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"My name is Stephen Curry and I am a rookie for the Golden State Warriors. After a great college experience at Davidson, I got drafted by the Warriors and moved out to Oakland\u2014which is a long way from my hometown of Charlotte, NC. Playing in the NBA is a dream come true and now I get to test my skills every night against the best basketball players in the world. I'll be keeping this diary with GQ for the entire season, so follow along with me on this amazing journey.\n\nWednesday morning I woke up at about 9:30, and got a good breakfast in\u2014an egg-and-cheese bagel and a waffle. We had a shoot-around at 11, and afterwards, I got a nice smoothie, went home, and took a three-hour nap. My mom was in town for opening night, and she was staying in one of my extra bedrooms. So she cooked my favorite spaghetti for my pre-game meal when I woke up. Pretty good comfort food. My dad [Dell Curry] was doing color commentary for the Charlotte Bobcats' opening night, so he couldn't make it out.\n\nOn my way to the stadium, I panicked a little because I didn't realize there'd be so much traffic. I had a set time that I was supposed to be at the arena to start warming up. Normally it takes about 10 minutes to get to the stadium, but with the traffic I was a little stressed. I ended up getting there on time, and there was a film crew from NBA.com that wanted to document my first opening night. They wanted video footage of me pulling into the parking lot through to when the game started, but they didn't know when I'd be arriving. So, when I got to the arena, I walked all the way to the locker room, and when they came in, they were like, \"Agh, we missed your entrance! Can you go back to the car and do it again?\" So I went out and pulled the car back in, hopped out, and walked back to the arena again so they could film it. I was down on the court 30 minutes later for my warm-up. I thought I'd be nervous the whole time, but it felt pretty natural.\n\nNinety minutes before tipoff, they start letting the fans in. There had been a couple autograph seekers out by the players' parking lot, but this was when they really started piling in. I had finished my warm-up, and was just sitting on the court watching my teammates. I signed a couple autographs on the way back to the locker room, and then I changed into my game uniform, before going to the chapel. We have a separate space blocked off next to our locker room, where a full-time chaplain does our devotions each game\u2014a fifteen-minute service. That night, it was me, three of my teammates, two guys from the Rockets, my mom, and some of the Warriors staff. Most home teams have chapels, so when I'm on the road I'll probably go to their services.\n\nAfterwards, I went back to the locker room for our team meeting. My teammates were basically telling me, \"This is what it's all about. This is what we worked so hard for during training camp. For Opening Night.\" They told me to have fun, to get my feet wet. It's funny: I'm the second-youngest guy on the team, but the youngest guy has already played a year. I'm the only rookie. So I was, I suppose, the most excited. I couldn't sit in the locker room. I was jumping up and down, doing extra stretches for no reason. I was the most wired guy in there. And all the veterans were looking at me like, \"This guy doesn't know we have 82 games?\" It's a long season. I expected Coach to say something to me, but he said absolutely nothing different than he did before the pre-season games. So I took that to mean that he knew I was ready to play.\n\nBefore heading out to the court, that was probably the most nervous I got all night. Everybody was piled in the hallway. You could hear the crowd, the music playing. We all got pretty excited. One of our captains gave a good speech to get us motivated. Then my teammates tried to play a joke on me. As soon as we said \"1-2-3 Warriors!\" we got in single-file to take the court, and I was the first person in line. When we got to the end of the tunnel, I turned around, and they were further down the hall than I thought they'd be. Because I'm the only rookie, they had planned to let me run out on the court by myself and then kind of look around all dumb\u2014and then they'd come out eventually. But since I saw them, they couldn't really pull it off.\n\nThey had a great introduction for us. After the buzzer sounded and the National Anthem played, they took us back into the locker room, and we came out of a different entrance. They had all these dancers on the floor and a bunch of videos of us as a team during the pre-season\u2014all to pump up the crowd. Then they introduced every single person on the team, starting with the reserves, and building up to the starters. I was second-to-last to be introduced, and so everybody was on the court. It was pretty much just like when you announce yourself as a kid. I heard my dad in all those starting line-ups, so I mimicked that growing up: \"Starting guard, 6-3 from...\"\u2014back then, I didn't know what school I was going to yet. It was a pretty intense moment. My mom said she cried.\n\nI told a bunch of reporters before the game that I thought I would be a little nervous on the court. But it felt so natural out there. There wasn't really a transition period between, say, a college game and pro game. It was just ball, tip, and I felt like I'd been playing at this level for a long time. [Golden State lost to the Houston Rockets 108-107] The Golden State crowd is awesome, so when we came down late into the fourth quarter and it was a close game, the whole environment when the fans got excited was totally different than anything I experienced in college. That was one of the biggest surprises--how much fans get involved when you're at home and the game is close, how much they can turn the momentum of a game when they're cheering so loudly.\n\nWe were disappointed after the game because we fought hard and didn't come out with the win, but there were pretty optimistic attitudes from the whole team. It was only the first game. We wanted to win the first one at home, but we realized we had 81 left. And we played pretty well, so nobody hung their head. It was a, \"let's get the next one\" kind of mentality.\n\nThat night I went home, and my mom and girlfriend cooked some food at the apartment. Everything closes pretty early in Oakland, so my apartment was the only spot to get some food. We watched some highlights and a couple of the games that were on later that night, and then I went to sleep.\n\nCheck out the next post: Stephen Curry's First Road Trip"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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