The Golden State Warriors invited the seven surviving players from the team that won the NBA championship in 1975 — Charles Dudley, Jamaal Wilkes, Clifford Ray, Rick Barry, George Johnson, Butch Beard and Jeff Mullins — to attend a recent game against the Portland Trailblazers at the Chase Center in San Francisco.
During the second quarter, the Warriors radio/TV announcers interviewed Dudley, in counterpoint with their play-by-play. His recollection solved a mystery that has puzzled me all these years! Rick Barry, interviewed during the third quarter, described a mystery that still puzzles him.
In the mid-70s City Magazine paid writers relatively well. Francis Ford Coppola, who moved to SF in 1969, had bought the magazine and was putting money into it. (His American Zoetrope partner, George Lucas, had a studio in Lucas Valley, and Bruce Anderson was a few years away from moving to Anderson Valley. Coincidental coincidences.)
One of the pieces I wrote for ‘City’ was a guide to pick-up basketball games in San Francisco. The editor, John Burks, was 6' 7" and a hoopster himself, having played with Rudy LaRusso at Dartmouth in the 50s. It was easy to sell him on a Warriors-centric preview of the NBA season. Thus credentialed, I arranged to attend the last practice before the October 17 opener.
The practice began in the morning, maybe as early as 10 a.m., with a shoot-around. Rick Barry arrived about 10 minutes late. After taking his first shot, and without consulting Coach Al Attles, he left the floor and found a maintenance man. I watched as Barry pointed up to the top deck, where an electronic blind had not been fully closed, letting in a narrow horizontal band of daylight. The worker nodded, left the floor, and a minute later the blind slid shut, creating a real-game backdrop. Barry returned to the court and began telling his teammates, one-by-one, exactly where his hands would be placed to receive the perfect pass. Keith Wilkes looked unhappy. He would soon change his name legally to Jamaal Abdul-Lateef.
Assistant coach Joe Roberts organized a scrimmage. About 15 minutes in, there was an injury to Jeff Mullins, who'd been slated to start at shooting guard. It turned out to be a broken bone in his hand — which would mean a starting role for Charles Johnson, and more playing time for Dudley and a very good rookie from USF, Phil Smith, the son of a Muni driver. It was obvious that the Warriors would be running more.
I spoke briefly with Attles, whose voice was as deep as his Blackness. Somehow the conversation turned to the high level of play in the 'D' league. (It would be decades before the NBA and Gatorade sponsored a minor league that paid a living wage.). “Making it onto an NBA roster,” Attles said, “could be very, very political.”
That afternoon I told John Burks we were picking the Warriors to win it all. He disapproved, saying readers would think it was some kind of spoof. But that's not why I didn't write the story. I didn't write it because Rick Barry, not Al Attles, had run the practice. That was the story, and how could I tell it without disrespecting Attles? I didn't try to convince Burks, just let it slide… But I could never understand why Alvin Attles, who came from Newark and was nicknamed “The Destroyer,” let Rick Barry run the show that morning in Oakland.
Until the other night when Charles Dudley was interviewed. Play-by-play announcer Bob Fitzgerald kept calling him “The Hopper,” which he said was his favorite nickname of all time. Dudley, a serious, dignified man, seemed to wince. First of all, he said, he wanted to honor Joe Roberts, the assistant coach, who hadn't got enough recognition. And then he explained the Warriors' success in three words: “Clifford Ray's leadership.”
To get the unheralded Clifford Ray, the Warriors had traded their aging star center, Nate Thurmond, to the Chicago Bulls. “Rick picked Clifford up at the airport,” Dudley recalled, “and that started a relationship.” (These quotes are imperfect, jotted down as I watched the game.)
“Clifford knew after the first three or four practices that there had been some ill feelings going against Rick, and we needed all the teammates together, bonded. So Clifford asked Al, ‘Can I talk to the players?’ Al said ‘yes’ — which says something about Al's leadership, that he could give power to a player like that.”
Clifford Ray told his new teammates, according to Dudley, “If any of you guys can score 35 points a night, let me know. Nobody said anything. That was a part of everyone finding their role. There were a lot of scorers on that team, a lot of very good players, but for us to win, we needed Rick scoring 30 points a game.”
“Al was a guy that we never wanted to disappoint. We respected him. We knew there was pressure on him to win that championship. For the first time ever we had two black coaches. We wanted the NBA to progress, that was the whole thing. The league is a copycat league. With our success, other African-American coaches got an opportunity at that high level.”
When Rick Barry joined the announcers at the start of the third quarter, Fitzgerald asked him why he had picked Clifford Ray up at the airport back in '74. Barry said, “Because I'm smart. I need a center who is willing to come and put himself in a good position so we could run the two-man game. I said to Clifford, ‘Look you put yourself in a good position. I’ll get you a lot of dunks.’ Cause I know Clifford loved to dunk. There’s nobody in the history of the game — I guarantee, if you look at tape, nobody played the two-man game as well as me and Clifford. I did it with Nate and others, but I guarantee you, Clifford was the best.”
Fitzgerald recalled that Barry had taught the back-up center, George Johnson to shoot foul shots underhand. “Did you go to him and say ‘George you’re a 41% free throw shooter. We gotta do something about this?’”
Barry: “George had the guts to be able to do it. He got himself up to the point where he was an 80% free throw shooter. I don’t understand why general managers and coaches don’t tell players they have to do it. They're employees, they make millions of dollars, and they’re gonna say no? George got it very quickly. His form wasn’t exactly where it needed to be, but we didn’t have a lot of time to work on his technique. His form was terrible, your hands don’t go out like that. It’s been proven scientifically that it’s the most efficient way to shoot a free-throw. And yet people don’t do it. It doesn’t make any sense.”
Color commentator Kelenna Azuibuike put in that he could never get the hang of shooting underhand foul shots. “That's because you're not a player,” said Barry. Azuibuke had been a very good player, drafted by the Warriors in 2000 out of Kentucky. In his third season he averaged 14.4 points a game. Then his knee was wrecked. Barry said that if he had been there to teach proper form, Azuibuke would have soon mastered it.
(Released underhand, the ball rises slowly and reaches the rim more softly than when propelled one-handed from the foul line. The arc is less pronounced, the contact softer. Once upon a time at the 92nd St ‘Y’ in Manhattan I used to earn 50 cents rebounding for an overweight middle-aged man who would shoot 50 underhand foul shots and make 48 or 49 of them. All I did was throw the ball back to him after it came through the net. 50 cents was real money when a slice of pizza on 86th St. cost 15 cents.)
Barry said the Warriors championship in 1975 was “the greatest upset in the history of major league sports in this country.” The climactic series was not the last one against the Washington Bullets (!) but the Western Conference finals. The Chicago Bulls with Chet Walker, Norm Van Lear, Bob Love and, of course, Nate Thurmond, had been up three games to two. “That was our championship series right there,” said Barry. “I blew a game in Chicago that was haunting me. In game seven I was 2 for 14 and Al took me out. What coach do you know who would take out his leading scorer, down double figures? And he kept me out till the start of the fourth quarter. It wasn’t until I got into rhythm a few minutes into the fourth quarter…"
The Warriors swept the Bullets in the finals. At the start of the fourth and final game, Mike Riordan tried to get Barry ejected by luring him into a fight. Barry said he said, “Mike, what the hell do you think you’re doing? You think I’m stupid enough to get in a fight with you and get thrown out of the game?” After one especially flagrant foul, Al Attles came tearing off the bench and went for Riordan. It was Attles who got ejected. And it was Attles who was rightfully named Coach of the Year.
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