So here we are. For the third time in four years, the Golden State Warriors are NBA champions. And for the third time in four years, they beat LeBron to do it. This one seems different, though. A sweep is more than a victory; it’s a symbol. A clear sign that the rivalry that has defined the NBA for almost a half decade is over. While it may have been apparent before, it’s undeniable now: the Warriors are the better team. But that doesn’t mean I have to admit that to my dad.
Over the past four years, the Cavs–Warriors divide has been the most intractable difference between me and my father. To me, LeBron is everything a player can be: a team unto himself, a contender on two legs. A player who wanted to make his own championship team and did. Twice. To my dad, though, LeBron’s gifts are outweighed only by his all-consuming ego. The Warriors—now there’s a real team. Masterful draft picks coming together to form the kind of egalitarian beauty not seen since those divine ’70s Knicks teams of my dad’s shag-carpet childhood in Astoria, Queens. Even when Durant signed with them, they were still elegant, equipped with four players ready to end the game on any given night. All I see, though, is another Silicon Valley death machine gobbling up all the assets it can afford. Ultimately, it’s not really about who’s the better team; it’s about who’s better for basketball. A battle between father and son for the soul of the game they love.
Plus, we also both think my older brother Dan is on our side.
Dan’s the one who brought me to basketball. We always got along while growing up, but more like cordial coworkers than loving siblings. There were fights when we were young, but that slowly morphed into a general disinterest in each other’s affairs. He was busy falling in love and slamming drum kits while I was content to delve deeper into the PlayStation catalogue.
But that all changed when he went to Oberlin in the mid 2000s, a tiny college just outside Cleveland. He caught LeBron fever quick, so when he came back home, instead of disappearing into a cloud of weed smoke with his buddies, he’d stick around and force me to watch some guy I’d never heard of play a sport I didn’t care about. I don’t know why he was so insistent—if he just needed the TV or if he really wanted to connect the way older brothers had been connecting with little brothers for generations.
But either way, it took only a few games to make me a LeBron lifer. I’d run home on the weekends when Dan was back, eager for him to guide me through the intricacies of the King’s genius. It was incredible watching a still-growing superstar unlock the mysteries of this beautiful game right before my eyes. I felt awe, throat-shattering excitement and hope. And Dan had given me all of it. Watching those games together was the first time I ever felt that my big brother really loved me, and the first time I felt like I really loved him back.
A few years after he graduated, Dan moved to Santa Cruz to teach. In the summer of 2014, just around the time Steve Kerr came along and unlocked the Warriors’ devastating potential, he got a job as an eighth-grade US history teacher in San Jose. After toiling away as an eager but unpassionate fifth-grade math teacher for years, he finally had a chance to put his long-dormant liberal fury to work. But early in the school year, he had some medical problems. Seizures at first, then in February a sudden heart attack. He spent a lot of time in the hospital, desperately waiting to get back to work and his kiddos. But he still had basketball.
I don’t know how many Warriors games he watched from those stale hospital beds, but I know how much he loved them. He tried to get me on the bandwagon, but I had eyes only for the King’s return to Cleveland. Instead my dad bore the brunt of Dan’s adoration, glad to have a chance to hear his boy talk about something other than the nagging pain in his chest. Hours went by as he attentively listened to Dan break down the devastation of the Curry–Green pick-and-roll. There was no talk of LeBron and the Cavs, or even our beloved Knicks. Just Dan’s feeble-bodied hunger for that budding Dubs dynasty on the other side of the hospital walls. Dad even started recording the Warriors East Coast feed so he’d be sufficiently prepared for the next phone call. As Dan got better, they started to plan one of their classic summer road trips for when school was out—another chance to go somewhere Dan wanted to see and Dad knew how to get to. A few days to drive and talk about another season’s worth of stories, hopefully with a Warriors title to cement Dan’s newfound loyalty to his home back in the Bay. A place he already loved too much to ever leave.
And then, one last heart attack. We buried him on Saturday, April 2.
The next day, the Warriors beat the Wizards with a deceptively close score of 102 to 94, while the Cavs squeaked past the Hornets, 102 to 93.
The moment J. R. dribbled away the Cavs best bet to score an upset at Oracle, I knew the series was over. But a sweep?! By the time game 4 mercifully ended, I couldn’t even watch. I just walked around my neighborhood, angrily mumbling about missed free throws and Kyrie Irving what-ifs. When I finally got the courage to call my dad, he was quiet, conscientious of his little boy’s raw confusion, but I could hear that “I told you so” smile from 3,000 miles away. Behind that smile, though, was a sadness. A recognition that our four-year debate was over. A realization that hurt him just as much as it hurt me. For however much we argued over LeBron vs. Steph, it was always about more than who was right, more than player preferences or basketball philosophies. It was about Dan and our desperate attempts to talk basketball with him one more time.
The hardest part about grieving is feeling the memories of your loved one slowly slip away. They’re just too painful, so your brain steadily washes them out. Sometimes I can’t even remember what his laugh sounded like. What his favorite foods were. I have a recording of him leaving a birthday message on my phone that I finally listened to last year. It seemed so foreign, like a letter from a relative I know only through dilapidated family photos. But when the Finals roll around, with LeBron’s and Steph’s faces covering ESPN like worn-down mastheads, a bit of Dan comes back into focus.
When somebody you love dies, they’re gone forever. They do, however, leave something behind in those whom they loved, parts of them they don’t need anymore. Dan gave me his love of LeBron, his memories of driving back to Oberlin from a game in Cleveland as he worked himself through the possibilities of the King’s meteoric potential. My grief has transformed it, though, into something rabid—a desperate, unhinged love. I need LeBron. Watching him dominate is like a time machine for me, a way to stir up that high school awe I felt while watching him for the first time. Back when I had a big brother.
Dad, on the other hand, got his love of the Warriors. The way Steph Curry threes and a nice joint could make Dan feel something more than the faint beat of his ever-weakening heart. I remember on one of those silent drunken nights during the week of the funeral that Dad mumbled to the window, “He must have been so scared at the end.” That was his boy, the one who turned him into a father, and he died confused and alone. I think that’s where the Warriors come in. They weren’t the team of Dan’s past; they were the team of his future. The team he imagined himself rooting on for years as he slowly built a life for himself along the hills of San Jose. For everything Dan had to face that last year, there was always the promise of the Warriors. Something beautiful his body’s countless betrayals couldn’t corrupt. He may have been raised a Knicks fan and spent a few years living according to the King James Gospel, but he died rooting for the Warriors. So to my dad, they’re more than a dynasty; they’re a memorial, an ever-expanding bouquet of flowers made in his memory by the Bay Area that welcomed him just in time to lose him forever.
Those feelings are alive in us, raging for a way to get out. But rather than let them dwell in hidden silence, these yearly clashes have given us a chance to piece together the echoes he left behind about Steve Kerr’s coaching acumen and LeBron’s GOAT status until it seemed as if there were three of us talking. Just biding our time with pointless arguments until the next game started. It’s those moments, when his memory is more than good or bad but actually there, that have helped trick us into thinking that he’s not really dead. He’s just not alive the same way anymore.
Even if LeBron does come back to Cleveland, I don’t like the chances for Cavs–Warriors V. the Celtics, and the Sixers are rising in the East, and the Rockets were just a Chris Paul ankle roll away from sinking Golden State anyway. So if this really is the end of the rivalry, I’m grateful. Grateful that me and my dad were able to, for a few scattered days every June, feel like the family we used to be. A chance to gather around a TV and trade long-winded hot takes. To scream at impossible chase-down blocks and back-breaking threes. To be together, for a moment, just watching basketball.
I love you, Dan.
Go Cavs.
Hey! The Bold Italic recently launched a podcast, This Is Your Life in Silicon Valley. Check out the full season or listen to the episode below featuring Alexia Tsotsis, former editor in chief of TechCrunch, so stay tuned!
