Eddy Curry didn’t have the type of career that many predicted for him when he entered the NBA, but he still tried to make the most out of his opportunities, playing for good teams and trying to make an impact on each one of them. However, after his heart started acting up, things went south for Curry, who couldn’t keep the pace, decreasing his level season after season.
His time with the Chicago Bulls was rocky, especially the last days he lived in Windy City. The six-time NBA champions were the ones that discovered Curry’s irregular heartbeat, but the way they handled things after that made Eddy unhappy and prompted him to find a new team in the association.
During a recent interview on VladTV, Curry recalled how the whole situation with the Bulls and his DNA test went down, explaining that he felt they were doing him wrong by offering a settlement if the test came back with bad results.
Curry explains that he first told Tyson Chandler about his extra beat, but the former center didn’t believe him.
“I sat down at half court with Tyson because we always would sit there and talk about the game or whatever, and I’m like, ‘man, I feel like an extra beat in my heart right now,’ and he’s like, ‘man, stop playing’, ’cause a lot of guys in those types of cities back then, they really didn’t want to play in those types of games. The Bobcats were one of those cities you really wouldn’t get up to, so he’s like, ‘stop playing, we gotta play this game.’ I’m like, ‘man, ain’t about playing the game, I don’t duck games, I really feel a weir beat.'”
They then contacted the team’s athletic trainer, who then called another person and found out that Eddy had an irregular beat. He saw doctors in Charlotte, then traveled to Boston, Los Angeles, and Minnesota trying to get more than one opinion. When he was about to get a procedure that would fix this issue, the anomaly stopped and everything went away.
That’s when the real trouble started between him and the Bulls, as he refused to take this infamous DNA test. Leon Rose, his agent at the time, prevented him from taking this test, explaining that it would have a bad effect on future players.
“My heart went back to normal size, but the Bulls were still not willing to let me play and it came down to the situation when they were like, ‘we want you to take a DNA test, because we don’t know if maybe you can have a heart disease, or maybe you’ll eventually develop a heart disease, so we think that with a DNA test we can rule that out and if we rule that out, we can let you play. And this was before the year before I could get a big deal. I have been playing well, my numbers have been going up every year, we were actually in the playoffs that year. I was about to get the DNA test, I just want to get back on the court, but I had signed with Leon Rose, who’s with the Knicks right now, and he’s like, ‘let me think about that.’ So he went and talked to some people and came back and he’s like, ‘no, I don’t think you should do that. I don’t think you should take a DNA test because I think you’re kinda setting the precedence that could probably affect some things negatively for a lot of African-Americans coming to the league.”
After that, the Bulls tried more options to make Eddy get this test, even offering money for a lot of years if the results weren’t good for him. Then again, he didn’t agree with that and decided to look for a new team.
“It was one of those things when they were like, ‘if you test positive for it, we’ll give you like $300K a year for the rest of your life.”
Vlad clarified that the offer was $400K for the rest of Curry’s life, and then he explained why he turned that down.
“Yeah, but the thing was my agent did the math, thought that the Bulls owed me like $5.7 million or $8 million. Whatever it was, they were basically gonna put that money up and pay me interest off that money, that’s all they were really doing. And at the time that didn’t really sit well with me, I felt like that wasn’t really honest to them to do that, and it got to a point when they were like, ‘we’re not gonna play you for the rest of the year, we’re sure you’re gonna pick your player option up next year, but we won’t play you next year either and then you can sit out next year also and basically try to figure out if you’re gonna play again.’ So at that point, they were like, ‘if you want, you can try and go out there and find a trade scenario and if we like the sign-and-trade scenario, then we’ll accept it’, and that’s what ended up happening.”
Curry would go to the New York Knicks after that, saying that he felt really bad to leave Chicago after building something good with the Bulls. Once he landed in the Big Apple, he learned that fans in New York are tough and would demand everything from him. He would become an NBA champion in 2012 as part of the Miami Heat, having little participation in that title run.
He seems to be doing fine right now, and even though things didn’t end the best way between him and the Bulls, it’s fair to assume that he’s thankful for the team to take care of him during those uncertain times.
