Golden days, p.8
Golden Days, page 8
Perhaps the best indication of the almost surreal power that Russell held over the Lakers comes from this West observation. He talked about staring at a photo of Russell that showed him standing with his hands on his hips at midcourt. And West said: “He looks almost regal.” What a strange thing for the Logo to say.
The defeat sent West into a tailspin. In West by West he compares a photo of himself walking off the court after Game 7 to the iconic shot of a bloodied Y. A. Tittle after the New York Giants quarterback was knocked silly during a game against the Pittsburgh Steelers in 1964. Tittle suffered a concussion and a cracked sternum; West had no palpable physical wounds but more severe psychic pain than Tittle ever suffered.
Even the Dodge Charger that West had won for being the MVP served as a motorized rebuke—it was roughly the color of Celtics green. Once while West was jogging during that summer of ’69, he overheard someone utter the word choke as he passed by. West says that he had to restrain himself from beating the guy up, a throwback to the days of rage he experienced growing up in a household with an abusive father.
Late in 2016, West was asked if he ever considered quitting after that loss in 1969.
“I came very close,” he said. “I didn’t like myself very well. I just couldn’t cope with the horrible feeling I had, the idea of going back into a locker room that was about losing. I kept thinking: Is this all there is? I was so frustrated. I was so frustrated. Basketball wasn’t bringing me any joy at all. None.
“You know, pity and envy are two horrible words. But I associated them with myself. I know people pitied me, and I hated that. And I used to say to myself all the time, Why the hell can’t we get to where we want to go? Why can’t we get the right bounces? And that was envy.”
As West spoke, you could feel the man’s pain, still visceral fifty years after so many other triumphs.
“I thought it was all over for us. I really did,” says West. “I thought I’d be labeled as a loser for life. And who thought we would even stay together as a team? I certainly wasn’t sure about it. And with all that happened, it’s kind of amazing that we did.”
“But when I got to Oakland? It was…Brooklyn.”
—CHRIS MULLIN
CHAPTER 5
Curry’s Unhappy Draft Day
In the spring of 2009, by which time Durant was already on his way to becoming an NBA All-Star, Davidson junior Curry declared for the NBA draft. The basketball world didn’t take a lot of notice. Curry was not coveted across the board as was Blake Griffin, the consensus number one pick, a cartoonishly athletic power forward from Oklahoma. Curry was even projected in some analyses to be as low as a midteens pick. He was undersized—how many NBA players had as their idol growing up the 5'3" Muggsy Bogues, as Curry did? He hadn’t played in a major conference, and, besides, it was a draft rich in backcourtmen—Arizona State’s James Harden, Memphis’s Tyreke Evans, and USC’s DeMar DeRozan, along with a couple of small point guards whose value had to be sized up next to Curry: Jonny Flynn from Syracuse and Ricky Rubio, a phenom who had played in his first Spanish ACB League game when he was fourteen years old.
Team Curry (himself, his father Dell, and agent Jeff Austin) believed that playing fast was Steph’s best—maybe his only—chance of being an NBA star. “We knew what [then Knicks coach] Mike D’Antoni had done with Steve Nash in Phoenix,” said Austin, “and it seemed like a perfect fit.” The Knicks had the eighth pick, so getting Curry seemed like a reasonable scenario if the Knicks wanted him. And D’Antoni wanted him.
One problem: The Golden State Warriors, who were picking one spot ahead of the Knicks, wanted Curry, too. Well, one person did, anyway—general manager Larry Riley. As we already know, Curry wanted no part of the Warriors, which was not a minority opinion around the league at that time. But Riley, an old NBA hand with a folksy manner, loved him some Curry. He firmly decided that Curry was his man, ironically, after being in the stands for one of Curry’s worst college games, a 76–58 loss to Purdue on December 20, 2008, at Conseco Fieldhouse in Indianapolis. Curry missed his first eight shots and scored only thirteen points on 5-of-26 shooting. Riley didn’t care.
“I wanted to see how he would hold up under pressure,” Riley said in a 2017 interview, “and I knew Purdue would beat the shit out of you because that’s the way the Big Ten played. The other knock was that Curry was a two-guard, not a point. I never believed that. I thought he was a point guard, and the fact that he shot so well only made him more valuable. Well, in that Purdue game he made the long pass, made the short pass, knocked down some shots, and stood up to everything they threw at him. They got their asses beat, but I walked out of the arena saying, ‘This kid is for real.’ ”
That was the message Riley communicated to Don Nelson, the Warriors coach and general franchise overseer. Always the iconoclast, Nelson agreed that an undersized kid who would bomb three-pointers might be perfect. So Riley let Team Curry know of Golden State’s interest and that he and Nellie would love to have Steph work out for them.
The answer from Austin was clear: Thanks, Larry, but we don’t want to work out for you. And we don’t want you to draft Steph.
It wasn’t a decision made just by the old guys. “I can’t lie,” Curry told me in 2017. “I was hell-bent on New York. I wanted to play for D’Antoni, and I didn’t want to play here.” At the time he was sitting at the Warriors’ practice facility in Oakland, the one with the 2015 NBA championship banner hanging from a wall with another one (though he didn’t know it at the time) due soon. Curry smiled. “I guess it was one of those cases of being careful what you wish for, right?”
—
Twenty-five years earlier another college player, this one named Chris Mullin, had been in Curry’s position. The Warriors wanted him, but he wanted the Knicks. There has never been a clearer Knick wannabe than Mullin, Brooklyn-born and St. John’s–honed, a city kid who talked New Yawk and played New York. Mullin should’ve come out of the womb with a Big Apple birthmark on his shooting arm, which was his left.
But Mullin had no chance of joining his hometown team, the 1985 draft notable for being the one that included the first draft lottery. The Knicks got the top pick—the fact that they did is still a favorite of conspiracists who believe that Commissioner Stern guided the lottery that way—and that prize was going to be Patrick Ewing.
That draft was replete with other big men besides Ewing, at a time when centers were still considered the key to success, so Mullin knew he was also going to be drafted behind players like Wayman Tisdale, Benoit Benjamin, Jon Koncak, and Joe Kleine. He didn’t know where he was going to go, but please don’t let it be Golden State at number seven, please don’t let it be Golden State…
“I had just dreamed of playing with the Knicks,” says Mullin now, relaxing in his office on the campus of St. John’s, where he is the head basketball coach. “Clyde Frazier was my guy. He’s still my guy. I had never left New York and certainly didn’t know much about Oakland.
“But they called my name and that was that. What was I going to do, play in Europe? Yes, I was very disappointed. But I was the first player picked who wasn’t a center or a big forward, so I bet everybody in the Bay Area was disappointed with me, too. Yeah, it seemed strange when I got to the Bay Area. I had never left New York except for a basketball trip or two, and what I thought of as California was maybe I’d be lying on the beach looking at palm trees. But when I got to Oakland? It was…Brooklyn.
“The only thing about the Warriors I knew was Rick Barry. Coach [Lou] Carnesecca [Mullin’s coach at St. John’s] had coached Barry in the ABA. He told me, ‘Rick was a great, great player. But sometimes he couldn’t get out of his own way.’ ”
Ah, a perfect way to describe the tortured history of this franchise, speckled with more whimsy than wins. Even the 1975 championship was a strange one, befitting the off-kilter aura of the NBA in the seventies. Scheduling for the Western Finals games had already been fouled up because of arena commitments for—you’re going to love this—the Ice Follies and a kung fu exhibition. So the top-seeded Washington Bullets were given the option of either a 1-2-2-1-1 format, or opening on the road and playing Games 2, 3, and 4 at home. They chose to open at home, lost that game and promptly got swept by Barry’s Warriors. (Golden State owner Franklin Mieuli, a man for whom the word jaunty seems to have been invented, used to ride around the city with the championship trophy in the back of his convertible. Whenever he made a stop, he left it in the unlocked car, confident, he said, that no one would steal it. No one did.)
But then the downhill slide began for the Golden State franchise. Bad karma and bad personnel decisions started to pile up. In compensation for the free-agent exit of Jamaal Wilkes to the Lakers, for example, the Warriors received the number five pick of the 1978 draft. They selected Purvis Short, who turned out to be a nice player, while with the next pick the Boston Celtics selected Larry Bird, who turned out to be Larry Bird.
Even when the Warriors did something good, it turned out bad. They had the sense to grab center Robert Parish with the eighth pick of the 1976 draft but four years later sent him and a first-round draft pick to the Boston Celtics in order to trade up to get two picks. Those picks turned out to be Joe Barry Carroll (memorably monikered as “Joe Barely Cares” by hoops scribe Peter Vecsey) and a so-so guard named Rickey Brown; the other pick the Celtics got turned out to be McHale. So the Warriors assembled the Bird-McHale-Parish frontcourt that was the foundation of three Boston championship teams in the 1980s. Between what Auerbach did to the Lakers in the sixties and what he did to the Warriors in the seventies, the state of California should’ve charged the annoying genius with grand larceny.
That was not Golden State’s only center-centric move that seemed to have been made by kindergarteners doodling on a draft board. In 1983 they ignored Clyde Drexler, Dale Ellis, and Derek Harper to pick Russell Cross, a 6'10" center from Purdue. He became just one of Golden State’s crosses to bear, playing only forty-five games before exiting stage left. Later, the Warriors managed to get a really good center…after he had stopped being one because of aching knees. That was Ralph Sampson.
Drugs were never far away from the Warriors franchise. “You walked more than thirty feet in either direction in the Oracle,” says Bay Area media personality Ray Ratto, “and you were high.” (To be fair, that still prevails in many areas of the Bay Area.) Pot was just part of Oakland’s rock-festival charm, but cocaine was something else, a problem that hit the NBA in the late seventies and lasted well into the eighties. It seemed worst of all in the Bay Area. Perhaps something sinister wafted in with the fog from the bay. John Lucas, Bernard King, Micheal Ray Richardson, and Chris Washburn were all wearing Warriors colors in troubled times. (In 1983 Golden State traded Micheal Ray to the Nets for Sleepy Floyd, prompting Bill Simmons to later write: “Anytime you can turn a cocaine addict into someone named Sleepy, you have to do it.”)
Even visiting players sometimes fell hard on a trip to Warrior Land. The Oakland Hyatt became to basketball what the “Riot House,” a Hyatt on Sunset in L.A., was to rock ’n’ roll. (See Rock Star, Almost Famous, This Is Spinal Tap.) During a western road trip in that era, Atlanta Hawks coach Mike Fratello chose to keep his team in Los Angeles for a couple of days after a game against the Lakers rather than have them fly out early for a game against the Warriors, memorably reasoning: “I’d rather have them fuck themselves to death in L.A., rather than spend an extra couple days in Oakland.”
And then there was the time in 1997 when Warriors guard Latrell Sprewell choked his coach, P. J. Carlesimo, another milestone to be excised from the franchise history reel.
There were moments of hope along the way—the “Run TMC” (Tim Hardaway, Mitch Richmond, Mullin) teams of the early nineties that played up-tempo and suggested a time in the near future when NBA teams might actually start fast-breaking again, and the “We Believe” team of 2007, an eighth seed that defeated a top seed (the Mavericks) in the first round of the Western Conference playoffs. But both turned out to be chimerical, a flash of thigh.
Through it all, a knowledgeable fan base was always part of the Warriors, no matter how feckless they might’ve been on the court. It plugged into the gestalt of an area where your cabdriver might be a Berkeley Ph.D. and where former Warrior Meschery did poetry readings with Beat heroes Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg. “It was a great basketball town before it was a great Warriors town,” sums up Ratto.
—
But in 2009 Curry wasn’t thinking about the town. He was thinking about the team. Now, Golden State wasn’t the only place he didn’t want to go. He refused to work out for both Memphis and Minnesota even though the Grizzlies, who had the second pick in the draft behind the Clippers, would’ve almost surely taken him.
“Jeff, my bosses won’t let me take Steph unless he works out,” Austin was told by Kenny Williamson, the Grizzlies assistant general manager, who was known in basketball circles as “the Eggman,” a nickname given to him by his grandmother because he sold eggs door-to-door while growing up in Harlem. (Williamson died in 2012.)
“Sorry, Kenny,” Austin told him. “We’re not coming.”
But Riley didn’t care about an audition. He remained steadfast, for that was his nature. In 1997, as he waited to board a flight from Cincinnati to Detroit for a scouting trip, he says he heard a voice telling him to go home. He rebooked on a flight back to Vancouver, where he was working as a scout for the Grizzlies. The Detroit-bound flight, Comair 3272, went down in a blizzard, killing all twenty-nine souls aboard. Riley says he had a “guilty complex” for a while, but it turned him into a man of strong faith.
Riley admitted that he would’ve taken Griffin with the first pick, but, had the Warriors been second in line, he would’ve still taken Curry, a move at the time that would’ve drawn almost universal derision. “I listened to everything Dell and Jeff had to say,” Riley remembers. “They made their case, and I made mine. I told them, ‘Steph doesn’t have to work out for us, and you don’t have to like us, but we’re taking him. And we’re going to make it work.’ ”
So the Golden State Warriors called his name and David Stern shook his hand, and there was Curry at his first Warriors press conference, facing an uncertain future with an uncertain franchise, so young-looking that he appeared to be waiting for a prom date, a vision that probably left most Warriors fans thinking: Well, we can always come to watch the other team, just like we always do.
“Let’s get out of here. Jerry’s down there going crazy again.”
—CHICK HEARN
CHAPTER 6
Fame and Glory but No Ring
Jerry West had a practice ritual. He would stand with his back to the basket, begin to count down from four seconds, one thousand four, one thousand three…, turn, and release a jump shot to beat the hypothetical buzzer. He wrote in West by West that he always gave himself “enough time to take maybe one or two dribbles to get somebody leaning.” Like many great players he seemed to have a clock in his head.
West hit several buzzer-beating clutch shots in his career, but he remembers one in particular because it came against the Celtics. In Game 3 of the 1962 Finals, his first against Boston, he made a steal with time running out and the score tied 115–115. As his teammates yelled for him to take a jumper, the clock in West’s head told him that he had enough time to speed in for a game-winning layup, which he did.
He also remembers it because it occurred during the first of those six Finals defeats to the Celtics in the decade of the sixties.
On April 29, 1970, West made another buzzer-beater, this one an enduring YouTube classic, this one a seemingly impossible launch, this one a shot that lifted West to immortal status (if he was not there already), this one…another dagger in his heart?
Game 3 of the Finals, this time the Knicks as the opponent. New York forward Dave DeBusschere makes a jump shot from the foul line with three seconds left to put New York ahead 102–100. Chamberlain grabs the ball, stabs one foot out-of-bounds—in later years Wilt always noted that he didn’t have both feet out-of-bounds, so his inbounds pass was illegal—and shovels to West. Everyone thought it was over. Walt Frazier would say later that he was in the process of walking off the court. But West takes three quick dribbles—one thousand three, one thousand two—and takes off from several feet behind the midcourt line, probably sixty feet from the basket. It’s a desperate shot, to be sure, but one taken in reasonable rhythm, and down it swishes, as DeBusschere, by now back on defense, puts both hands on his head in a classic holy shit! gesture.
This is what happens after the shot goes in. West simply starts walking toward the bench, takes a quick glance at the scoreboard to confirm, that, yup, we’re heading for overtime (no three-point shot back then), accepts the hugs from his teammates, and sits the hell down.
“I don’t even like to talk about it,” West said in 2017, as he has told dozens of interviewers over the years. “You know why, don’t you?”
Yes. West missed five shots in OT, the Lakers lost the game and, eventually, the series. West despises the fact that so many associate him with heroics that occurred in a losing game. It only highlights, as he sees it, the number of occasions that the name Jerry West is associated with losing. It’s hard to imagine how desperately West would’ve despised his sixty-footer had it come against Boston.
