The Terrible Towel

Earlier today I was talking to a co-worker in my office and the discussion turned to my Golden State Warriors towel that I have draped over the back of my television. Without really thinking about it, I said that it was an ad for my bad taste in basketball teams. Being a fan of the game and no team in particular, he laughed, agreed and the conversation moved on. Later I felt bad, as though I had sold "my team" out. After all, the Warriors had one a championship (barely before I was born) and had the ultra-stylish Run TMC crew, not to mention the Sprewell-Webber shoulda-woulda-coulda that was prematurely dead. Still, the recent run of form for the team, which coincides with the blossoming of my basketball conciousness, has been uniformly awful. Sure, as many a Warriors fan has pointed out, if we were in the East, we almost certainly would have made the playoffs one of these years. This is a nice way to lie to ourselves, to try and make us forget all the times that we've thrown a game away in the last 2 minutes and/or flubbed those all-important free throws (a particular Warriors nemesis). Even the stars of the team are flawed: Baron Davis, the overweight point guard with All-Star skills who can't seem to stay healthy or his mind entirely on the game; Jason Richardson, the ultra-athletic 2 with no handles to speak of; Troy Murphy, the defensive-rebounding specialist power forward. All of which, it should go without saying, are worse free-throw shooters than they have any right to be. The rest of the team is potential, a tomorrow that never comes, barring a trade to another, more fortunate team. Unlike the Royals, Texans and countless other woe-begon franchises, the Warriors don't even give you the joy of being flat-out bad, no chance at balancing out the scales with a No. 1 pick. And even when they do screw up and have a horrible year, the balls shake out the wrong way and we get Mike Dunleavy Jr., a gag gift if ever I saw one. Junior is a good enough metaphor for the team as a whole, being as he is just good enough to garner a ridiculous contract while being just bad enough that he'll never live up to that money. And yet, I still feel bad when I refer to the team sucking, aside from the brief flash of instant gratification that you get when you speak the truth. As a fan, I've somehow married myself to this grotesque conglomeration of athletic underachievers and I don't know if there's any way out. Oh well, at we don't have a roster that looks like this anymore: http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Stage/7975/roster.html