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—which 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.

Wednesday morning I woke up at about 9:30, and got a good breakfast in—an 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.

On 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.

Ninety 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—a 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.

Afterwards, 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.