Look at this spectacle! The Oracle Arena on Saturday was vibrating, and the fans were jumping, literally jumping, almost every time Steph Curry raised up to shoot. The team has been a fixture for 45 years in the city, two entire generations.
“You have to think of the Warriors like a tree,” an Oakland native and Oracle attendant named Lorenzo said. “We planted our roots here and just keep growing, and eventually cover the whole community.”
Last week in the run-up to the Super Bowl, we saw the marketing behemoth at work. Every Super Bowl inevitably turns into the lovechild of Corporate America. But this year, with the game being staged at the $1.3 billion Levi’s Stadium nestled near Silicon Valley, that lovechild has grown up, crowned and coronated. And we’re not seeing it just at the lavish Super Bowl City in downtown San Francisco, but throughout the Bay Area — local sports teams are all seeking to profit off the wave of corporate and tech money pouring in.
Steph Curry scored 26 points in Saturday’s win over the Thunder, Golden State’s only home game of Super Bowl week.
The San Francisco 49ers are no longer the San Francisco 49ers. (Although some would argue San Francisco itself is no longer San Francisco.) In Oakland, it’s magnified even more. The A’s recently sought to move further south to San Jose before that was eventually shut down by the Giants, who own the territorial rights to that city. The Raiders seem to want to play in any city but Oakland. And then there’s the defending NBA champion Warriors. One of the greatest teams in the sport’s history, giving the greatest swan song the sport has ever seen with their current record of 46-4. An ode to Oakland. Likely the team will begin play in a new, state-of-the-art facility across the bay in San Francisco in two seasons’ time.
But why leave? Right now, Oakland is booming. Tech companies are moving in — including Uber, which is actively looking at offices there. And despite the negative aspects of gentrification, Oakland remains one of the most racially and ethnically diverse cities in the country. Nevertheless, the city is still a long way off from San Francisco or San Jose financially.
In 2014, a video emerged showing a disagreement about a soccer field between some employees of Dropbox, a file-hosting service headquartered in San Francisco, and some local kids in the Mission Area of the city. The Dropbox guys reserved the park for an hour online via an app. But the kids argued that they had played on this field their entire lives and no one had ever “reserved” it.
“You think just because you have money you can buy the field,” one of the locals said in the video.
The argument was never resolved; it just festered. Which essentially is what we’re seeing in the sports landscape in the Bay Area. When that rupture happens — when wealth divides fandom to such a degree that it breaks down the community that sports teams allege to represent, what then?
And let’s be honest. We romanticize sports, no question, too much sometimes. We give franchises more credit than they deserve. When you consider financial reality, you can’t fault 49ers CEO Jed York for leaving Candlestick Park, or the NFL for promoting the Super Bowl the way it does and pinching every last drop of cash out of it, or even the Warriors for wanting a better arena and a larger piece of the corporate pie. You can’t.
But inside Oracle Arena, named after another booming tech company, it wasn’t hard to look past Steph Curry’s brillance, or some of the best fans I’ve ever seen, and see the people that work at this building, who grew up with the team, and wonder what will be lost if and when a move happens.
Last month, a lawsuit was filed in state court against the developers of the Warriors’ new arena, arguing that the site is too close to the UCSF medical center and could create traffic concerns for emergency vehicles. The plans have been pushed back while the lawsuit crawls its way through the courts.
The inevitable, though, seems just around the corner. And, as Lorenzo says, without the Warriors — or the Raiders, or A’s — Oakland would be like “a city with no trees.”
Flinder Boyd is a former European professional basketball player turned writer. On Twitter he can be found @FlinderBoyd. He’s in the Bay Area all week for a series of articles on the events around Super Bowl 50.