A Member of 1975 GSW Championship Team Recalls the Greatness of Coach Al Attles
By Charles Dudley
Next year marks the 50th Anniversary of the 1975 Golden State Warriors NBA Championship. Led by coach Al Attles, this team brought the first NBA championship to the Bay Area. A graduate of North Carolina A&T, an HBCU institution, Attles became the NBA’s first full-time African American coach.
He also became the first full-time African American head coach in history to win an NBA Championship. On the eve of this 50th anniversary, I would like to share what Coach Attles meant to myself and my teammates.
Al was a force of nature, and it is reflected in his accomplishments during his 50-year career tenure with GSW starting with the 1960-61 season when he was drafted the 39th overall pick by the then Philadelphia Warriors. The Philadelphia Warriors were the only professional team Al has ever been associated with.
He played 11 seasons and coached six playoff teams, including the 1975 champions. In 2014, he was the recipient of the John W. Bunn Lifetime Achievement Award, the Basketball Hall of Fame’s most prestigious honor aside from enshrinement.
There are only seven surviving players from the 1974-75 season. Those no longer with us are: Steve Bracey, Charles Johnson, Phil Smith, Derek Dickey and Bill Bridges. Assistant Coach Joe Roberts, who played an integral part in the team’s success during the 1974-75 season, recently passed away.
The remaining players are this writer, Clifford Ray, George Johnson, Rick Barry, Jamaal Wilkes, Jeff Mullins, and our trainer, Dick D’Doliva. Over time, the gratitude and love for Coach Attles has been deeply felt and to this day is embodied in what is engraved on our Championship rings – “Togetherness.”
Here is what Al meant to all of us. More than a coach, he was a tremendous leader, mentor, innovator and made all 12 of us feel important. On the bench, at practice or on the road and even when the chips were down, Al never swore, never belittled or yelled at any of us in front of each other.
No one ever wanted to disappoint him, everyone accepted their respective roles, and we knew what we had to do to achieve long-term success. That is where the slogan “Strength in Numbers” began for us. He taught us how to set goals and how to achieve them. An honorable man, he never went back on anything he promised.
At the time, we were living in a basketball world that refused to see us, recognize us, or want us to be a part of professional basketball because of the makeup of our team, which consisted of 10 African American players and two white players. In 1975, this was not the norm in the NBA. No matter what was going on outside the arena, Al always kept us focused on the prize. “We win together or we lose together.” Importantly, he created the foundation for our individual successes after our basketball careers had ended.
Al saw something special in all the players on the 1974-75 team. It started with training camp that season in Hawaii and culminated in Game Four of the NBA finals against the Washington Bullets (now Washington Wizards).
Attles also saw something special in Joe Roberts, who became the Warriors first assistant coach. His trust in Roberts paid dividends when he had to take over for Al in Game Four of the NBA Finals.
At the start of the 1975 NBA Playoff Finals, Attles’ team was being vilified by the media as being the worst ever to reach the finals and shouldn’t have been there at all. At a team meeting and Al said to the players “I don’t know if we can beat this team in four straight, but I think we can beat them in five.”
The word was that the Bullets were supposed beat us in four straight games. Everyone heard that prediction, took it to heart and won the first three games. In Game Four, it came down to the wire, but with the belief in togetherness, we beat the Washington Bullets 96-95. In that four-game sweep, the Warriors became only the third team in NBA history to do so. To date, there have only been nine teams to accomplish this.
At the end of the day, this was a basketball team that succeeded against all odds to become NBA World Champions. Never recognized, rarely mentioned, and playing during a racially and socially turbulent time in Oakland and the Bay Area, our 1974-75 Warriors team had no chance to have a successful season were it not for the foundations and strategic brilliance laid out by Al Attles.
His coolness under pressure and confidence in his players resulted in this victory that saved professional basketball in the Bay Area; and his leadership in forming a racially diverse team laid the foundation for how the NBA looks today.
Speaking on behalf of my team and myself, I’m very honored to have been coached under “Mr. Warrior,” Al Attles.
