5-1

The Warriors look amazing. At 5-1 and as of yesterday boasting the league's top ranked defense, they've finally started looking the part of true contender, shedding the Junior Varsity feel of a talented yet fatally flawed paper tiger. Most of this, in my humble and fairly well shared opinion, is the result of Mark Jackson's dismissal. I thought Jackson did more than most to shackle the potential of this team, but to be fair, he did a lot of good things for the Warriors, most notably getting (most) of them to fall totally head over heels in coach-love with him. When Jackson was fired some of us wondered about the chemistry or the raw lingering feelings guys like Steph and Draymond and Andre Iguodala might carry with them after seeing their guy done dirty. I thought about this for half a second, mentioned it to my dad, and what my dad told me was to get real.

My father has tried to teach me many things over the years, and it’s not the least bit his fault I downright failed to learn most of them. He has a patient heart, but I am a poor student. Fractions, Windsor knots, how to keep a car from exploding, these are just some of the things I failed or half-failed to grasp under his guidance. Born in the middle of the pack of eight children, with beauty queens and a boy genius leading the way, he figured going out for organized sports was his ticket to defining himself. Basketball was his favorite. It’s safe to say that it is not a coincidence that basketball is the only sport that I really care about. 

Dad was interested in slightly manlier things than I was. Besides football and basketball, he was also captivated by the history of war, drove a pick-up truck, enjoyed jets, and liked his steak rare. As I grew up awkward and sarcastic, he accepted and approved and supported. He watched with patience as I tried to throw that huge orange ball up at the hoop and rarely lucked into a made shot. I really was a terrible pupil, but as I said, that didn’t matter to him. He explained the game with grace, deflecting one dumb question at a time or several at once. He peeled away arcane layers and made it all so simple, so profound, so no shit. He was like a hoops-head Socrates, pre-hemlock.

So, imagine my surprise last season, when this team-this successful team of Warriors, this team my dad revealed to me, finally GOOD after so many awful and worse years-annoyed the shit out of me. And seemingly at all times, the national media and any talking head in proximity to a microphone browbeated us into accepting Mark Jackson as the benevolent savior of a beshitted and cursed franchise. He was the Patron Saint of Beggars Can't Be Choosers. Notwithstanding finding him a thinly veiled hypocritical blowhard, it was painful to watch this team as constructed continually attempt to paint using hammers. 

There were moments, of course. Good moments, excellent moments. But the joy hovered just out of reach. It was coy cruelty, potential so obviously unrealized it felt almost ludicrous. But yes, there was good stuff. Stephen Curry unleashed was and is lovely to behold. Andrew Bogut’s blunt rage inspires, but didn't have such good home and away splits. Those games in which Iguodala shifted into the corporeal and looked like the player he used to be…When Draymond Green showed again and again why he deserves minutes over Nice Fella Harrison Barnes…when Klay Thompson hits a corner three completely stoned out of his mind and hella dreaming of munchies…

And yet one of the defining feel-good moments of last year, when the Warriors snarled back from an unseemly ass-whupping by the then lowly Toronto Raptors en route to a(n) historic comeback, felt altogether more nauseating than inspiring. When they couldn’t defend their homecourt against cellar dwellers (reflexively thinking of a group of grown men as “cellar dwellers” also seems wrong!), or when they couldn’t manage to put away the Spurs sans their Big Three or when Harrison Barnes consistently failed to beat Kirk Hinrich off the dribble… A jilted lover’s obsession with taking advantage of match-ups…18 year veteran Jermaine O’Neal as your best player for long stretches…Walking the ball up the court…The rumored exile of the avuncular and wise Jim Barnett…The calling for hedonistic hero ball again and again, by design.

This team should have been able to run anyone off the court and yet…

They just didn’t, or couldn’t, or wouldn’t.

They were poets reduced to copywriters. All the incessant talk of the offensively dominant and exciting to watch Warriors ended up being precisely that-incessant talk. Supremely constructed mediocrity! And so it was. “Perfection” was closer, but not that close. After exile from basketball relevancy, I wanted to immediately be the Spurs and the Showtime Lakers, and the 1996 Bulls. Several things became apparent in rapid succession. Maybe Bulls and Lakers and Spurs fans have never felt the joy that comes with uncertainty. Their teams are too good, too well managed. Success is terrifying. Being a fan of a professional sports team is insanity. Willingly signing up for a plane crash, or at least a plane that may never end up landing. Is it moral to hand down this trifling angst generation to generation? Should I put a Golden State Warriors cap on my son’s head? Should I watch the games with my little girls?

My phone calls home were infrequent, but they usually consisted of  75% Warriors talk. I’ve kept a lot of my angst from Dad. But there was one particular game I had to sound off about. It was a narrow win, over a terrible team. A game we should have won by forty points. A game we should have won before the whistle even blew. I was driving home from depositing a negligible check. My mood was foul. There was frost on my window and this winter was never going to end. Two rings and dad answered. I readied some talking points.

“See the game?” Dad asked.

“Yeah. It-”

“It was great.” And then he started talking about Stephen Curry the way young Macedonians might have spoken about Alexander the Great.

I swallowed my petty complaints instantly, or at least compartmentalized them. They were valid. But they didn’t have anything to do with this version of the Warriors, this part of their objective truth. The part that had to do with my dad.

Dad still believed. Dad has been around long enough to keep the faith. Dad didn't care about Mark Jackson. He shared every one of my misgivings. But unlike his feckless son, Dad is not one to quit on something. As I said, I’m slow to learn. 

One thing I’ve always retroactively admired is my dad has always been ready and able to pull my head out of my ass, but benevolently, and without reprimand. And sometimes the faithful are rewarded. Sometimes they aren't of course. Sometimes the faithful are hanged from the neck until they be dead or forced to endure five seasons of pure unencumbered tanking. But...sometimes they are rewarded.

And this year has been a very nice reward, indeed. The Golden State Warriors have played a mere six games and yet the world has turned and left Mark Jackson looking awful. From top to bottom, the Warriors look like a team ready to make a run of it, literally a run, as they no longer stroll leisurely up the court as if on the way to a mid-term. My grim prognostication about the Warriors getting thrashed early in the season for failing to acclimate to Steve Kerr's new system seems to have been unfounded. My nightmares of Mareese Speights shooting half court shots with 23 seconds left on the shot clock were just that, nightmares (weird nightmares). There's always the possibility of a mass unraveling. Injuries, Shakespearean betrayal, a panic trade, the Reckoning of the Return of Kevin Durant, many and more things can of course derail this beautiful train. But that's the game, yo. And the Warriors are playing the game out of their fucking minds right now.

And my dad is happy.