Warriors fan promotes faith in team

0 Comments | Oakland Tribune, May 6, 2007 | by Kelly Rayburn

There was something about the Golden State Warrior's 111-93 victory over the Detroit Pistons on March 5 that grabbed Paul Wong's attention.

It wasn't Jason Richardson's game-high 29 points. Nor was it Al Harrington's 10 rebounds or even the fact that none of the Pistons starting five, playing on their home floor, scored more than 18 points.

"There was something in their eyes that I saw," said Wong, 34, who owns the Hawaiian Drive Inn restaurant in Alameda. "And I said, 'You know what, they believe in themselves. We just need to show them that we believe in them.'"

And so it was that "We believe," the mantra of Warrior fans at the end of the season and throughout the team's shocking upset of the top-seeded Dallas Mavericks in the first-round of the NBA playoffs, was born.

After the win in Detroit, Wong showed up at the Warriors next game, at home against the Denver Nuggets, with the first of his homemade signs. It read: "WE BELIEVE PLAYOFF."

The Warriors won that game 110-96 and subsequently went on a mad dash to the finish line. On the last day of the regular season, they secured a playoff spot for the first time in 13 years.

For their next act, they stunned the basketball world by dispatching top-seeded Dallas, which had just completed on of the best seasons in NBA history.

"It was awesome," said Jackqueline Atkins, 37, of Oakland, who was at the Oracle Arena on Thursday night when the Warriors clinched the series 4-2.

The Warriors begin second-round play Monday. For Wong, Thursday's victory was the high point -- so far -- of his campaign to build a tidal wave of support behind the basketball squad he has rooted for since the early 1980s.

With a touch of pride, he reflected on Thursday's game. "The Dallas Mavericks lost simply because they were not playing against the 12 players on the team. They were playing against 22,000 fans in the arena."

Attendance for the game was actually listed at 20,677, but given the arena's rocking atmosphere, Wong can be forgiven for over- estimating. It's no wonder the Warrior faithful are so enthused. As Dallas coach Avery Johnson put it, "If you haven't been to the playoffs in 13 years, your fans are going to be pretty crazy."

Longtime fan John Prewitt, 25, who grew up in the East Bay and now lives in Foster City, described the frustration of rooting for Warrior teams full of potential -- only for the end of each season to become "just a matter of what draft pick we get."

Prewitt was referring to the NBA's lottery system, in which teams that don't make the playoffs get first crack at the pool of college (and, until this year, high school) players coming into the NBA. Wong didn't know where to start in describing the past frustration.

"How about losing all that talent?" he said.

The list of players the Warriors traded away or lost to free agency reads like an All-Star squad. It includes Mitch Richmond, Tim Hardaway, Chris Mullin, Chris Webber, Latrell Sprewell, Antawn Jamison and Gilbert Arenas.

"How about all the coaching changes?" Wong asked.

Since current coach Don Nelson led the Warriors to the playoffs in 1994, Bob Lanier, Rick Adelman, P.J. Carlesimo, Garry St. Jean, Dave Cowens, Brian Winters, Eric Musselman and Mike Montgomery have all coached the team. None lasted longer than two seasons.

This year a couple of front-office moves proved key. One was luring Nelson, who had most recently coached the Mavericks, out of retirement. Another was a blockbuster trade engineered by Mullin, now the organization's general manager, that sent Troy Murphy, Mike Dunleavy, Ike Diogu and Keith McLeod to the Indiana Pacers for Harrington, Stephen Jackson, Josh Powell and Sarunas Jasikevicius. Even after the trade, however, the team remained on the skids. Nelson all but wrote off the playoffs after a 113-83 loss to the Chicago Bulls on Feb. 28.

"I definitely feel responsible for this," he said. "I thought I could get this team to the playoffs, but it doesn't look like it's going to happen. I feel that I failed in a lot of ways, really."

Five days later the Warriors ended a six-game losing streak with the victory against Detroit. Fans at the Denver game ridiculed Wong over the tortured grammar of his "WE BELIEVE PLAYOFF" sign.

Wong said he simply ran out of room for an 'S' at the end of "playoff" and had to make do. He hasn't changed the sign since. He's very superstitious.

The victory over Denver was the second straight win in what would become a 16-5 end to the regular season.

In that time, Wong dropped $5,000 of his own money on homemade "We Believe" T-shirts and signs.

He estimated he handed out 4,000 signs alone in one game -- the Warriors last regular-season home game, against Dallas, a 111-82 victory on April 17.

The Warriors organization approached him, Wong said, about taking control of the "We Believe" campaign for the playoffs. He said he was "honored" by the request.

The team then pulled off its first playoff stunner, winning in Dallas 97-85 in Game One of the series. Since then, there have been no brakes on the runaway bandwagon.