Stephen Curry Admits Suffering From Rare Irreversible Condition

Rumors about Stephen Curry having poor eyesight first surfaced years ago. Back in 2019, reports emerged that a mid-season shooting slump had led him to quietly start wearing contacts for a corneal condition nobody outside the organization knew about. At the time, Curry offered little beyond confirming that he felt "the whole world has opened up" once he made the switch.

Now, in an exclusive interview with People, he spoke about just how serious that condition actually was. And how long he played through it without realizing it. Curry traced it back to a moment during the Warriors' championship run in 2018, when general manager Bob Myers noticed something off while watching him on the bench during a broadcast.

"Bob Myers texted me after the game because apparently the telecast kept showing me when I was on the bench, and he was like, 'You're just squinting, looking like you couldn't see anything... You should probably go get that checked out,'" Curry recalled.

What followed was a diagnosis Stephen Curry never saw coming. "They told me that I had a rare condition called Keratoconus," he said, describing the irregular corneal shape that distorts and blurs vision. The reality of the diagnosis hit harder once doctors explained the long-term outlook: "What I found out about it was it's a progressive condition that can deteriorate your vision over time, and it's irreversible if it goes in the wrong direction."

Keratoconus doesn't just blur sight temporarily. If left unmanaged, it can permanently worsen, and by the time Myers flagged the squinting, Curry had already spent years compensating for distorted vision without knowing there was a medical explanation behind it.

The most striking part of Curry's account is the timeline. He had already won two championships and was an MVP by the time the condition was caught in 2018, meaning some of the most iconic shooting seasons in NBA history happened while he was unknowingly playing with a deteriorating cornea.

Specialized contact lenses eventually corrected much of the distortion. But the years beforehand raised real questions about how much sharper his numbers might have looked with clear vision from the start.

Stephen Curry has never been shy about finding humor in the ordeal, even now. "I joke that when I'm all done, my memoir should be called 'The Whole Time I Couldn't See,'" he said.

It's a lighthearted way of him talking about a genuinely rare medical situation. It also proved just how remarkable his run of dominance was - built, in part, on top of a condition that quietly worked against him long before anyone, including Curry himself, understood what was happening.