He doesn't pass the eye test. He never has. I know this about him going in—the coaches and scouts who dismissed him because he didn't play right, didn't act right, didn't look right. One early scouting report reads like a series of taunts from the Bully of the Beach in the old Charles Atlas comic strips:

“Far below NBA standard in regard to explosiveness and athleticism…extremely small…needs to add some muscles to his upper body, but appears as though he'll always be skinny…not a natural point guard that an NBA team can rely on to run a team.”

I know how wrong his doubters proved to be. I know the truth: that he's the first unanimous MVP in NBA history, that he's the best shooter ever to lay hands on a ball, that he's changed the fundamental geometry of the game itself. There is a generation of kids, from the college level on down, who are imitating Steph's moves, throwing up Curry-style half-court shots while chomping, Curry-style, on their half-expectorated mouth guards.

And yet when I meet the man this spring, at the Golden State Warriors practice facility, my eyes tell me what they tell me and I think, like so many before me, and quite stupidly: Uh, I thought Stephen Curry would be bigger.

As I lurk behind the goalpost, dazzled and half hypnotized by the shhhick!…shhhick!…shhhick! (a sound sibilant and crisp and, somehow, grinning) as he sinks 35 three-point shots in a row, the nay-saying thoughts about Curry and the Goliaths he's going to meet in the playoffs assert themselves. His vertical leap is a whole foot shorter than Russell Westbrook's.… LeBron James outweighs him by 60 pounds.…

Even Curry is not immune to such doubts. “Would I have told you my rookie year, ‘I'm gonna be MVP someday’? No way,” he says. “I didn't know what the ceiling was.”

Does he now? Do we? Curry knows he has unfinished business to attend to this season before any question about his ceiling can be addressed, just as he knows the world is watching and wondering. Yet in practice he radiates nothing but balletic ease. (His record for consecutive threes is 77; he considers any day in which he sinks fewer than 80 out of 100 to be an off day, an ugly day.) The display is impressive, of course, but it's also quite beautiful.

Curry himself, even before he gets a basketball in his hands and starts to move, is a beautiful human being. And “beautiful,” not “handsome,” is the correct word here. Teammates and opponents both used to describe Michael Jordan as a hard man, and he looked and acted the part: cut from stone, built for combat. Curry, on the other hand, is a Warrior who looks nothing like a warrior. He's 29 but still baby-faced, with soft sunny features and bright green-gray eyes. There's an optimistic cast to his face—he looks like he's smiling even when he's not. Or, as Warriors head coach Steve Kerr says, “Steph looks like he's 12 years old.”

But it's the sight of Curry in motion that hypnotizes. The 100-shot progression resembles an étude rather than a drill. One assistant coach, Nick U'Ren, places himself under the hoop, secures each ball after it shhhicks the net, and distributes it to another assistant coach, Bruce Fraser—known as the Curry Whisperer—who fires passes to his shooter from different positions, constantly varying angle, speed, and arc. Curry remains in perpetual motion, releasing every three seconds or so, slowly tracing the half orbit of the three-point arc from one corner to the other. The exactitude of his footwork—the way the tips of his Under Armour sneakers depart and land exactly an inch from the arc with every shot—creates the impression that he's negotiating a tightrope, not a painted line.

He doesn't achieve much air on his jump shot. The question that raises (Why aren't half this guy's shots blocked?) gets answered with every ball Fraser feeds him: The hands! The speed with which Curry can receive a pass and transition it into a shot is simply astonishing—to the naked eye he often seems to be volleying, rather than catching, the ball.

“I've always suspected he has extra nerves in his fingertips,” says U'Ren. “His ability to manipulate and adjust the ball in a fraction of a second, to transition the angle or arc of his shot in response to what a defender is doing, is unlike anything I've ever seen.”

“Steph has an almost superhuman ability to micro-self-correct on his own,” Fraser adds. “But then if one of us says, ‘Try this,’ he's able to process the change faster than anyone I've ever seen. He's the most educable player I've ever known—both in terms of his willingness to listen and in his ability to absorb and execute.”