Golden days, p.3
Golden Days, page 3
But how did we get here, to a revolutionary place, to that place where the Warriors have come to define basketball greatness and innovation (albeit with some pushback from LeBron) over the past three years, to a place where, going into the 2017–18 season, Golden State seems practically unbeatable? Superlative seasons, such as the ones the Warriors enjoyed over the past three years—and the one that the West-and-Wilt Lakers enjoyed forty-five years ago—do not happen in a vacuum. They result from an endless reinvention process. Coaches get fired, replacements are hired, they get fired, somebody else gets a chance. Rosters turn over, transform, improve, regress, show promise. Ownership strategies get modified, rationalized, modified again, abandoned, and a “For Sale” sign appears on the franchise, come and see if you can turn it around. The hopes of fans rise, wane, rise again, eternal until they are not.
One could close one’s eyes, run a finger across virtually any season in the history of the Golden State Warriors, open them up, gaze at the record book, and think, Wait, this is a team that became a champion? The Warriors won an NBA title in 1975 behind the play of another revolutionary, Rick Barry, a determined iconoclast who aimed a middle finger at everyone while at the same time launching his free throws from between his legs, like some stubborn black-socks-wearing holdout at the YMCA. Then they won no more until the pair that came along in the past three years. In many of those forty seasons from 1975 to 2015, the Warriors were a laughingstock, the anti-paradigm, the ghost on the Left Coast, the franchise that plays in Croakland.
What did it? What turned it around? New owners? New blood in the front office? Old blood (West’s) in the front office? Luck? Playing style? Coaching? Maybe a little bit of all of them. To see how far the Warriors have come one could choose many points in their history. I choose this one:
The date is June 26, 2009. The Warriors are coming off a 29-53 season. Curry, the son of an NBA player known for his marksmanship but more of a sixth man than an all-star, sits uncomfortably on a podium, tentative smile airbrushed on his boyish, twenty-one-year-old face. He is surrounded by Warriors owners, executives, and coaches, none of whom are still around today. His mien is somewhere between bewildered and resigned. He didn’t want to be drafted by Golden State in the first place, but then he heard he was being traded to the Phoenix Suns. Is there hope of avoiding Golden State? But, no, apparently that deal didn’t go through, and here he is in the Land of Losers with a Team That Time Forgot.
With a few exceptions, this was a feeling-is-mutual situation. Curry wasn’t wanted by the Warriors players any more than he wanted them. When incumbent point guard Monta Ellis was asked soon after the draft if he and Curry could coexist in the same backcourt, he doubled down on his doubts. “We can’t. We just can’t,” he said.
Move ahead several months, to their first season together, a game against the lowly Minnesota Timberwolves at Oracle Arena on November 9, five months after the draft. The Warriors score 146 points, but Curry, demonstrably frozen out, gets off only eight shots and scores only eight points. Ellis, Stephen Jackson, Kelenna Azubuike, Acie Law, Anthony Morrow, and C. J. Watson—guards to one degree or another—all score more points than does Curry, who seems to be on an island of his own.
Why, oh why, Curry thought for the thousandth time after that game, couldn’t I have gone somewhere else?
That’s quite a journey from there to that moment in the 2017 Finals when his audacious three-pointer goes through the hoop and the noise goes through the roof.
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Some consider the Warriors’ rise as rather a cautionary tale and view the franchise as a kind of Icarus in sneakers, daring to add too-weighty pieces and tamper with ancient formulas. The basketball world seemed a lot more logical when the Dubs were a cult attraction, the noir film playing at the Capri off the main drag, defined by the resolutely eccentric Don Nelson, who wore his spectacularly awful fish ties and walked his potbellied pet pig through his Alameda neighborhood.
Golden State’s transformation to overdog started a couple of years ago, perhaps during the 2014–15 season, after which Curry won his first of two straight MVP awards. Everybody loved the Warriors, it seemed, when they were underdogs clawing their way to the top with this smiling, skinny kid beating the odds. But when Curry morphed (almost magically it seemed) from question mark to superstar, the Warriors became something different. No matter how many Silicon Valley “Moneyball” references were attached to the Warriors, they had in fact grown into a team no longer fueled by low-salaried, high-performing scrappy B-listers, the kind that Billy Beane wanted for his Oakland A’s. They were a superpower with a superstar.
And when they added Durant in the summer of 2016? Why, something must be rotten at the very core of an organization that wants too much talent, it was said. Durant had always been a popular player but was pilloried for leaving Oklahoma City and daring to join a better and more glamorous team. Even NBA commissioner Adam Silver expressed his skepticism about “super teams” being good for the league. Somehow the Warriors became the first franchise that ever wanted to get better, and Durant became the first player who ever changed teams.
And what else would a thoroughly modern team like Golden State be expected to do but flee its ancestral home for that biblical Shining City upon a Hill? That’s what the Warriors will do in 2019 when they leave Oakland’s ancient Oracle, where they’ve played since 1971, for a bright and shiny, self-financed (at somewhere around $1.4 billion), decked-out, teched-out arena in the Mission Bay area of San Francisco near AT&T Park, home of the baseball Giants.
Lacob and Guber claim that a new arena wasn’t on their agenda on day one. But it’s hard to believe that those two weren’t from the beginning thinking about setting up shop in the lovely “Baghdad by the Bay,” as columnist Herb Caen labeled San Francisco back when that was a compliment. The owners’ introductory press conference, after all, was held at the tony Epic steakhouse on the Embarcadero, where, incidentally, one can pay forty-three bucks for a martini made with Hangar 1 Fog Point vodka, a splash of vermouth, a twist of lemon, and water “harvested” from the San Francisco fog. Apparently nothing was available in Oakland that day. “For a guy like Peter Guber,” observes veteran San Francisco Chronicle columnist Bruce Jenkins, “Oakland just doesn’t resonate.”
The Chase Center—whose groundbreaking ceremony in January 2017 was a Guber extravaganza, with acrobats, a choir, and synchronized, dancing backhoes—is the symbol of a franchise that, in some respects, is searching for its soul or, at the very least, trying to keep it. The Warriors were born as the league’s counterculture team, moved around the Bay Area (Memorial Gym, Civic Auditorium, Cow Palace) like an unsettled grad student, landed in hardscrabble Oakland, and finally established what seemed to be a comfortably symbiotic relationship with the place: The club drew its oxygen from a fan base that remained fiercely loyal despite years of underperforming, and the Bay Area fans got a (sometimes) entertaining underdog that satisfied their basketball cravings going way back to pioneering offensive player Hank Luisetti and pioneering defensive player Bill Russell. Sure, the swells from across the bay were welcome—the Warriors have always drawn equally from each side—but the essence of the franchise, its soul, was gritty Oakland. And beginning in 2019 the Warriors will be gone.
“People would say, ‘How did you do that?’ and I’d say, ‘I don’t know. What did I do?’ ”
—ELGIN BAYLOR
CHAPTER 2
The Terrific Tandem of West and Baylor
Jerry West could never accurately be described as happy-go-lucky, but there was a certain joie de vivre about him when he came to Los Angeles after the Lakers made him the second pick of the 1960 draft, right behind Oscar Robertson, with whom he had co-captained the ’60 Olympic team to the gold medal in Rome. A photo in the Los Angeles Times from September 20, 1960, shows a crew-cutted West, wearing a sport coat and tie for the signing ceremony, posing over a contract with Fred Schaus, his college coach, who—no coincidence—was taking over the reins of the Lakers. That first story about West hangs half a nickname on him that he grew to despise—“the Kid from Cabin Creek.” It was Elgin Baylor, the Lakers’ designated nickname-giver, who later replaced “the Kid” with “Zeke,” illustrating what Baylor saw as West’s rubedom. Anyway, as West always tried to explain, he was not from Cabin Creek but from a nearby burg called Chelyan; Cabin Creek was only where the West family picked up its mail.
The Olympic triumph dovetailed nicely with the Lakers’ move from Minneapolis. Young West heads west, his basketball bildungsroman continuing far, far away from the West Virginia hills where he was born. In Hollywood, story line is all. He and his wife, the former Martha Jane Kane, his college sweetheart whom he had married in April 1960, settled into a small apartment on Century Boulevard, hard by the noise of the airport, and West reveled in the energy of the city.
“When I first came out to Los Angeles it was kind of an amazing transition,” West told me in 2017. “To be coming from something that small, like Morgantown, to something that vast. I wasn’t familiar with anything, and one thing that served me well was that I knew my north, south, east, and west from hunting and being in the woods back home. I navigated that way a lot. I doubt many people were getting around Los Angeles by hunting knowledge from West Virginia. One of the things I liked about L.A. from the beginning was that it was a melting pot. I heard somewhere we speak over a hundred languages.”
A delicious Disneyesque newness permeated Los Angeles as the sixties dawned. The place could still feel comfortably small in the cocoon where athletes live part of their lives. West became a regular at Westwood Drugs, a hangout run by a sports fan named Hollis Johnson, who invited Lakers and UCLA players to munch on burgers and slurp down shakes at a discount or sometimes for nothing. (Johnson later became a fishing buddy of West’s.) It was like a little club, a bunch of millionaires and soon-to-be millionaires sitting on milk crates as they chewed burgers and the fat.
But L.A. was also getting big. What Horace Greeley had urged in 1871 was happening on a large scale. People were going west. By 1962, West’s second year in the league, California had supplanted New York as the most populous state in the union. The aerospace industry—less celebrated than the movie industry but just as robust—had put L.A. on firm economic footing. Music was exploding on Sunset Strip—the Byrds, the Doors, Buffalo Springfield—and L.A.-based producer Lou Adler, later known as the bearded guy who sits by Jack Nicholson at Lakers games and has more money, was turning the Mamas and the Papas into a raging success. A talented group of studio musicians, as yet unnamed, were backing up everybody from Sinatra to Ike and Tina Turner and in 1966 worked with Brian Wilson in the release of the Beach Boys’ immortal Pet Sounds. Later the musicians would get a name—the Wrecking Crew. That’s what they could’ve called Baylor and West.
Moreover, L.A. had gathered under its sprawling wings both a basketball and a baseball transplant. L.A., ocean to the west, mountains to the north and south, desert to the east, glamour everywhere, was warm, exciting, and identity-stripping. Almost from the moment they arrived, the Lakers were no longer “Minneapolis,” just as the Dodgers were no longer “Brooklyn.”
More instant acceptance was afforded the Dodgers, who were already a nationally known commodity, their minor-league affiliates sprinkled around the country like so much salt in a sport that was still very much our national pastime. It remained for a fast-talking, Illinois-born announcer named Francis Dayle “Chick” Hearn and two franchise players named Baylor and West to bring fans into the pro-hoops fold. Though the Lakers’ arrival predated John Wooden’s string of NCAA championships at UCLA—Wooden’s first was in 1964, West’s fourth season—L.A. basketball in the early sixties meant college basketball. Even Southern Cal hoops resonated more than Lakers hoops.
In an effort to attract a fan base, the Lakers adopted primitive marketing schemes. West remembers standing in the back of a pickup truck and driving through countless neighborhoods in an effort to sell tickets. “Come see the Lakers play!” West says, imitating a carnival barker. “Can you imagine asking players to do that today? And I was painfully shy. I couldn’t even bring myself to wave from a truck. My Gawd! I felt like I was on display.”
A video taken early in his career shows West, wearing long pants and a sport coat—to this day, even when he goes to the drugstore, West rarely goes casual—mingling awkwardly with a bunch of kids at a West L.A. playground.
“Getting in an extra workout?” the setup announcer asks him.
“Well, I guess,” says West, who looks like he’d rather be slathered in honey and strapped down near a giant beehive.
“We were a sideshow to the Dodgers and the Rams,” West says now. “When I went to a Dodgers game shortly after I came, I was amazed at how many fans they had and how small the smattering of applause a Laker got. There was a huge number of transplanted New Yorkers who had followed the Dodgers.” But not nearly as many Minnesotans who had followed the Lakers.
(That pattern was duplicated in the Bay Area. The arrival of the baseball Giants was heralded with one of the biggest parades in San Francisco history, while the 1962 welcoming parade for the Warriors was labeled a bust by the papers even though NBA sensation Wilt Chamberlain was on the team. A photo in the San Francisco Chronicle shows Wilt waving from a convertible to a nearly empty street. Wilt had more people at a housewarming party, as we shall see.)
The Baylor-West tandem act—and it was clearly that from the beginning of their pairing, right up until the arrival of Chamberlain in 1968—did not catch on right away at the Lakers’ first home, the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena. Owner Bob Short put up a large board that clicked off the count of paying customers as they entered, but it served only to reinforce the reality that the Lakers were a B movie.
“I remember seeing the number 4,790,” West says. “The next night, a second straight game against the Knicks [his recollection jibes with Basketball Reference], the number was about 4,200. My Gawd! It was very strange for me because I had played before large crowds in college. It’s hard to imagine how primitive and unimportant we were as a basketball team in those early years.”
Still, West’s rep grew and grew. He was not the game’s first white superstar, an honor that belonged to the Minneapolis Lakers’ bespectacled, robotic center George Mikan and the Celtics’ clever playmaker Bob Cousy. But they had played when the game was largely the domain of white players. West came along when the NBA was starting to be dominated by African-Americans, and West became the touchstone reference for the Alpha Caucasian, even for blacks. Comedian Richard Pryor, who lived in L.A. and did a lot of his performing there, had a bit about West. “You brothers better get serious,” Pryor would say from the stage, “because this white guy is kicking your ass.”
That gave the Lakers star even more cultural currency.
Tougher than a Cossack and blessed with natural talent, West was hip. West was cool. West was even, in a strange way, Hollywood. His size, a legit 6'3" with a massive wingspan, surprised people when they met him. He had a kind of countrified, rawboned strength about him. He didn’t have movie-star good looks but, rather, the face of a hard extra, someone who tumbled down stairs, dusted himself off, and went back looking for more. West’s penchant for getting his nose rearranged only added to his allure.
He was also a perpetual-motion machine that never seemed to get tired. “We’d play in L.A., get on a plane, play the second game of a doubleheader in New York the next night right from the airport, then take a Sunday afternoon train to play in Boston,” West says. “You were so tired inside that you were shaking, but I never got outwardly tired. Maybe it’s genetics. Maybe it’s the way I grew up. We had no car so I ran everywhere, up and down the mountains.”
In 1969 West was immortalized in another way. The NBA commissioned a branding consultant named Alan Siegel to design a logo for the league. During his research Siegel happened upon a Sport magazine photo that showed West in mid-dribble going to his left. Ironically, West was known for going mostly to his right. Siegel didn’t know that and didn’t care anyway; he just loved the photo.
“It had a nice flavor to it,” Siegel told the Los Angeles Times in 2010, “so I took that picture and we traced it. It was perfect. It was vertical and it had a sense of movement. It was just one of those things that clicked.” In a theme that echoes again and again, and would be repeated years later by Massachusetts-born Warriors owners Lacob and Guber, Siegel was a Knicks fan but put rival West on a pedestal. (“There have been so many times I’ve been around him when someone will come up and say, ‘I was a Celtics fan but I loved your dad,’ ” says Jonnie West, Jerry’s youngest child and the director of player programs for the Warriors. “That’s not supposed to happen. That’s when I realized how popular my father really is.”)
The NBA accepted the Siegel design with no fanfare, preferring that the image be looked upon as generic, not specific. After all, why wouldn’t Russell or Chamberlain, two figurative and literal giants of the game, have been picked? Or if a Laker were to be chosen, why wouldn’t it have been West’s teammate Baylor? Even today the league won’t officially admit that the Logo is West, and West played it coy until he finally conceded in the summer of 2016 that he was the model, but even then he said it quietly, almost like he didn’t want it to get out. Jerry, it’s been out for forty years.
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Elgin Baylor is wearing a sweater when he answers the door to his home in the Hollywood Hills. In the years when he worked as general manager for the Los Angeles Clippers and the abhorrent Donald Sterling, Baylor was known for his sweaters, most of them dreadful. He was also known for ending up on the sad side of the L.A. story, imprisoned in the Clip Joint and alienated from the Lake Show, the one he had helped create. Could anyone—could Jerry West for God’s sake?—have saved the Clippers from Sterling’s mismanagement? We’ll never have the answer.
