Pick Me a Winner  Andy Dolich

Several weeks ago Raiders season-ticket holders received an email questionnaire asking them to rank the importance of the Raiders, A's and Warriors on a scale of 1 to 3. The list of questions came from the NFL and the Raiders.

This is all part of the NFL building an information base on the viability of the three cities at risk of losing their franchise: Oakland, St. Louis and San Diego. Many of the questions focused on fan satisfaction with the aging O.co Coliseum, along with their willingness to spend more for tickets at a new stadium.

NFL spokesman Greg Aiello said: "We are trying to learn as much as we can about the Oakland market. It's no more complicated than that."

Of course it is!

How about these complications over the past year:

Coliseum City

Carson

Inglewood

San Antonio

Oakland A's

Financing

Seat licenses

Levi's Stadium

Rams, Cardinals, Raiders

City, county, JPA

Floyd Kephart

The NFL and the Raiders are positioning fans to come up with the right or wrong answer, however they want to play it. "We have decided that because Raiders fans think that Roto-Rooter Stadium can't be replaced or retrofitted, we have to go south."

Or, "We are going to do everything in our power to work with the Raiders and elected officials to build in Oakland, but we don't know if the A's and Raiders can co-exist."

It's no more complicated than asking parents which of their three children they love the most.

Longtime sports executive Andy Dolich has more than three decades of experience in the professional sports industry, mostly spent in the San Francisco Bay Area. This includes stints in the NFL, MLB, NBA and NHL. He operates his consulting business, Dolich & Associates, in Los Altos. 

Meanest Baseball Stunt Ever Richard Lupoff

On Saturday afternoon Los Angeles Angels pinch runner Taylor Featherston ran into a batted ball with two outs in the ninth inning and was declared out, ending the game in the Giants' favor, 5-4. The batter, Matt Joyce, was credited with a hit, despite ending the game. 

This unusual play is not without precedent and resulted in one of the meanest single plays in the history of the game, a mere 125 years ago!

Pete Browning was a batting champion who played for the Cleveland Infants in 1890. Ad Gumbert was a journeyman pitcher for the Boston Reds. The game in question took place in the Players League, which existed for only one year. Gumbert carried a no-hitter into the ninth inning. With two outs in the ninth, Gumbert hit Browning with a pitch. Browning went to first base, extremely peeved. The next batter hit a fair grounder up the first base line and Browning deliberately let the ball hit him on the foot. Under scoring rules, Browning was called out, but the batter was credited with a single. Game over, no-hitter spoiled.

Browning gets credit in my book for the meanest stunt ever pulled in a major league baseball game.

Richard Lupoff is widely known as a mystery and science fiction writer, but his first gig was covering schoolboy sports for major dailies in New York and Philadelphia. "Once it's in your blood," he says, "it's there forever."

Oakland, Calif., 1975: The Golden State Warriors, world champions of basketball, pose for a team portrait.

Warriors' First and Only Championship Was Sweet Bruce Macgowan

NBA Hall of Famer Rick Barry always gets a little excited when you ask him about the only NBA title won by the Golden State Warriors in the 53 years they've been on the West Coast.

While Barry and fellow Hall of Famer Nate Thurmond sparked the then San Francisco Warriors to the NBA finals against the eventual champion Philadelphia 76ers in 1967, the Warriors team that won it all in 1975 was a much bigger story. After all, coach Al Attles wasn't sure what kind of a club he had going into training camp, what with Thurmond traded to the Chicago Bulls for a young center named Clifford Ray, and veterans such as Cazzie Russell, Jim Barnett and Clyde Lee all having moved on through free agency or trades.

A highly touted but slender 21-year-old rookie from UCLA, forward Keith Wilkes (he later changed his first name to Jamaal), along with young veterans Charles Johnson,Butch Beard, Derrick Dickey, Charles Dudley, center George Johnson, fan favorite Jeff Mullins and USF rookie Phil Smith made up a the bulk of this virtually unknown and unsung team.

By now the Warriors were playing all their games in Oakland and were now known as the Golden State Warriors. The Cow Palace in Daly City and the San Francisco Civic Auditorium (now Bill Graham Arena), where they had previously played, were not considered comfortable or practical by team ownership.

Dick Vertlieb, The Warriors' new GM, made the difficult move of shipping Thurmond to the Bulls for the younger but less expensive Ray. The move turned out to be a huge plus, as the Warriors became more adept at the fast break and Ray combined with Johnson to give the team a two-headed center that collectively averaged about 20 points and 20 rebounds a game.

The Warriors got off to a great start and won 48 games to earn the top playoff spot in the conference.

In the opening playoff round they beat the Seattle SuperSonics in six games but had to hold the Sonics off in a wild game six in Seattle. Afterward, angry fans attacked several Warriors players on the floor.

"I remember a woman came up to me and actually hit me with her purse as I was leaving the floor," an incredulous Barry said afterward.

"Defense is the reason we are where we are," Barry told me as his team looked ahead to a tough series against Chicago. "Defense wins championships, and we've played terrific defense from day one." Against the Bulls the Warriors won games six and seven, coming all the way back from a three-games-to-two deficit.

The Warriors' next opponent would be the Washington Bullets. The Bullets, with the best record in the league that year, featured such stars as Elvin, "Big E" Hayes and power forward Wes Unseld. Again the Warriors, a team that no one had picked to go further than perhaps the conference finals, were the underdog.

"That night I turned on the local news, and one of the Washington-area sports announcers was saying that we had no chance of beating the Bullets," Attles told me years later. "It took everything I had to keep from throwing a chair through that TV screen!"

The Warriors, in typical fashion, found themselves trailing early on, and once again had to scrap from behind. Smith's clutch shooting sparked the comeback, as the Warriors stunned the Bullets for anarrow win in game one.

Game two was played at the Warriors' old home the Cow Palace, because the Oakland Coliseum Arena had already made a commitment to host the Ice Follies. But the Warriors managed to pull off a stunning win as Rick Barry hit key shots and the Warriors defense held on in the final seconds, forcing one bad shot and blocking another to preserve a pulsating one-point win.

Game three was the only game that wasn't really close. The Warriors pulled away and won by double digits, thanks to a 38-point night from Barry. Now in dire straits and trailing in their series three games to none, the Bullets needed some kind of a miracle to upend the Warriors' momentum.

"I wasn't surprised that they would try something desperate to turn this series around," Attles said later. So when tough guy Mike Riordan literally attacked Barry early on, hoping to provoke a fight and get theWarriors star out of the game, Attles ran onto the court to intercede. Wes Unseld, all 6 foot 8 inches and 270 pounds of him, quickly corralled Attles and a wild slugging match ensued, with Attles trying to throw punches while Unseld kept the angry Warriors coach in check by bear hugging him.

"Al Attles went out onto the court clearly as a peacemaker!" an angry Bill King shouted on his radio broadcast. "You have to know that this was a violent and flagrant act by Mike Riordan to draw that kind of attention from the Warriors coach as Al Attles is one of the great gentlemen in the game. Now referee Richie Powers is explaining something to Attles ... he's kicked Attles out of the game! This is ridiculous! THIS IS RIDICULOUS! Al Attles has been kicked out of the game, and now Clifford Ray wants to go after Richie Powers! I can't believe what I'm seeing. This is one of the most unwise and disgraceful decisions I have ever seen an official make."

Again, the Warriors found themselves in a bind, trailing in the final minutes of action. But clutch plays by Dickey, key shots by Smith, Johnson and Barry, and Beard's free throws in the final minute salted away a narrow win.

"Al Attles' Golden State Warriors are the unbelievable champions of the world!" an ecstatic King announced on theradio broadcast, dubbing them "the Cinderellas of the sports world!"

"Rick bought a bunch of bottles of wine for the flight home and guys just had a great time talking about the season," said Ray.

When the Warriors' plane hit the runway in San Francisco at about1 a.m., a crowd of about 7,000 noisy fans plus a number of media were there to greet them. It was a crazy scene, but the players were so happy that they all got up on a makeshift stage and several gave speeches while many spoke with reporters before going into the terminal to pick up their belongings and head home.

The experience of covering that team remains one of my favorite sports memories. And isn't it interesting that it happened 40 years ago this spring, justas we're watching another great Warriors team perhaps duplicate that Cinderella effort.

Bruce Macgowan is a longtime radio/TV sports announcer who has worked in Northern California for almost all of his near 40 years in the profession. He currently works at KGO radio and co-hosts a syndicated radio show, Sports Econ 101, on the Sports Byline radio network.

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