I think I’ve mentioned this before in this weekly yarn, but all the reasons that one might have for getting into the business of covering sports for gainful employment are completely stripped from your soul the minute you no longer cover the “home team.”

I get asked often, “Who’s your favorite team? Who do you root for?” And, the sad truth is I don’t have one and I don’t root. That joy of fandom is promptly beaten out of you the first time you do a game outside of a local broadcast. The hallmark of doing a “good game” is when you receive hate postings from both team’s fans.

My friend Roxie Bernstein — who is one of the best national guys out there doing college sports these days — reminded me of that whole conundrum when he posted notes from two trolls after his broadcast of the Kansas-Texas Tech basketball game the other night. One said he was the worst announcer known to man because of his bias toward Kansas. The other said exactly the same thing about his bias toward Texas Tech. What does that mean? Great game Rox!

When the game was over, I always had two thoughts: Where are we going to eat, and what time is the flight. Don’t ask me who won the game — I forgot.

What you don’t forget over years of yammering about sports are those athletes and those performances that go way beyond the game. I’ve been privileged to see, and even broadcast a lot of them over the many eons of doing this sort of thing.

None of them any more enthralling than watching Steph Curry play the game of basketball. The reason is, he transcends the game. He plays with sheer joy. He not only lights up score boards, he lights up the whole building he’s playing in. The joy is contagious. It spreads to his teammates and spills into the crowd. I never thought I’d hear chants of MVP come from a Madison Square Garden fan base for a member of the opposing team. There were as many Steph fans as home fans on every stop on the just completed road trip. He draws as many people to his pre-game warm up than the Sacramento A’s will draw in a lot of their games this year.

I worked for many years with Sugar Ray Leonard, and I never thought I’d see anyone who worked his fans any better than him. Until Steph.

Talk to Steph for five minutes and he’ll make you think he has nothing better to do.

He’s a great business man, a great husband and dad, one of the most generous people I’ve ever met in sports. He knocks your brains out on a basketball court and when it’s over his opponents hug him out of respect.

I’ve been lucky to have seen and cover some of his predecessors. Great not only in the skills of their respective game, but the joy that they they play with just sets them apart. Like Willie Mays.

Yes, one of the greatest ever. But when it came to flair and style — nobody ever had more. He played with joy — you had to watch.

Pele. In his prime the difference between him and anybody else in the world playing soccer was a chasm. To this day he’s the only athlete I’ve ever asked for an autograph. When he played, nobody could possibly enjoy the game more than him.

Secretariat. I didn’t ask him for an autograph either (it’s the opposable thumbs thing again), but like Pele, he was head and — well — withers above any of his peers. Winning the Belmont Stakes by 31 lengths remains to me one of the most incredible individual performances of all time. And he did it when he was three years old. He was retired to the breeding farm shortly thereafter. I suppose that’s a different kind of joy.

Muhammad Ali. Like Steph Curry in hoops, there have been better fighters than Ali. But there has never been anyone — in any sport — that has had the flare or the other-worldliness of Ali.

I was a kid, working for KCBS Radio when I was sent to Berkeley to cover Ali who was speaking at an anti-war rally. When it was over he shirked the driver waiting for him and started walking down Durant Ave. In a block there were 100 people around him. He kept walking. By the time he got to Shattuck Ave. there were at least a 1,000. It felt like he had something to say to each and every one of them. Traffic stopped. The world stopped. He was Muhammad Ali.

I saw him again shortly before he passed. He couldn’t speak, and couldn’t walk. But he still drew a crowd and had the same charisma. He WAS other-worldly. And he still brought joy.

Two others who come to mind had that same flair. Usain Bolt, the world sprint champion falls into the Steph Curry category. He didn’t just win races. He won races with flair. When he ran, it was must see TV. He made the impossible seem routine. Like Curry — joyful.

And Simone Biles. I spent quite a lot of time around gymnastics for a period of my broadcast life. I found it to be a sad sport. In fact, it bordered on child abuse. Many of the people around it were either parents who saw in their child everything that they weren’t, and tried to exploit it; or organizers and coaches who did exploit it.

Then the sport was exposed as the pit that it was and what emerged was Simone Biles. Almost single-handedly she and a small cadre of professionals brought the sport back. The difference was the same thing that set Curry, Pele, Mays, Ali and Bolt apart. Even Secretariat.

Joy. Sheer joy.

Catch it while you can. I promise it doesn’t come around often.

Barry Tompkins is a 40-year network television sportscaster and a San Francisco native. Email him at barrytompkins1@gmail.com.