OAKLAND – Charles Dudley lives in Seattle, but his mind often wanders. It travels 800 miles south and 50 years in the past.
To the Bay Area. To 1975.
When the Warriors, led by a trail-blazing coach and team-first tactics that could have been ripped straight out of Steve Kerr’s playbook in 2025, stunned the NBA world by capturing the NBA title.
The Warriors swept heavily-favored Washington 4-0. Led by Hall of Famer Rick Barry, it was the kind of improbable run that should have left the imaginations of the larger hoops public spellbound.
“I say it’s the greatest upset in the history of major sports in the United States of America,” Barry, 83, told the Bay Area News Group. “We weren’t even going to be a playoff team or get to the Finals, and then supposedly it’s going to be a sweep. Then we sweep the team that was supposed to sweep us. You can’t find anything more dramatic than that.”
Instead, it was a championship that has been largely forgotten within the larger NBA narrative.
While other title-winning teams have been immortalized by books and film, Golden State’s accomplishment exists only in newspaper archives and the memories of the dwindling few who watched and the even fewer who played.
“No cover of Sports Illustrated, no invitation to the White House,” Barry said. “Nothing for 50 years, while there’s been all kinds of documentaries done about all kinds of other teams. Now, finally, thanks to Charles Dudley, we’re finally going to have a documentary to talk about this amazing accomplishment.”
Dudley, 75, was a key reserve on that overlooked group, and has made it his mission to remedy that wrong.
He has spent the past few years making frequent trips to San Francisco, poring over frail archives of the old San Francisco Examiner and other newspapers and conducting interviews with nearly 30 subjects for an upcoming documentary on the ‘75 Warriors.
The documentary, called “Cardiac Kids” is nearing completion.
“It is important to me to, for the guys who have passed away and are no longer with us, that they are not forgotten,” Dudley told this news organization.
The seven living members from that team — Barry, Dudley, Butch Beard, George Johnson, Jeff Mullins, Clifford Ray and Jamaal Wilkes — will gather at Chase Center on Friday night to be honored during the Warriors’ game against the Blazers. Who wouldn’t want to learn more about an eclectic cast of personalities from a bygone era?
Such as the late Al Attles, who ran the team from the sidelines at a time when Black coaches were a rarity, and in the minds of his players, should have been awarded a Coach of the Year honor.
Attles, who died in 2024, bucked traditional NBA thinking – and modern thought that persists five decades later – by playing a 10-man rotation even into the Finals.
“We set the tone for how the NBA looks today,” Dudley declared. “We had 10 Black guys, and two Black coaches on the team .. from that point on, there were more opportunity for African American players and then gradually African American coaches.”
Warrior coach Al Attles
Among the stars of that title-winning side was Wilkes, the hotshot rookie who drew the ridicule of his peers during a summer league camp at San Jose City College in 1974.
The former UCLA star had graced the silver screen in a movie set to release later that season — “Cornbread, Earl and Me” — and came into camp with a pretty-boy reputation. The 22-year-old did not do himself any favors early on.
“I was feeling pretty good about myself, and then I dehydrated on the second or third day of rookie camp, and they had to carry me off the court,” Wilkes, now 72, remembered in an interview with this organization. “I was the biggest joke of rookie camp.”
Wilkes, better known as Magic Johnson’s running mate for the Showtime Lakers a half-decade later, he rebounded from his preseason embarrassment to become Rookie of the Year in the Bay Area.
During an era in which throwing the ball down to the post ad nauseam was the norm, the mid-1970s Warriors bucked that trend by running a perimeter-oriented, pass-and-cut-and-screen attack that bore uncanny resemblance to the sets flooding the modern NBA.
Big men Ray and George Johnson would set screens and play-make from the high-post while the perimeter scorers such as Barry, Wilkes and the Filmore’s own Phil Smith buzzed around the wide-open court.
“We were not going to overpower teams,” Wilkes said. “We were going to outsmart, outquick and hopefully outhustle them. That’s what I remember about that team.”
And that’s what the Warriors did in the postseason, taking out Seattle in six games before outlasting Chicago, then in the West, in seven.
The scoring patterns were not the only part of the Warriors story that was ahead of its time in 1975. With Jim Crow laws still a recent blight on American society, the integrated NBA still saw most teams’ social circles divided along racial lines.
Not the Warriors, who played in an East Bay that was at the epicenter of the Black Panthers movement and student activism, and took a progressive approach to all aspects of their team.
“I never heard about the (Black and white players on the) Celtics or Lakers hanging out together,” Dudley said. “We all spent time and hung out together. We would do projects together in the Oakland community. Oakland was very important to us, because they supported us the whole way, when everybody else stopped.”
Their social attitudes and offense – sans a 3-point line that would not be introduced to the NBA until 1979 – may have been cutting edge, but precious little else was.
The Warriors flew commercial out of Oakland and were forced out of their normal arena, making them play in Daly City’s Cow Palace instead for the Finals, a series that was shown on tape delay.
It could have been even worse, Dudley remembered.
“If the Cow Palace was booked, the next biggest building would have been the Civic Center,” Dudley said incredulously. “Five thousand people (capacity) for a championship series like that.”
The Warriors appeared primed to make a run at back-to-back Finals the next season, winning a league-high 59 games as the majority of its team returned.
The Suns put an end to that dream, taking out Golden State in seven in an epic Western Conference Finals. The team took almost 40 years to regain its form after that.
“I thought we were positioned to possibly win another championship or two,” Wilkes said. “But it’s pretty difficult. We’re talking about it like it’s easy, but its not. A lot of things have to go right.”
While the dynastic Reggie Jackson Oakland A’s and John Madden’s 1976 Raiders have become mythologized in Bay Area lore, their Warriors have slipped through the cracks.
But thanks to the efforts of Dudley, and his constant trips from his birthplace of Seattle to his adopted home in the Bay Area, it is a story that will be talked about for years to come.
“This story needs to be kept alive,” Dudley said. “It is all self-funded. I made a commitment to the guys that I would get this done, and it’s very, very close to being done.”
