What were you doing on May 25, 1975?
If you are younger than 40, you weren’t doing anything because you weren’t born yet. Or at best, you were 9 days old. If your name is Lauryn Hill, you were being born that day.
If you were a Democrat, you were a year and a half away from having a peanut farmer from Georgia elected President of the United States. If you were a Republican, you were supporting the only person in U.S. history, Gerald Ford, to become President without having been on a ballot in a presidential election.
If you liked pop music, you could turn on the radio and hear “Thank God I’m A Country Boy” by John Denver, which was No. 3 on the charts that day. What was No. 1? “He Don’t Love You (Like I Love You)” by Tony Orlando and Dawn. If you were a moviegoer, you had a lot to choose from, including The Eiger Sanction, French Connection II and Mandingo.
If you were a Cleveland sports fan, you had a good day at the expense of the folks in Oakland. Dennis Eckersley made his major league debut and pitched a shutout as the Indians defeated the A’s 6-0. Yes, Eck started with the Indians before having his best years as a closer in Oakland.
If you were a Bay Area sports fan, you didn’t really care much that Charley Finley’s team put up a goose egg. That was because the local basketball team, the Warriors, finished off a 4-0 sweep of the Washington Bullets with a 96-95 victory. What was notable in this game was that the Dubs finished it off without coach Al Attles, who was ejected for running onto the court in the first quarter and getting into a fight with Bullets guard Mike Riordan. The former Knick was getting overly physical with Golden State star Rick Barry, who averaged 35 points over the first three games.
Ah, the mid-70s.
Fights between coaches and players in the Finals! No, we don’t see those types of things anymore. Sort of like the AMC Pacer, which was first produced in 1975. No, they don’t make ’em like they used to.
Another oddity: The game was played in Landover, Md. because the Warriors could not book their home court, the Cow Palace, for Memorial Day weekend. The Bullets were given the choice of opening the series on the road and then playing Games 2, 3 and 4 on their home court, or going for a 1-2-2-1-1 format, They chose the latter.
It was the first time in NBA history – or in any of the four major North American professional sports leagues, for that matter – in which both teams in the championship round were led by black coaches, Attles and K.C. Jones of the Bullets.
All of these 1975 facts are relevant today because it has been 40 long years since the Warriors won that championship. They haven’t won one since.
But if that seems like a long time, consider the plight of the Cleveland sports fan.
In 1975, it had already been 11 years since the Cleveland Browns won the NFL Championship, the precursor to the Super Bowl. The championship drought was getting pretty dire, folks in Cleveland believed, although they had no idea what awaited them.
Here we are 40 years later, and the number of championships won collectively by the Cavaliers, Browns and Indians still adds to a big fat goose egg. That’s right, 51 years without a title of any kind. (And Knicks fans think they have it bad.)
Think about that for a minute. Every sports fan 55 or younger from Northeast Ohio has no remembrance whatsoever of having a championship celebration. No parades, no ticker tape, nothing but bad memories that have taken on their own nicknames – RedRight88, The Curse, The Shot, The Drive, The Fumble. They even ran out of apocalyptic nicknames after Jose Mesa blew a save in the ninth inning of Game 7 of the 1997 World Series.
Fans of the Cavs have only the miserable memory of the 2007 NBA Finals, when LeBron James got Cleveland past dreaded Detroit in the conference finals, only to have Bernie Fryer swallow his whistle when LeBron James was fouled by Bruce Bowen on a game-tying 3-point attempt with 4.9 seconds left in Game 3 against San Antonio. The Spurs escaped with that win and went on to sweep the series, and the Cavs have endured a series of failures and defections in the eight years since.
All of that brings us to this year, because the fortunes of the fans in either Oakland or Cleveland are about to change. They are the last two teams standing, and one of them is going to bring home the NBA title over the course of the next two weeks.
You really couldn’t ask for a better series.
We get the MVP, Stephen Curry, against the best player on the planet, LeBron James. We get a chess match in which some of the peskiest defenders in the NBA, Draymond Green and Matthew Dellavadova, get to try to slow down those two superstars. We get a rookie coach, Steve Kerr, who we’ve grown to appreciate and understand, first through his work as a TV analyst, then through his character as a coach, keeping things so loose around the Warriors that his players would go to war for him. He matches wits against another rookie coach, David Blatt, who is better known in Israel than he is in his homeland of America but whose annals of success as a coach around the world are unmatched by an American not named Phil Jackson, who did all of his best work stateside.
We get the class of the West, a team that won 67 regular-season games and has lost at home only three times all season, against the class of the East, a team that has been without one of its best players, Kevin Love, since the end of the first round and was without its second-best player, Kyrie Irving, for most of the conference finals. The Cavs pulled off a sweep of an Atlanta Hawks team that dominated the regular season but could not match the deep pool of reserves that have been assembled by Cleveland’s two Davids, Griffin and Blatt, along with the input of Goliath, also known as King James.
We get a breath of fresh air, because the past four years have been about LeBron, LeBron, LeBron and LeBron, with cameos by Pop, Cuban, KD and Russ, and a handful of others who have learned that finishing second in mid-June is so, so much worse than finishing a season in mid-April or early May or late May.
If we have any luck, we get a seven-game slugfest with road wins for both the Cavs and the Dubs over the course of the first four games. Then would come a Game 5 that swings the momentum in a huge way one way or another. And then a Game 6 in which a great team, take your pick, shows what it is made of when 8 1/2 months of hard work (in many cases, a lifetime of hard work) is in danger of going down the drain.
And then, if the basketball gods smile on us, a night to remember forever in Game 7 on the 19th, a Friday. Somebody goes home the champs. The other team goes home devastated. One wait will end; one wait will endure.
I’ve been covering this league since the early 90s, and I’ve never anticipated a finals as much as I’ve anticipated this one. But I have nothing on the folks in Oakland and Cleveland, who have been waiting lifetimes for this moment. Let’s hope it’s the best finals ever.
Chris Sheridan is publisher and editor-in-chief of SheridanHoops.com. Follow him on Twitter.
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