All right. Contrary to what I promised myself when I first began weaving a weekly yarn for this newspaper 20 years ago, I am about to date myself.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t mean that literally \u2014 although I did spend much of my teenage years dating myself. What I\u2019m referring to is a story I did in my second year of television sports at KPIX in San Francisco.<\/p>\n
It was in 1969 (Yes. I started in sports television when I was 6 years old), and the then-San Francisco Warriors were owned by a creative cherub of a man named Franklin Mieuli.<\/p>\n
Franklin was P.T. Barnum in a deerstalker hat. He understood how to sell his product, and how to put bodies in seats. The team played its home games at the Cow Palace, and often times the horned denizens the place was named after outnumbered the paid attendance.<\/p>\n
Franklin also knew how to get publicity, which in turn generated interest in his team. To that end, in the 1969 NBA draft, with his 13th pick (yes, there were 13 rounds back then), Mieuli selected Denise Long, a 5\u201911\u201d scoring machine from Whitten, Iowa.<\/p>\n
Long had scored 6,250 points in her high school career at Union Whitten. They were also the Iowa state champions. The town of Whitten has a population of 200. There were 34 students in the graduating class. Long was the most talked about thing in the state, this side of the corn harvest.<\/p>\n
When she and a high school teammate were brought to San Francisco, they were heralded in the same way that Barnum heralded Jumbo the Elephant.<\/p>\n
Denise Long got to meet Wilt Chamberlain, then a Warrior \u201cteammate,\u201d Willie Mays, the mayor and every other politician who wanted his picture in the paper with anybody he or she could.<\/p>\n
Denise Long never played for the Warriors, but Franklin Mieuli did build a woman\u2019s team that lasted for one year and featured Denise Long.<\/p>\n
She never saw the court as a Warrior because the then-enlightened NBA Commissioner, J. Walter Kennedy vetoed the draft pick by saying the NBA didn\u2019t draft non-college players. He didn\u2019t add\u2026.\u201dor women.\u201d<\/p>\n
All of this came back to me in a blinding flash when I began thinking about the impact the Golden State Valkyries have had on this community some 57 years later.<\/p>\n
Denise Long was a good shooter. Period. Maybe she might have been first off the bench for a West Coast Conference team were she to be playing in today\u2019s game, but any thought that she might have so much as sniff at making a WNBA team would be like me saying \u201cI think I can score on Victor Wembanyama.\u201d<\/p>\n
If the truth be told, I couldn\u2019t score on a single player in the WNBA, and I\u2019m talking about back in the day when I actually knew how to bounce the ball. That\u2019s how good the league is, and how far the women\u2019s game has come.<\/p>\n
And that\u2019s why I\u2019m a fan of the Valkyries.<\/p>\n
The whole story of this team is a phenomenon. A second-year franchise is now about to begin a seven-game series to determine the champion of the best women\u2019s basketball league in the world.<\/p>\n
Against all odds, the first year of this franchise saw them get to the playoffs. That\u2019s also unheard of.<\/p>\n
The team\u2019s owner, Joe Lacob (who also owns the men\u2019s team that plays in the same building), promised a championship within five years. Understand that Lacob is the master of the over-stated, and he\u2019s about to be somehow shown that every now and then, hyperbole is usurped by reality. This simply is not supposed to be happening.<\/p>\n
In the Warriors\u2019 championship years, the team took on the rallying cry\u00a0 \u201cJust Us.\u201d And it worked. Well, that cry has now taken up residency down the hall in the locker room of the Valkyries \u2014 and it\u2019s working again.<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s begin with the coaching. They say that the NBA is a \u201cplayer\u2019s league,\u201d and in many cases that\u2019s true. But the WNBA is a coaches\u2019, league, and all you have to look at to prove it, are the teams that got this far.<\/p>\n
I always said this about Tara VanDerveer at Stanford, and I\u2019ll say it about Natalie Nakase with the Valkyries \u2014 those two people can flat out coach. And I mean at any level. Men, women, college or professional. Natalie Nakase prepares her team to play a game as well as anyone I\u2019ve ever been around.<\/p>\n
The Valks are the sum of the parts. Yes, they have a few players who could play for anyone in the league. But there\u2019s a real \u201cwe\u201d kind of feel about this team. They play within a system, they generally make the extra pass for the better shot, they\u2019re unselfish. It\u2019s not \u201cI\u2019m gonna get mine,\u201d it\u2019s \u201cwe\u2019re gonna get ours.\u201d And how an undersized team can out rebound virtually every opponent is still beyond my comprehension.<\/p>\n
And then there\u2019s Ballhalla.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m honestly not sure who came up with that description of the Chase Center for a Valkyries\u2019 game, but give them a promotion. We live in an age of hype at a sports event. Quite frankly I don\u2019t really want to be told when to cheer and when to jump out of my seat by head-banging music and a hype-person. The Valkyries have even found a way to make that tolerable. Somehow, the fans create the din that has won games for this team without the overpowering assistance of electronics.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s still the hype-person, and stirring music. Still tee shirts being shot into the stands, and fun and games involving the crowd, but for some reason the histrionics, the crowd, and the team all seem to work in sync.<\/p>\n
I can tell you that what\u2019s happening here right now is lightning in a bottle. I urge you to grab hold of it.<\/p>\n
The team is great, the vibe is great, the place is rockin\u2019.<\/p>\n
Denise Long\u2026. and Franklin Mieuli\u2026 would give it a standing \u201cO.\u201d<\/p>\n
Barry Tompkins is a 40-year network television sportscaster and a San Francisco native. Email him at barrytompkins1@gmail.com.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"All right. Contrary to what I promised myself when I first began weaving a weekly yarn for this…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":884039,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[73],"tags":[55713,355,4910,99,434],"class_list":["post-884038","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wnba","tag-marin-sports","tag-nba","tag-newsletter","tag-sports","tag-wnba"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/884038","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=884038"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/884038\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/884039"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=884038"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=884038"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=884038"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}