Last night during the Golden State Warriors season opening debacle, I was settling into the couch with a beer while chatting on the phone. On the other line was my buddy Henry, a born and raised San Franciscan in his 50s and avid basketball fan who used to work with me a couple years ago.
As the Lakers began to separate themselves from the Dubs and really beat the road team down, our conversation tangentially shifted into how he had lost his job due to a back injury and was looking for new work. I took a nice long swig of the brew and sighed; his adult daughter, fresh out of graduating college, had come back to live with him and his wife. He described feeling a combination of excitement that his baby was back home and some guilt that his financial situation was unstable.
He’s a proud man, and his identity as the breadwinner for the family was something he had spent decades standing on. With injury sapping him of his health, and his advancing age making it harder to start anew, he cracked jokes about thanking God his wife was successful in her career. I heard the deep inhalation from his pipe and the pause as he let the smoke burn his lungs.
“You’ll figure it out bro,” I reflexively offered. “Just run that resume through one of them AI joints, you know? They’re pretty good at hooking you up with something nice. And with your experience? Dude it’s only a matter of time before somebody picks you up.”
He exhaled into a sharp cough that lingered for a few moments. “Yeah but I need this sciatic nerve picked up, ya dig?” he uttered as he cleared his throat. “When you get older mayn, sometimes the body don’t wanna act right. That’s why you gotta keep your hustles diversified, ya feel me?”.
That old Fillmoe flavor accented his words, a product of generations of Bay Area hustlers. Even with his kids grown and now the excitement of his grandad years, he still had the mind of a guy who made things happen outta nothing, the rose that grew from the concrete. And now with his back on fire, I could feel him fighting a new kind of doubt, one borne of a lifetime wrestling Father Time.
“Yeah, I feel you…” I muttered, my fingers wrapping around the almost empty bottle of High Life on my thigh. I didn’t know what to say, but I’ve learned sometimes just being there in the quiet time can say more than words. My eyes looked at the clock, calculating how much sleep I’d need before I had to be at work at 7:30am.
“You know what we do need though?” his voice rising softly.
“What, OG?” I asked, hopeful that maybe my buddy was receiving a hopeful epiphany.
“A damn center!! This is ridiculous!”.
I burst out laughing, my eyes going back to the Warriors postgame where they were showing the statline from the bludgeoning performed by the Lakers’ 7-foot machine Walker Kessler on Golden State’s emaciated front court depth. Kristaps Porzingis out and possibly ready for retirement, Charles Bassey out with an injured knee, leaving the grey bearded, 6-foot-6 Draymond Green and the 40-year old Al Horford out there to get dominated by the Lakers attack.
Henry’s voice picked up steam as the highlights (or lowlights if you’re a Warrior fan) poured in. “This is what’s always wrong with the Warriors mayn! Since forever! We just can’t keep a big man. And when we do get one, he always hurt. Just like Andrew Bogut!”.
Now if you’ve been reading my work her at DNHQ you know I come from a lineage of strong black men who truly can’t believe the Warriors don’t have a good big man. R.I.P. to my Papa, who in the last conversation we had, told me the Warriors were never gonna be good until they got a real big man, like Wilt Chamberlain was. This was after a dynasty was established by the way, and Steph Curry has twice the amount of rings as Wilt…but I digress.
As Henry and I sat in our respective living rooms and watched the Lakers stomp the Warriors into submission on opening night, those “we need a big man” mantra never rang truer. Now don’t get me wrong, that Kessler behemoth has been known to be a quality big man during his time with the Utah Jazz, but at no point had I ever heard him mentioned in the same breath, as well, Chamberlain! Until last night.
The Warriors literally made Kessler look like an all-time Laker great!! If that’s what the Dubs are going to look like this season, Dub Nation is in one for a truly tortuous experience. But going back to my roll call of players available and not dressed for Wednesday night, a combination of injury and age have wrecked that position for the Warriors.
And much like my buddy Henry, they’re desperately calculating a way to find a way through that while there’s still time to take care of the ones who matter. For Henry, it’s his family. For the Warriors, it’s particularly Steph and Draymond, guys who are damn near out of chances to get that fifth championship, tying legends like Tim Duncan and Kobe Bryant.
And even if the Warriors may not be the worldbeaters they were before, they should at least be able to have the dignity of being competitive. And I know there was a lot of focus on Luka Doncic and rookie Yaxel Lendeborg jawing at each other, but there’s no way Kessler should be getting praised by Shaquille O’Neal as the greatest big man alive after playing Golden State!
Absolutely terrible.
As the postgame show went to commercial, I yawned and told Henry it was time for me to start getting ready for bed. Work in the morning and all that jazz.
“Do ya thang, baby!” he encouraged me. “When you write that next article, tell the Warriors to stop messing around and get a new big man!”.
Hey Warriors, you heard the OG. He understands more than most of what being the center means, whether it’s on the basketball court or holding a family together. And if not for the sake of Papa, get that big man for every fan in Dub Nation who dreads seeing another decent center suddenly anointed as an icon after smashing the dilapidated remains of this rotation.
OT: But I found out that some Blazers fans really hate GP2. For context, I started chatting basketball with a local (I live in Oregon) dude, and GP2 came up. He proceeded to tell me that there is a subset of Blazers fans who wish him ill because they believe he faked his injuries during his time there just to make money while sitting on the bench before he could return to the Dubs.
At least Kerr could have put in Ike in the 2nd quarter to let him put a body on Kessler. All summer long, I was waiting for the W's to announce that they had signed a large defensive man. Nothing.!! But in the meantime, the Celtics got the Knicks guy from last season, the 7 foot Micth Robinson, the Knicks replaced him with the 279 lb Andre Drummond . The Magic have 6'11" 265 lb. Nikola Vukcevic. And there are many more who they could have chased.
And theW's were relying on pencil-shaped Porz to be that guy. Of course, now he allegedly cannot play, because he has come down with POTS (postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome), whatever the heck that is.
What a disaster. They are going to face so many teams that have a real Big that will have a runway to the hoop with no one to stop them. One cannot blame Dray for not being able to do anything about it. The W's lost by 23 poins and Kessler had 26. With a proper defender on him, it would have at least been a ball game. This is embarrasing.