By A.J. Hayes
Thomas Wolfe may have been exaggerating when he wrote “You Can’t Go Home Again.” But in the case of basketball player Chris Webber that phrase should be taken as gospel.
Chris Webber, earlier
Especially when it comes to a possible return to the Warriors, Webber’s initial NBA club. When Webber forced his way off the Warriors in the fall of 1994, he just didn’t leave the franchise and team’s dedicated fan base in the lurch. He dumped a gallon of gasoline on the shag carpet and lit a match.
But here we are more than a dozen years later and there is serious talk of a Warriors and Webber reunion. But before the Warriors make that move we implore Golden State to take Amy Winehouse’s advice and say “No, No, No.”
The current Warriors, with Baron Davis and Stephen Jackson leading a “shoot-and-ask-questions-later” barrage are currently the most entertaining and only winning pro sports team in Northern California. But today’s W’s still have a ways to go in matching the excitement level generated by the Warriors clubs of the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Led by fish-tie-wearing Coach Don Nelson in his first tenure as Warriors coach, those Warriors reinvented NBA basketball in the Bay Area. Led by Timmy Hardaway, Mitch Richmond and Chris Mullin (AKA Run-TMC), those Warriors clubs put on awesome scoring displays every time they took the hardwood, selling out the Coliseum Arena on a nightly basis and winning a couple of league scoring titles in the process.
Warrior’s fans ate it up like popcorn, or more accurately free pizza, which they won every time Golden State scored 120 or points in a game, which was frequently.
Despite a high entertainment value, the Warriors of those days lacked the presence of a great big man to move them deep into the playoffs. But that all changed in 1993 when the Warriors managed to draft Webber, the collegiate superstar who led Michigan to the NCAA championship game in ’93.