Stephen Curry has revealed he spent years of his championship prime with undiagnosed keratoconus, a rare eye disease that gradually warps the cornea and blurs vision, and only discovered it in 2018 after his own general manager texted him.

The four-time NBA champion, now 38, opened up about the diagnosis in an interview with People magazine tied to his role as ambassador for a new keratoconus awareness campaign that launched on Wednesday.

The trigger was a road game in 2018. Watching from home, then-Warriors general manager Bob Myers saw the broadcast keep cutting to Curry on the bench and sent him a text.

“You’re just squinting, looking like you couldn’t see anything. Have you gotten your eyes checked? You should probably go do that because that wasn’t normal,” Curry recalls Myers writing.

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Curry booked an appointment expecting nothing much.

“I didn’t know I was really dealing with crazy blurred vision or distorted images, it was just the way that I saw things, and we compensated around it,” he told People.

A diagnosis he had never heard of

The optometrist told him he had keratoconus, a progressive condition in which the normally dome-shaped cornea thins and pushes outward into a cone shape, distorting incoming light and blurring what the eye sees.

“They told me that I had a rare condition called keratoconus, the irregular-shaped cornea that obviously leads to blurriness, distorted images,” Curry said.

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“It was definitely a shock because one, I had never heard of it.”

By the time of the diagnosis, Curry had already won championships in 2015 and 2017 while unknowingly working around the deteriorating vision. He now wears specialised contact lenses and returns for an eye check every six months.

Fronting a campaign for earlier detection

Curry’s disclosure is timed to the launch of “Could It Be KC?”, a keratoconus awareness initiative he is fronting for ophthalmic device company Glaukos, which says the campaign is aimed at earlier detection of a disease that often goes years without being recognised.

“For a long time, I got used to just getting by, squinting and brushing off headaches, without realizing anything was wrong,” Curry said.

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He has also written a children’s picture book, Eye on the Ball, to make going to the eye doctor less intimidating for young readers, with copies to be donated to schools, eye care practices and libraries.

Curry now jokes about it.

“I joke that when I’m all done, my memoir should be called The Whole Time I Couldn’t See,” he said.

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