It's no secret that I am a huge sports fan, and that the one sport I gravitate to more is basketball and the NBA... and like those here it's the Golden State Warriors that are my top hoops team. Despite my Olympics love affair, hoops has been the preferred sport in my household before I was even born, and it dates back to when my parents moved to America from the Philippines where basketball was and still is their preferred team sport in the nation that gave the world Manny Pacquiao. The first sporting event I ever attended was a Warriors preseason game in 1993 when Chris Webber made his home debut, and two succeeding times I went up to the Town I got to watch LeBron in action in his first stint with the Cavs in 2006 (and went to a strip club after the game) and during the Dubs' historic win streak the same night Ronda Rousey got knocked out four years ago.
Those of us here in the Bay Area have had it all good with the Giants' World Series run at the start of this decade, and it may be the case again with the 49ers returning to prominence with, perhaps, the road to the Super Bowl for the NFC may go through Levi's next month. You can imagine that I was over the moon excited when the Warriors won it all in 2015, devastated by that Cavs comeback the following year after that 73-9 regular season, and redeemed with KD leading the Dubs back the following two seasons. Those of us, Warriors fans, had nothing much to cheer about for a long time -- and in a way, what we're going through right now is a rough stretch. But thanks in part to the investments the team's new ownership group of Joe Lacob & Peter Guber, GM Bob Myers, bringing in Steve Kerr as coach, and forming a team built around Stephen Curry, the Warriors finally became a power in the NBA to give it top billing in where we live.
While it's one thing just to watch and celebrate with your friends a hometown team winning a title, it's another to go to a victory celebration a few days after they hoist the trophy and spray champagne in the locker room. It's there that you really get the full sense of what it's like to be in the euphoria of a championship, and it's a measure of how sports can unite a city and its surrounding communities. For the largest gathering of people in America in the modern era, it was three years ago that five million people lined the streets of Chicago when the Cubs celebrated their first World Series title in 108 years. Three million New Englanders came together to revel in the Red Sox's historic World Series triumph twelve years earlier, where both that and the Cubs' drought-ending titles were headed by GM whiz Theo Epstein. And of course, there are the many ticker-tape parades that take place in New York City when teams there win a title.
Last year for the 2018 Warriors championship, I got to cross off an item off my bucket list when I took a day off from work to join my sister, cousins, brother-in-law and a few relatives to take the trek up north from the South Bay (where I live) up to Oakland to attend the Golden State Warriors' victory parade after they won their third NBA title in four years and the back-end of back-to-back crowns. Like many others, we stood in the crowd all during the morning and early afternoon to watch the Warriors parade and see the players and well-known's go passing by us, and got to live through this unique experience that I got to see first-hand for the first time. For anyone who lives and breathes sports as much as I do, typically the local teams matter more than any other... and it should be on any fan's bucket list to experience one of these parades at least once in your lives.
I got to take video of this celebration which I then uploaded onto my YouTube channel during the offseason of what would be the last of those three NBA titles for the Dubs. That includes the man who hosted the War of the Worlds 2 reunion in Nick "Swaggy P." Young, and we've put his video last because of what my cameras caught with him that you'll want to stick around the entire post for. Enjoy...
🏀 STEPHEN CURRY
🏀 KEVIN DURANT
🏀 DRAYMOND GREEN
🏀 Head Coach STEVE KERR
🏀 ANDRE IGUODALA & JORDAN BELL
🏀 JAVELE McGEE & DAMIAN JONES
🏀 SHAUN LIVINGSTON & DAVID WEST
🏀 E40
🏀 NICK "SWAGGY P." YOUNG
For more, subscribe to my YouTube channel at YouTube.com/dc408dxtr... and unlike the majority of channels on that site, I only upload original content that's shot, recorded and edited by yours truly. Included there are about 70 videos from my trips in the past several years to Las Vegas, and the second wave of vlogs from #DCVegas X from this fall will be posted there this holiday week.
- I AM DC
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