May 25, 1975: The Warriors Are Golden

May 25, 1975, 50 years ago: The most stunning upset in the history of the NBA Finals is completed.

The Baltimore Bullets had made the NBA Finals in 1971, but got swept by the Milwaukee Bucks. They moved down the Baltimore-Washington Parkway to Washington in 1973. Well, not quite: After playing a few home games at the University of Maryland's Cole Field House while waiting for their new arena to be finished, they settled at that new arena, the Capital Centre in suburban Landover, Maryland, just outside the Capital Beltway.

They played the 1973-74 season as the Capital Bullets, before changing their name to the Washington Bullets. And, in 1974-75, led by Wes Unseld and Elvin Hayes, they reached the NBA Finals again. Their opponents would be another team that went through more name changes than was necessary. The Philadelphia Warriors were a charter franchise in the NBA in 1946, but moved to San Francisco in 1962. In 1971, they moved across San Francisco Bay to Oakland, but took on the name "Golden State Warriors."

Much like baseball's California Angels, who tried to draw fans Statewide in an effort to draw more fans than the nearby Los Angeles Dodgers, the Warriors weren't fooling anybody with their Statewide name. At least, unlike the Angels, they no longer had to compete with another team: The ABA's Oakland Oaks had moved in 1969, becoming the Washington Caps, and then the Virginia Squires in 1970.

Coached by former Boston Celtics star K.C. Jones, the Bullets went 60-22, and won the Central Division. They beat the Buffalo Braves in the Eastern Conference Semifinals, and the defending Champion Celtics in the Conference Finals.

Coached by former Warriors player Al Attles, Golden State went 48-34, and won the Pacific Division. They beat the Seattle SuperSonics in the Western Conference Semifinals, and the Chicago Bulls in the Conference Finals.

In spite of having won 12 fewer games than the Bullets, and having lost 3 out of 4 regular-season games against them, the Warriors were the top seed in the West, while the Bullets were the 2nd seed in the East. Still, the Bullets were heavily favored, with many observers predicting a sweep.

They got a sweep, all right, but not in the direction they expected. Game 1 was played at the Cap Centre, and Phil Smith came off the bench to score 20 points in 31 minutes, and the Warriors won, 101-95.

The odds seemed to be against the Warriors, because the Oakland Coliseum Arena was unavailable, as they were hosting the Ice Follies. Games 2 and 3 were moved to the Warriors' former home, the Grand National Livestock Pavilion, a.k.a. the Cow Palace, across the City Line in Daly City, California. Not on their usual home court, could the Warriors possibly win?

Yes, they could; and, yes, they did. They erased an early 13-point Washington lead thanks to 36 points from Rick Barry, and won Game 2, 92-91. Barry, probably best known as one of the greatest free-throw shooters ever, scored 38 points in Game 3, and the Warriors won, 109-101.

Keith Wilkes, later to change his name to Jamaal Wilkes and help the Lakers win titles in the 1980s, held Hayes to just 29 points in the 1st 3 games. Over that stretch, the Warriors' bench outscored the Bullets' bench, 115-53.

Game 4 was played back in Landover, and featured a fight that was started when the Bullets' Mike Riordan fouled Barry hard. Attles, a former guard known as The Destroyer, ran onto the court to defend his fellow New Jerseyan -- Attles was from Newark, Barry from 2 towns away in Roselle Park -- and "took one for the team," getting physical with Riordan and getting thrown out of the game, so Barry wouldn't be. Assistant coach Joe Roberts coached the Warriors the rest of the way.

The fight seemed to take the fight out of the Bullets, as they blew a 14-point lead, and the Warriors won, 96-95. The San Francisco Bay Area had its 1st NBA Championship.

The District of Columbia would have to wait until 1978, when the Bullets beat the SuperSonics. The Sonics reversed that result the following year. The capital team, which renamed itself the Washington Wizards in 1997, the year they moved into the District proper, into what's now named the Capital One Arena, haven't been to the Eastern Conference Finals since.

The Warriors also struggled a lot, until the Stephen Curry era began, and they won 4 titles and made 2 other Finals. Indeed, given how much basketball talent came out of the D.C. and Bay areas, great high school players and great college programs, the pro team in D.C. has seriously-under-achieved, and so did the pro team in the Bay Area until 2015.

From May 25 to October 22, 1975, 150 days, not just the San Francisco Bay Area, but specifically the City of Oakland, held the World Championships of baseball and basketball at the same time. It was part of an extraordinary 10-year run from December 31, 1967 to January 1, 1978, that saw Oakland win 5 American League Western Division titles; win 10 AFC Western Division titles, and reach the AFL or AFC Championship Game 9 times, including 2 Championships; reach the NBA Western Conference Finals 4 times, winning once; culminating in winning 3 World Series, a Super Bowl, an NBA Championship, an ABA Championship, and a National Professional Soccer League Championship:

* Oakland Clippers, 1967 NPSL Champions.

* Oakland Raiders, 1967 AFL Champions, 1976 NFL Champions.

* Oakland Oaks, 1969 ABA Champions.

* Oakland Athletics, 1972, 1973 and 1974 World Champions.

* Golden State Warriors, 1975 NBA Champions.

All this, while, across the Bay, San Francisco lost the Warriors to Oakland, saw the Giants and the 49ers continually let their city down, and nearly lost the Giants to Toronto.

However, by the time that 10-year period ended, the City of Oakland would lose its NHL team, its ABA team, and its NPSL team; and set in motion the process that would eventually cause it to see its NBA team move back across San Francisco Bay, and lose its MLB team, and lose its NFL team, gain it back, and lose it again.

July 16, 1964: Extremism In the Defense of Liberty

July 16, 1964, 60 years ago: Senator Barry M. Goldwater of Arizona accepts the Republican Party's nomination for President, at their National Convention, at the Grand National Livestock Pavilion, a.k.a. the Cow Palace, just outside San Francisco in Daly City, California.

The site of the 1964 Republican National Convention may surprise people who know San Francisco as the most liberal city in America, which might not even be accurate. But, like all cities, San Francisco has its "old money" conservative elite. And this was the 2nd time the Grand Old Party had held its convention at the Cow Palace, built in 1940 for rodeo shows but later adapted for professional sports and concerts. They had previously nominated Dwight D. Eisenhower for a 2nd term there in 1956.

Then 55 years old, Goldwater was a Presbyterian, but had a Jewish grandfather, as the family name was originally Goldwasser. This makes the 1964 Republican Convention the closest either major party has ever come to nominating a Jewish person for President.

He was also very Western, living on a ranch outside Phoenix, with a solar-powered flagpole: Every morning, when the Sun came up, it raised the Stars & Stripes; every evening, when the Sun went down, the mechanism lowered the flag into a box.

A bomber pilot in World War II, Goldwater had been elected to the Phoenix City Council, and in 1952 defeated an incumbent Democrat for the U.S. Senate. Re-elected in 1958, he thought he could be the conservative alternative in 1960 to Vice President Richard Nixon, once considered the anti-Communist hard right's man, but now widely seen as more moderate -- the very thing that gave him a legitimate chance of election.

No true conservative had been elected President since 1928, and that was Herbert Hoover, on whose watch the Great Depression began, and whose policies were seen as having made it worse, leading to his landslide loss to Franklin Roosevelt in 1932. Every Republican nominee since had basically said, "We accept the New Deal, but we can do it better, and more efficiently, and with fewer Communists."

But there was another alternative to Nixon in 1960: Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York, who had replaced a previous holder of his office, 1944 and 1948 Presidential nominee Thomas Dewey, as the leader of the moderate-to-liberal Eastern wing of the GOP. He wanted to be President, too. But he also wanted to win. So he invited Nixon to his apartment, and made a deal where he would endorse Nixon to hold off any conservative challenge. It became known as "The Compact of Fifth Avenue."

So, at the 1960 Republican Convention in Chicago, Goldwater told his supporters that they could take their party back, if they were properly organized: "Let's grow up, conservatives!"

Whether the conservative movement, as it came to be known, "grew up" is debatable: Conservatism has often listed from side to side, from old and stuffy to very childish. But they were very well organized, and, on the morning of November 22, 1963, with Nixon branded as a "loser," Goldwater and Rockefeller were the 2 leaders for the Party's nomination in 1964.

That day, John F. Kennedy, who had beaten Nixon in 1960, was assassinated. In his memoir, Goldwater admitted that his chance of winning had died with Kennedy. The 2 men had been friendly rivals, and Goldwater had really looked forward to a clash of ideas with JFK.

But with Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson now President, and sure to be the Democratic nominee in 1964, any chance for a real clash of ideas was doomed: LBJ would do anything to win, including "making Kennedy's ghost his running mate." His actual Vice Presidential nominee turned out to be Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, but he essentially "ran with JFK" every bit as much as Harry Truman ran with Franklin Roosevelt in 1948.

Goldwater told his advisers that he didn't want to run against Johnson. They told him that he had to do it, anyway, as the best way to continue the building of the conservative takeover of the Republican Party. To use a sports analogy, they were asking him to sacrifice himself, to "take one for the team."

And so he ran. He ran his campaign as a moral crusade, to bring down government spending, to end welfare programs that encouraged "immoral behavior," and to stand up to the Communist world better than the Democrats had.

His supporters took the "morality" thing even further, citing the fact that Rockefeller had divorced his first wife and quickly remarried -- as if that had anything to do with his qualifications for the job. When Goldwater refused to campaign in the Oregon Primary, and Rockefeller went, accompanied by signs saying, "He cared enough to come," Goldwater knew that the California Primary was it: Win it, or you're out.

And when Margaretta "Happy" Rockefeller gave birth to Nelson Rockefeller Jr. just 3 days before the Primary, it bolstered the "morality" argument by reminding voters of Rocky's divorce and remarriage. Goldwater won California, and clinched the nomination.

But right after that came the Senate's vote on the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Most of those voting against it were Southern Democrats. But Goldwater voted against it -- on constitutional grounds, he said. But the vote tarred him as a racist, even though he wasn't one. The fact that Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina switched from Democratic to Republican after LBJ signed the bill, and then endorsed Goldwater, didn't help Goldwater at all.

Then came the Convention, and it set the standard for future ugly GOP Conventions to come in 1992, 2004 and 2016. Goldwater chose Representative William E. Miller of New York, then also the Chairman of the Republican National Committee, as his Vice Presidential nominee, "Because he drives Lyndon Johnson nuts."

There was a proposed plank for the Party platform denouncing "extremist groups," specifically mentioning, on the left, the Communist Party; and, on the right, the Ku Klux Klan and the John Birch Society. They did not specifically mention liberal groups like Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), or the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). The Black Panther Party had not yet been founded.

The problem was, many of Goldwater's supporters were in the Birch Society. When Rockefeller came on to speak in favor of the plank, Goldwater supporters in the seats tried to boo him off the stage. It was a disgraceful spectacle, but Rocky stood up to them, and finished his speech. The plank was easily voted down, making the GOP look like extremists.

So, to use another sports analogy, Goldwater knew he needed a home run for his speech. He started off well: "This Party, with its every action, every word, every breath, and every heartbeat, has but a single resolve, and that is freedom. Freedom made orderly for this nation by our constitutional government. Freedom under a government limited by laws of nature and of nature's God. Freedom, balanced, so that order, lacking liberty, will not become the slavery of the prison cell; balanced, so that liberty, lacking order, will not become the license of the mob and of the jungle."

He knew that if he attacked the late President Kennedy and his policies, he had no chance. So he attacked the Democratic way in general: "During four futile years, the administration which we shall replace has distorted and lost that faith. It has talked and talked and talked and talked the words of freedom. Now, failures cement the wall of shame in Berlin. Failures blot the sands of shame at the Bay of Pigs. Failures mark the slow death of freedom in Laos. Failures infest the jungles of Vietnam."

This was a few days before what became known as the Gulf of Tonkin Incident. At the time, Berlin and Cuba were more familiar to Americans than Vietnam. At the time JFK took office, even Laos was more familiar.

Goldwater gave a few more platitudes about freedom, and fired a few more potshots at the Democrats. And then he addressed the need for unity within the Party's own ranks:

Anyone who joins us in all sincerity, we welcome. Those who do not care for our cause, we don't expect to enter our ranks in any case.

And let our Republicanism, so focused and so dedicated, not be made fuzzy and futile by unthinking and stupid labels.

I would remind you, my fellow Republicans, that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.

Johnson would not go on to say it, but I can imagine a still-living Kennedy responding to this by saying, "I would remind you, my fellow Americans, that extremism in the defense of liberty is no defense of liberty."

What Johnson did go on to say was, "Extremism in the defense of liberty is an unpardonable vice. And moderation in the pursuit of justice is the highest virtue."

The Goldwater campaign produced buttons saying, "In your heart, you know he's right." The Johnson campaign produced buttons countering this, saying, "In your guts, you know he's nuts." And it produced other suggestions that he was too extreme to be President, including an ad known as the Daisy Spot.

Goldwater ended up winning only 6 States: His home State of Arizona, barely, and 5 Southern States who liked his apparent stance on civil rights.