Steph Curry was just 10-years old when the And1 Mixtape (and Skip To My Lou) phenomenon started and still in his early teens when streetball stars like The Professor and Hot Sauce were shutting gyms down with moves like the Shirt Tornado, which involved slapping the ball out of your jersey while spinning on a defender. In 10 out of 10 cases, the move didn't help the player get into a better scoring position but it looked good and got oohs and aahs from the crowd.
During the Under Armour basketball camp in China this past weekend, Curry took it back to 2001 with an easy variation of the shirt move before knocking down a step-back jumper (this would have been a miss by most streetball players) over a defender.
Seeing Curry pull out the move gives me an excuse to pull out this throwback video of Kobe Bryant visiting the Philippines in 1998 during an Adidas tour. In it, Kobe executes a lot of the most popular moves seen in the original And1 mixtapes and even does the elbow hang dunk made famous by Vince Carter in the 2000 NBA dunk contest. What makes this so interesting is this event was a year before the first And1 mixtape came out, years before it blew up and two years before Vinsantiy won the NBA dunk contest. My question is: Where did Kobe see these moves and dunk?
