Lawrence Joel Veterans Memorial Coliseum was packed to the rafters.
The 2005–06 regular season was drawing to a close. Wake Forest University sat dead last in the A League standings, with no hope left of reaching March Madness or the conference tournament, yet this game still drew enormous attention — because the opposition was the Duke University Blue Devils.
Back in 1923, in a football game against Duke, Wake Forest — ordinarily mediocre in sport — had pulled off an upset win over one of the top-ranked teams in the nation. To celebrate the players' fighting spirit, the editors of the Wake Forest student paper christened the school's teams the "Demon Deacons," a name meant to convey "those who judge the devil." From then on, every meeting between the two schools carried an extra edge of venom.
By now the game had entered the second half, and the arena that had blazed with excitement at tip-off had gone dead silent — the Wake Forest Demon Deacons were already trailing the Duke Blue Devils by as many as 40 points.
On the sideline, the Demon Deacons' head coach, the nearly sixty-year-old Skip Prosser, was absolutely livid.
The Blue Devils were a perfect 11-0 in conference play this season, while the Demon Deacons had managed just 1 win and 10 losses. Losing was no surprise, but losing like this, to a bitter rival, was something no one could ever explain to the fans.
Behind Prosser, Cole sat on the bench under equally crushing pressure.
Since taking over the team in 2001, Prosser had led it to the NAA Tournament four years running, and last season he had even carried them to No. 1 in the nation for a time.
For the team's fortunes to swing so wildly within a single season, the root cause was the decline in talent.
Counting Paul, three of last season's five starters had left the team, and the recruits brought in last year had underperformed — Kevin Swinton, ranked 76th in the country, was averaging a mere 2.6 points and 3.5 rebounds. Even the best cook can't make a meal without rice; there was little Prosser could do about it.
The NAA was a student league. Players could stay with a team for at most four years, and the more talented ones left school early, so rosters were chronically unstable. The key to staying competitive lay in recruiting.
If there was no breakthrough in recruiting this year, his run as the team's scouting director would be over.
When the final horn sounded, the Demon Deacons had been crushed, 99–41, by the Blue Devils, and a team name that had once carried real swagger had become an enormous irony.
The day after the game, Cole met Yang Shuai in his office.
"This fast?"
Looking at the scouting report Yang Shuai handed over, Cole was full of astonishment — it had been less than a week.
But when he saw the name "Stephen Curry," he fell into silence.
Cole of course knew of Curry, but like every other scout, he had automatically skipped over this second-generation star when it came to recruiting.
"You may not know Skip very well. He's a head coach who puts enormous stock in defense." Cole voiced his reservations tactfully.
"I'm not trying to win the team over with one scouting report. I just hope the team will give him a tryout." As he spoke, Yang Shuai took a camera memory card out of his backpack and handed it to Cole.
Cole had a computer right there in his office, and he watched it with curiosity.
In this era, a camera's main job was taking photos; video was only a bolted-on feature, so the resolution was very low.
But even with that mosaic-quality footage, Cole dragged it back and watched the clip three times through.
The first time, Cole watched with a blank expression; the second, he leaned slightly forward; by the third, he was staring at the screen without blinking.
Curry had not always lived in Charlotte. Dell Curry had joined the Raptors in 1999 and played there for three years, so Curry's entire middle school career was spent in Toronto.
There, he had led Queen's Road Christian Academy to an undefeated season, and his play turned heads.
So when he finished middle school and returned to Charlotte, the colleges across North Carolina sent scouts to watch his games one after another — Wake Forest among them, and the scout they sent was Cole.
That was when they discovered just how painfully slight Curry was — slight not only in build, but in frame.
If today's Curry looked like a middle schooler standing among high schoolers, back then he had looked like a genuine elementary school kid.
In the end, every scout came to the same conclusion: Curry would never set foot on the road to professional basketball, and they all gave up on evaluating him.
In the footage Yang Shuai had brought back, Curry's body was still thin next to his peers, but his skills had improved enormously, above all his three-point shooting.
Curry had always shot well, but the size gap made it hard for him to get his shots off, and they were easily blocked.
Now, though, this Curry had raised his release point and quickened his release — exactly as Yang Shuai's scouting report put it: fast and accurate.
You could see how much effort Curry had poured in over those years.
"I'll arrange a tryout for him. Whether he makes the team, though, will depend on how he performs there." Pulling his gaze from the computer, Cole finally agreed to Yang Shuai's request.
Even granting that Curry would still be targeted on defense because of his size, his value on offense was plain to see.
A player strong on offense and weak on defense — back when Paul was still on the roster, Cole would have passed on him without a second look.
But now, for a Demon Deacons team that had scored only 41 points in a game, they needed people who could put the ball in the basket.
Still, as he handed the memory card back to Yang Shuai, he couldn't contain his curiosity: "Why did you choose Curry?"
Given Curry's situation, at least ninety out of every hundred people had already crossed him off their lists, and of the ten remaining, nine were simply watching and waiting.
"If a man is born into a family that wants for nothing, and he still chooses to give everything he has for basketball — doesn't a person like that deserve to be believed in?" Yang Shuai looked as though it were the most obvious thing in the world.
Cole froze for a beat, then couldn't help laughing.
So this, perhaps, was what Yang Shuai meant by a "bright spot"!
A few days later, during the Demon Deacons' routine practice session, Curry appeared courtside.
He was not alone; several other high schoolers had shown up with him.
Yang Shuai glanced through the list in his hand. Most of these high schoolers he had never heard of — after all, a high schooler who needed a college tryout was never ranked very high.
His gaze finally settled on one name: Ishmael Smith.
Smith's media rankings generally hovered around 200th — the highest of any high schooler on hand.
But Yang Shuai also knew that in history, this man had made the NBA and played there for a full thirteen years.
Regular practice ended, and the tryout was ready to begin.
The Demon Deacons players didn't leave; they stayed to help out.
Curry quickly drew their attention.
"Is that guy a ball boy?"
"He's warming up. He really is a high schooler!"
"You sure he won't get knocked to pieces out there?"
The practice gym wasn't big, and every one of those remarks found its way into Curry's ears.
Curry didn't respond to any of it, but his body was taut and his face grim.
Seeing this, Yang Shuai walked up behind him and pressed hard on his shoulders with both hands. When Curry turned around in surprise, he spoke: "Relax. This is a piece of cake for you."
Curry was still wound tight, so Yang Shuai patted him on the chest: "Take a deep breath."
Curry drew a deep breath, rolled his shoulders a few times, and at last a smile appeared on his face.
The tryout then began. It was split into a contact part and a non-contact part, with the non-contact part mainly testing basics like speed, jumping, and shooting.
In the speed test that came first, Smith left everyone in the dust.
Even Yang Shuai's eyes lit up.
He had watched plenty of NAA games since arriving in this world, but this was the first time he had seen someone run that fast — like a sprinting antelope.
But in the jumping and shooting tests that followed, Smith was rather ordinary, especially in shooting: whether spot-up or off the dribble, he struggled.
That explained why, for all his outstanding speed, his ranking wasn't high.
Soon it would be Curry's turn to come out and shoot.
Yang Shuai looked toward Curry.
Curry had been beaten by Smith in the earlier speed test, and his jumping test had been mediocre as well, so the shooting segment to come was critical for him.
At almost the same moment, Cole turned his head to look at Yang Shuai.
Curry was not the only one who needed to prove himself on this court today.
Curry was the first work of Yang Shuai's scouting career. If this work fell through, then his earlier talk of "hunting for treasure among undervalued players" would come to nothing.
Chapter 3