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The Warriors Chased Big Money to San Francisco and Left Their Soul in Oakland
What it feels like to have your team, your city’s heart, torn out and dragged across the Bay
This summer, I drove by the Oracle Arena on Interstate 880 and found myself faced with ghosts. As the arena grew larger on the horizon, so too did the massive headshots of various Golden State Warriors players. Stretched across the stadium windows, Steph Curry and Klay Thompson and Kevin Durant looked as big as gods. Which, of course, in Oakland, they are.
Those posters lingered following the team’s unexpected and crushing loss to the Toronto Raptors in the NBA Finals. In some ways, the exit from Oakland is fitting for the Warriors, a team whose five-year run of mega-success has overshadowed the struggles they faced during most of their time in Oakland. Their rise seemed to match that of this city, a place long treated with disdain and which has, in many ways, recently transformed beyond recognition. But for all Oakland gained, it may have lost just as much. Now it’s losing the Warriors, too, and Oracle lingers as a grim reminder of the city and people left behind.
For a half-century, the Warriors have been a quintessentially Oakland team. Sportswriters love pointing out that the Dubs were once a San Francisco team (technically, they were a Philadelphia team first, leaving the City of Brotherly Love for Western pastures in 1962). However, that initial run in SF lasted just a short while: The Warriors moved to Oakland in 1971 to settle down in the spiffy new Oakland–Alameda County Coliseum Arena, known later as Oracle.
Once in Oakland, the team found some early successes. My longtime family friend and fellow Oakland resident, Paul Dresnick, recalls an April day in 1975 when he and my father took a radio on his outdoor deck to listen to the Warriors play the Washington Bullets in the finals. “I had two spinster neighbors I hadn’t met and they were yelling at me to turn it down,” he tells me. Underdogs even then, the Warriors, featuring superstars Rick Barry and Jamaal Wilkes, swept the series.
Oakland was an underdog, too. In the wake of World War II, suburban development had increased around Oakland, particularly in Contra Costa County, which…
