On January 20, the Golden State Warriors were scheduled to play a road game against the Chicago Bulls. In the hours before the game, the official Twitter account of ESPN’s flagship show SportsCenter posted a video of Warriors point guard Stephen Curry. But the video wasn’t of Curry's famed pre-game warmup routine, or highlights of the 35 points he'd scored against the Cleveland Cavaliers two nights previous. It was a 10-second clip of Curry dancing in his warmup jacket—looped to run for a full hour.
Not a GIF. Not a Vine. Sixty straight minutes of Curry smiling and bobbing his head overlaid with some disco music.
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Ever since last season's NBA championship run, Curry’s visibility has increasingly moved beyond on-the-court highlights to include his family life. Cultural archivists dug up the old Burger King commercials Steph appeared in as a little kid alongside his father Dell while he played for the Charlotte Hornets. His wife Ayesha—once upon a time a Hannah Montana guest star—runs a food and lifestyle YouTube channel called Little Lights Of Mine that regularly features the couple away from sports. From a viral video about olive oil inspired by a Drake line to re-enacting a song from Frozen, the Currys get shared even when there’s no tangible basketball connection. And then there’s daughter Riley, who became the NBA’s Baby In Chief with her playful antics throughout the playoffs and [beyond](http://(https://youtu.be/izB8P8oyhJk?t=4m15s).
Every part of Curry’s life now gets amplified by a mass of fans whose reach extends beyond basketball. Maybe it's fans Photoshopping Riley together with her MVP Baby predecessor, Derrick Rose’s son PJ, in a toddler version of shipping. Maybe it's sports commentator Bomani Jones using a picture of Riley to reference the Death Row/Bad Boy Records rap feud of the early 1990s. The recontextualization of Curry and his family mirror the way fans of television shows obsessively pick apart images, repackaging and repurposing them to suit any comedic need.
And according to Paul Booth, an associate professor of Media and Cinema Studies at DePaul University, those two fandoms are growing closer together as digital communication advances. “We’re seeing a lot of fandoms merging technologies and practices in the digital age,” he says. "Fans who participate in multiple fandoms use the same kinds of methodologies. So what they might make for an X-Files fansite, they also might make for Steph Curry.”
Of course, Curry is still a conventional charismatic sports hero as well. When the NBA released a list of the top-selling jerseys of 2015, there he was at number one. And just like fellow superstars LeBron James, Blake Griffin, Chris Paul, and countless others, Curry is now an ever-present pitchman.
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But there's something different going on here. Part of it, certainly, is that Curry maintains a public character with an emphasis on family, including his wife, daughter, father, and mother, which may help to explain why he’s becoming well-known and shareable to casual basketball fans who are usually more invested in other mediums. But he's also comfortable with the conduits of the day—the same ones that carry snippets of his on-court exploits far and wide.
While just about every player has a Twitter and Instagram account, Curry can go from posting a #womancrushwednesday picture of his wife Ayesha to using a photo of North Carolina rapper Petey Pablo to congratulate the Carolina Panthers on making it to the Super Bowl. He's fluent and recombinant and friends with Drake, culture's other great smiley-happy meme machine, and it all helps make him something we haven't seen before: a post-sports sports hero.
The worlds of sports and television fandom have always had some crossover; it’s not like fans of The Walking Dead can’t also love the NBA, or vice versa. But as broadcasting has expanded and the second screen has gained equal footing with the first, those two worlds have moved closer together. Between TV, websites, and social media platforms, people all across the country—even the world—could be watching the same game, episode, or highlight reel at the same time.
Online fan communities used to be mostly walled off into forums, where people could discuss theories for The X-Files or Lost, but never jump out into mainstream conversation. “In the past, fandom was something you might participate in within a small community,” says Booth. “It was geographically bound. People would go to games or fan conventions, but it was intended to be a much smaller affair.” With Twitter or Facebook, a chain of followers and shares can take a video about a basketball player’s family and move it into the orbit of someone who couldn’t tell you what city the Golden State Warriors are based in. (Oakland.)
And each one of those shares might just mean another jersey sold.
