, as far as the 22-year-old Curry is concerned.

“My private life is my private life,” he says. “I only let out stuff that needs to be let out. Some stuff needs to stay within the family.”

It’s the ultimate in irony, really. Ronald Curry, the young man who has been a celebrity of sorts since becoming a teen-ager, thrust into the public eye while tenaciously exercising his God-given right to remain intensely private.

It is 1998, Curry's freshman year at North Carolina.

Four students in a broadcast journalism class stand around him in his small room at Granville Towers, where UNC's basketball players live as freshmen.

They are doing a story assignment for class and are asking Curry about football and basketball, the two things people have asked him about since his first newspaper interview, the summer before he entered ninth grade.

Looking back now, Curry even admits that his initial reaction was excitement the first time he opened up a newspaper’s sports section and saw his name and his picture in print.

“I was more embarrassed by it because I thought people may look at me differently, especially my teammates,” Curry says today. “I never wanted to be that one to stand out. But it made guys look at me as the leader. It made me a better person.”

So as he stands in his room among the four students and their microphone, there is no doubt Curry is used to the questions.

Yet when he offers his responses, he is so barely audible that the student holding the microphone almost brushes it against Curry's lips several times in the effort to make sure the soft answers find their way onto the tape.

Well, those students think to themselves, I guess Ronald Curry is just quiet.

They didn't know he'd be pressed into action just a few weeks later when starting quarterback Oscar Davenport suffered a knee injury against Miami (Ohio) in the season opener.

They didn't know that would start the chain reaction that would so significantly affect the rest of his North Carolina career, the rest of his life, his future.

They didn't know that those events, combined with some emotionally trying times off the field, would change who Ronald Curry was.

“I’m a man now,” Curry says. “I feel like I was mature when I got here, but I’m a more mature person now. I came here as a young man, but now I’m a fully-grown man. I’ve been taking care of myself for four years.”

The bottom line in Curry’s decision to attend North Carolina was basketball.

He came to school to play hoops and football, but his initial choice – the verbal commitment to Virginia, the one that stopped everyone from asking all the questions about where he would go – was altered because of basketball.

When it came time for the top high school basketball and football player in the country to sign, the Cavaliers were without a basketball coach.

That turned the tide and sent Curry to Chapel Hill.

Many imagined he would play two years and then make his move to the NBA. Football was simply an added bonus.

The UNC football team’s then-coach Carl Torbush, now the defensive coordinator at Alabama, planned to either redshirt Curry or use him as a kick returner during his freshman season.

Davenport’s injury forced Curry into the starting lineup and into a football body.

Basketball was never quite the same for Curry. He came into his first season late after earning MVP honors for football in North Carolina’s Las Vegas Bowl victory.

That season he averaged 2.9 points and 1.7 assists per game in limited playing time off the bench.

Curry missed the entire next season recovering from a torn Achilles suffered while playing football.

It wasn’t really until last basketball season that anybody saw the impact Curry was capable of having on the court.

With freshmen Adam Boone and Brian Morrison running the point, Curry rejoined the team and settled things down.

The Tar Heels went on an 18-game winning streak following Curry’s return and vaulted to a No. 1 national ranking.

“He has this presence about him that really added a calm to our team,” UNC head basketball coach Matt Doherty says. “Plus, he’s a talented athlete and one of the best on-the-ball defenders I’ve ever seen.”

While he might have been an integral part of the team’s success, Curry was not the basketball star he had been in high school.

The kid who once had what most would call a sure-fire shot at the NBA now had to face the reality that the only future he might have in sports would be on the football field.

Despite having eligibility left, Curry says he probably won’t play basketball for the Tar Heels during the 2001-02 season.

But he’s never been bitter, never asked the dreaded “What if?” question as he prepares to leave basketball behind.

“I never really look back at what would have happened if Oscar didn’t get hurt and I went straight to basketball,” Curry says. “I never second-guess anything, that’s the kind of person I am. I always roll with the punches.”

The body blows from defenders coming through unblocked. The jabs from the media. The hateful hooks from disappointed fans. Those are the punches Curry has always found it easiest to roll with.

Those are the ones that don’t affect him, at least not in any way he lets on.

The blows that have sent Ronald reeling have always come from home, always come from death.

“When I’m at home, it seems like it’s always something,” Curry says. “Somebody’s sick. Somebody’s dying. This, that and the other. Mentally, it feels like if I’m not dealing with one thing, it’s another. I feel like an old man.”

Curry had already dealt with the death of his cousin Joemel – for whom he wears No. 1 in football and No. 22 in basketball – and his grandfather before losing the woman who raised him.

His grandmother, Mattie Curry, had battled illness for a long time. On more than one occasion, family members told Ronald that they didn’t think she’d make it through the night. He would travel back to his hometown of Hampton, Va., and once it seemed she’d be all right that time, he’d return to Chapel Hill.

Then one day, sitting in that Granville Towers room last October, he got the phone call that his grandmother had passed away.

Back home at the funeral, he struggled mightily with the loss, though he never revealed it to anyone outside his family that wasn’t on a need-to-know basis.

Now, Curry says, he realizes that his grandmother’s passing was probably the best thing for her, a release from the suffering of sickness.

“It was hard because I’ll never see her again,” Curry says. “But when I’d see her, sometimes she could talk and sometimes she couldn’t. She slept a lot. She was in and out of the hospital.”

The way Curry deals with these things, with such staunch public stoicism, no matter how much it hurts on the inside, impresses those who know what he’s going through.

Of course, that’s such a minute percentage of people compared to those who watch, cheer for, or berate Curry, that his supporters seem to stick up for him extra hard.

“He’s been through more things in life than most 60-year-olds,” says Torbush, Curry’s former head coach. “He’s been able to deal with adversity and stand tall in the face of it. He’s as fine a human being as I’ve been around.”

But even after losing his cousin and two grandparents, Curry would have his resolve tested one final time before his college career was over.

The week before Curry was supposed to be getting ready for his final homecoming game, against Wake Forest, he learned that his 12-year-old cousin Kenneth had died from asthma complications.

The young man who had seemingly been through it all now had yet another loss to deal with, and it was the toughest one to swallow for Curry.

“Back then, when I lost my first cousin, I really didn’t understand,” Curry says. “I was a person who didn’t really understand death that well. It was, ‘My man’s gone.’ But now, losing the 12-year-old, somebody who looked up to you and was just getting into sports, really enjoying life, that was probably the worst one I had to deal with. It’s still hard dealing with that one.”

When Curry returned from Hampton, he didn’t want anyone coming up to him and asking the obligatory, “Are you all right?” Thinking about his young cousin, trying to talk about it, brought tears to his eyes.

The football field has become Curry’s sanctuary, the place where he can escape from thinking about all of the heartache. From the opening kickoff until the final whistle, he knows he’s assured of a few hours peace from the things in life outside of football.

It’s the reason he still loves the sport, the reason he’s still chasing that dream of playing in the NFL.

Thanks to the after-effects of the torn Achilles suffered his sophomore year and the general sentiment of unfulfilled promise hovering about him, Curry knew he almost certainly wouldn’t end up a quarterback at the pro level.

But he couldn’t have imagined he would have to split time as one during his final season at Carolina.

During UNC’s rough 0-3 start on the road, redshirt freshman Darian Durant found some success in relief of Curry, prompting head coach John Bunting to come up with a plan – the dreaded two-headed quarterback.

Durant spent his time breaking most of Curry’s freshman quarterback records from 1998 as Curry clawed his way to several of UNC’s career quarterbacking marks.

Then the unthinkable happened. The same fans who rejoiced when Curry turned his back on Virginia in favor of Carolina turned on him.

Ronald Curry, arguably the best quarterback in UNC history, was booed by the home crowd at Kenan Stadium when he took the field against East Carolina. During the game in which he became the all-time leader in total offense at UNC, no less.

True to form, he remained unfazed when the fans made it obvious that they would rather see Durant – who Curry called “the people’s choice” – than him.

“I don’t feed into that. Never did, never will,” Curry says. “The only thing that hurts is when you go out there and lose. You let your teammates down. There’s a lot of armchair quarterbacks. There’s a lot of people that never wore a jock. There’s a lot of fair-weather fans out there. I don’t think there’s anybody in those stands who could come down and do what I do.”

So Curry remains upbeat about his shot at pro football. He says he most likely will start exploring his pro prospects in early January, once his final season at Carolina is complete.

Make no mistake, playing on Sundays is still a dream of his, but Curry will be happy even if he ends up in the regular workforce, like any other college graduate.

“I’ve been through so much stuff in my life,” Curry says, “if I never played another down of football, I wouldn’t lose sleep over it.”

That’s because the things that are important now to Curry are pretty much taken care of. He’s engaged, and he and fiancée Stacie Jones plan to tie the knot sometime in the spring or summer of 2003.

Ask Curry what’s most important, and he’ll tell you – wife, kids, comfortable life.

It’s hardly the elaborate fantasy some NFL-hopefuls conjure up for their futures, but that’s okay with Curry.

“I don’t need to be rich, I just want to be comfortable,” he says. “I don’t have to have all my wants, just all my needs.”

The longer you sit there and listen to what he has to say, the more you realize just how typical that attitude is of Ronald Curry.

It’s why he doesn’t care what you think. It’s why he comes off as “quiet.” It’s why those who do know him continue to be in awe of him.

For all the things that could be used to define Curry – the hype, the expectations, the ups and downs of his two-sport career – it’s probably a simple statement from his former coach that tells you all you need to know.

“If my son grows up like Ronald Curry has,” Torbush says, “I’ll be a proud daddy.”