The Warriors superstar’s forceful defense of his wife over an on-screen kiss has exposed the ugly double standards and fragile masculinity of sports’ manosphere
If Steph Curry is leading with his full government name, know that he means business. In a 90-second video released on Wednesday, from the Instagram account of “Wardell Curry”, he put the internet trolls who have been attacking his wife for years on notice. “Usually the noise doesn’t bother me, doesn’t bother Ayesha,” the four-time NBA champion and Paris Olympic knockout artist said. “But when you’re trying to step on the accomplishments of my wife, and feel the need to have to jump in and give an opinion on something that you really don’t know about, [it] kind of speaks to the bigger conversation on how you view women in this world and what they’re allowed and what they’re not allowed to do.”
Posterity will remember this as the NBA’s Oscar slap moment, but without the unnecessary violence. A bizarre turn in the parasocial compact when the restless fanboys pressured a superstar into publicly defending his wife. On this occasion, Curry had to defend his wife for the heinous crime of being the leading lady in a Christmas romcom: a Hallmark knockoff called Second Chance Holiday in which Ayesha Curry plays a dating expert with bad holiday luck and shares a kiss with a man who is not Wardell Stephen Curry II – her husband of 15 years and father to their four children. That apparently was a bridge too far for some of Curry’s former NBA peers.
On a recent episode of his We Said What We Said podcast, former NBA mainstay Gilbert Arenas reserved an entire segment to take exception to Ayesha turning down the role of basketball tradwife. “She doesn’t act like the other superstars’ wives,” Arenas said. “You know Jordan’s wife. Cookie, that’s Magic’s wife. Savannah [James], right. We don’t want to hear from you. We just want to know you’re there. You’re fine. You’re taking the pictures, but we don’t want to know you.” Arenas went even further, calling Ayesha “the only blemish” in the Curry family as Nick Young, who played alongside Curry on Golden State’s 2018 championship team, nodded along. Arenas should consider himself lucky that Steph responded in a strongly worded social media statement instead of going the Javaris Crittenton route and pulling a gun on Arenas in the locker room.
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Sports gossips have been making a game of picking apart Steph and Ayesha’s relationship since he shot to stardom at Davidson College. They seem to forget that while Steph was stealing hearts as the NCAA Tournament’s baby-faced bracket buster, Ayesha was carving out a solid career in Los Angeles as a working actor, with guest spots on Disney’s Hannah Montana and on CBS’s Gary Unmarried opposite comedian Jay Mohr – who is now the other half of LA Lakers president Jeanie Buss, incidentally.
The critics blanched when Ayesha joined the 2010s culinary craze with a blog and a YouTube channel, in which she shared dangerous, subversive recipes such as “Stephen’s five-ingredient game-day pasta”. When the hustle mushroomed into a full-blown lifestyle brand – with signature kitchenware and cookbooks, a Food Network show and a landmark CoverGirl deal – the gossips filleted Ayesha for daring to upstage her more famous husband, the real Chef Curry.
No matter what Ayesha did, it seemed, there was no winning over sports fans steeped in the manosphere’s retrograde views of women. They didn’t approve of her sharing bikini photos online or her body language in snaps with Drake or her candor about the struggle to hold on to her sense of identity and autonomy after marriage and motherhood. The point was driven home yet again when ex-NFL players Emmanuel Acho and LeSean McCoy, perhaps misunderstanding the concept of acting, debated the Curry kiss on their macho podcast – with Acho suggesting that Ayesha, through her words and actions, keeps telegraphing to the world that “she’s not that into Steph Curry”.
Intimacy work has become a wedge issue in Hollywood, with a number of prominent actors saying they will no longer participate in kissing or sex scenes – forcing some directors to get creative. But the Curry speculators aren’t arguing about the mechanics of making movies – a point Steph himself hastened to rebut in his video statement. They say this stuff as if they know the Currys. They don’t. They say this stuff as if they’re also still with their teen sweethearts. They’re not – and Acho especially is one to talk. They say this stuff as if audiences might also interpret Ayesha’s on-screen kiss as an act of adultery. They won’t. They’ll just let the 78 minutes wash over them as they fold laundry or scroll through their phones.
These manosphere brains insist on typecasting Ayesha while giving other prominent athlete spouses plenty of runway. The recent marriage of Coco Jones, the Grammy-winning singer and star of the Fresh Prince update Bel-Air, and Donovan Mitchell, engine of the Cleveland Cavaliers, is treated as an equal pairing. The same goes for Major League ace Paul Skenes and his gymnast-influencer girlfriend, Livvy Dunne. When Travis Kelce started dating Taylor Swift, the talk was all about how he, the Kansas City Chiefs and the NFL stood to benefit. And when Kim K and her sisters take up with high-profile athletes, the manosphere brains roll their eyes, chalk it up to the game and blame any poor performances that might result on the Kardashian curse.
But when it comes to Ayesha, there is no room for self-reflection, growth or individuality. She is, and will always be, an NBA wife in the eyes of many. Her tiresome critics would much rather see her on the sideline managing the kids than see Steph gathering them up to bask in the afterglow of his biggest moments. Weirdly, the tradcasting doesn’t stop with Ayesha. Steph Curry’s mother has been dealing with the same gender policing since she divorced his father, a former NBA player, in 2021 and remarried last month. That all this outrage is building at a time when gender roles in sports have become a culture-war battleground shouldn’t be lost on anyone.
Ultimately, though, the relentless snooping into the Curry marriage reveals a deeper insecurity about Steph. Here’s a God-fearing, wholesome family man who speaks up for female empowerment and walks the talk when he’s not burying clutch threes – and he’s still getting the job done for the Warriors at age 38.
Curry has spent his career making doubters rue the day they said he was too small for pro ball, and that same bracing self-belief has helped him thrive away from the court as a venture capitalist, Hollywood producer and Bay Area philanthropist. Through 18 NBA seasons, he has remained free of scandal, extramarital or otherwise – no mean feat for an NBA superstar, much less a Silicon Valley giant. And that just makes the sports and celebrity hounds who are only following along for the potential of a Will Smith – or Tiger Woods – like train wreck push harder in their relentless pursuit of dirt.
But for dedicated knuckle-draggers like Arenas and his cohort, who still don’t see an alpha male when they behold Curry, it isn’t just that he could be with pretty much anyone else, given his wealth and fame. It’s that he chooses Ayesha and that there still isn’t a rift between them to be found, even after all these years of trying.
The armchair analysis of the Currys’ marriage isn’t likely to stop anytime soon. But it’s a stargazing exercise in the end, with vast distances between the picture in view and the elusive reality. The constant churn of speculation only serves to show the willful ignorance at play, particularly when it comes to the difference between an on-camera kiss – again, Ayesha was acting – and an act of infidelity. With his forceful social media defense, Steph didn’t just offer a reminder of what true manhood looks like. He delivered a message that should sound awfully familiar to Ayesha’s haters – and give them pause: Keep my wife’s name out your mouth.
