FALLEN WARRIORS

Where have all the Warriors gone, long time passing?

Like an emissary from a happier time, former owner Franklin Mieuli sits courtside, wearing his Sherlock Holmes cap, thinking happy thoughts, but as far as links to the past go, that’s about it.

The ‘60s brought the franchise, Rick Barry (briefly before his jump to the ABA) and Nate Thurmond, a very San Francisco star, who occasionally served as maitre d’ at his restaurant in the city. The ‘70s brought the return of Barry and an NBA title; the ‘80s, Don Nelson and new Golden State excitement.

Then came the ‘90s, which brought trouble.

A lot of high-powered talent has come through in the ‘90s. Unfortunately, it’s still the ‘90s and the talent has all gone: Chris Mullin is in Indiana, Tim Hardaway in Miami, Chris Webber (shudder) in Washington, Tom (We Hardly Knew Ye) Gugliotta in Minnesota, Mitch Richmond and Billy Owens in Sacramento, Rony Seikaly and Mark Price in Orlando, Chris Gatling in New Jersey, Latrell Sprewell in forced retirement.

Ten former Warriors start in the NBA. Five average 19 points or more, assuming Sprewell’s name hasn’t yet been expunged from the statistics. The current Warriors don’t have anyone that high.

“I think about it a lot actually, the players who’ve come and gone, just since I’ve been there,” Seikaly says.

“We had incredible talent. . . . This is a team that would have traded Michael Jordan for a CBA player.”

But wait, something is stirring. . . .

No, it’s not a pulse. The Warriors are not only losing and demoralized but showing signs of mutinying anew, with Joe Smith, once ticketed to be their next franchise player, wearing Sprewell’s No. 15 on his sneakers and, no doubt, planning his own escape next summer.

Minutes before game time, the house lights go down. A spotlight falls on a lone figure, crouching at midcourt. He wears a midnight blue muscle shirt and has a yellow thing extending backward from his head. He looks like the Phantom, from the comic strip. His name is Thunderbolt. He’s the new mascot in these parts.

Not that he has anything to do with these parts. In the eccentric Mieuli’s day, this was the NBA’s funkiest franchise, the only one that sold baseball caps with the team logo in front and a propeller on top. Now, there are no more Golden Gates, cable cars or state maps on the uniforms, just a lot of generic lightning bolts. The arena and mascot have been “themed.” Everything is ‘90s-retro-techno-something-or-other.

“That’s all taste,” Mieuli explains. “I did it my way. Whoever Chris [Cohan, the new owner] has is doing it their way. . . . Do you think it’s offensive?”

It doesn’t have enough character to be offensive, but it sure is badly timed. The Warriors had a little problem synchronizing the rebuilding of the arena with the rebuilding of the team. The former went OK; the latter hasn’t gone at all.

This explains their present predicament, in which Thunderbolt has performed for as few as 10,065 fans in an arena they just expanded to 19,200 seats. In their last eight seasons in their chilly, unrenovated arena, the Warriors never had an empty seat, but now prices are higher, the team is awful and nobody comes.

“They’re doing the best job they can,” Mieuli says. “My sympathies are with them. They’re going through some hard times, but we’re going to survive.”

He should also be thanking his lucky stars he sold out and is only a former owner. Among the Warriors these days, “former” is a very good thing to be.

RISING STAR, FALLING STAR

They traded Webber right after I came in. It was just as if somebody put some dynamite at the foundation.

--Rony Seikaly

****

If only it was just hard times.

Everybody has hard times. What the Warriors had was franchise meltdown, a China Syndrome of a blowup that triggered an ongoing chain reaction that continues, three years later.

Sprewell’s assault on Coach P.J. Carlesimo was only the latest act in a horror story that started Nov. 17, 1994, the day Nelson lost it and traded Webber.

Nelson had made his bad bets before--such as trading Richmond for Owens--but he had a young team that promised to be a Western power until that day. After it, the three-time coach of the year, the only one then serving as general manager too, making him the game’s highest-paid administrator, watched his team blow up in his face. At the end, he was hospitalized and almost begging to be fired.

Young players wrote Webber’s No. 4 and Owens’ No. 30 on their sneakers. The team that had started 7-1 piled loss upon loss. When Nelson left in February 1995, they were 14-31.

“Some guys on the team took it with them,” says Seikaly, acquired just before the season, unfortunately for him, in a trade for Owens.

“They didn’t let go of it. They didn’t let go of it when Billy Owens was traded. They didn’t let go of it when Chris Webber was traded. They took it personally against the guys who came in.

“It was basically Spree and his boys--Keith Jennings, Gatty [Gatling], Victor Alexander.”

Nelson said later he had let his team get too young and had been unlucky, since the brash kids won 50 games in 1993-94 while the veterans, Hardaway and Mullin, were injured. Something else had changed too. Nelson, who’d always insisted on “good people,” was now running risks with such reputed question marks as Gatling, Cliff Rozier and Carlos Rogers. Mix in Webber’s stubborn pride, Owens’ free spirit, some unpleasant developments and the next thing you had was a rebellion.

In retrospect, the Warriors should have traded everyone they had--all the players who were starting at the end of that season are now gone, anyway--but no one had ever seen anything like it.

Nor did anyone dream it wasn’t going away.

By the next season, there was a new coach, Rick Adelman. He was a players’ type who had picked up the pieces in Portland after the Clyde Drexler-Mike Schuler standoff and taken the Trail Blazers to two NBA finals, but here, he was overmatched.

Who wouldn’t have been? His best players, Sprewell and Hardaway, had started feuding the season before and they weren’t done yet.

“Timmy had been the heart and soul of the team,” Seikaly says. “Timmy went out [for knee surgery in the 1993-94 season] and Spree became the man and he wasn’t willing to give that title back to Timmy.

“Everybody was against Timmy and sided with Spree. They said [Hardaway had] gotten old, he’d had too many knee surgeries, his cross-over dribble wasn’t the same.”

Unfortunately, it looked like a no-brainer. Hardaway was 29 and had yet to regain his old explosiveness. The gifted Sprewell, who had just turned 25, was about to become a free agent and he was the one they had to have.

Hardaway went to Miami, where he has since become the old Hardaway. Meanwhile, the more slack the Warriors cut Sprewell, the wackier he got.

Quiet and self-effacing--the writers called him “the black Tom Sawyer” as a young player--he could also snap. He had a storied fight at practice one day with the fearsome Byron Houston, who, Nelson once noted, “everyone thought was a mass murderer.” Sprewell had an even worse go with Jerome Kersey.

“Spree went out and got a two-by-four,” Seikaly says. “And after the two-by-four, he yells, ‘I’m going to the car to get my piece!’

“All Rick Adelman could say was, ‘Practice is over, guys.’ ”

They went 36-46. It must have been on sheer talent because their morale didn’t seem high. At season’s end, Seikaly vowed to retire rather than return, although he was only 31 and making $4 million a season.

“Chris Mullin and I used to talk about it during games,” Seikaly says. “He and I would be isolated, 30 feet from the basket, and we used to have conversations. We’d say, ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ ”

When Seikaly held out last fall, the Warriors traded him to Orlando. Mullin had to serve another year in the penal colony before they finally liberated him, sending him to Indiana.

The Warriors sank to 30-52. Adelman was fired, which seemed like a mercy termination for a man who had long since run out of answers, as when point guard Bimbo Coles, one of the few leaders left, publicly demanded that players who weren’t trying be benched.

“First of all,” Adelman said later, “I told him, ‘That’s not your job, that’s my job.’ But the other part is that it wasn’t just one guy. It would have been, ‘Who would you want me to pull out first?’ You’d have to flip a coin.”

Price and B.J. Armstrong were freed in deals this season. Sprewell was campaigning openly for his walking papers, when he got into it with Carlesimo.

These days, whenever former Warriors meet, which is most places, they talk about the old days and shudder.

“I talk to Mark about it,” Seikaly says. “I talk to Gugliotta. It was just unbelievable. What a nightmare.”

THE SUN ALWAYS RISES . . . DOESN’T IT?

P.J. tried to come in and put some authority in the organization. No way.

--Seikaly

****

You want to talk nightmares, talk to Carlesimo.

Unfortunately, he isn’t talking about it. For a while, earnest-sounding words came out of his mouth and his face took on sincere expressions, but there was little real response. If asked a specific question, he’d give a general answer, until finally, because of the possibility of litigation, he had an excuse for saying nothing at all:

Q: Did Sprewell call you to apologize, as has been reported?

A: I can’t comment.

Q: Could you, at least, say if Sprewell was truthful in saying he called you to apologize?

A: I’m pretty sure that would be commenting on it.

If you want to know how this has hit him, you could assume that a physical attack that becomes a sensational story, resulting in discipline against the player that turns into a furor, prompting a nation-wide plebiscite on the victim’s managerial style, would shake a man up.

Further, if his players seem to line up with their former teammate, this isn’t merely unpleasant. Barely one month into a five-year contract, Carlesimo might have been so badly damaged as to make his position untenable.

“It’s not for me to say that,” Carlesimo said Tuesday as the pending Sprewell news conference, in an adjacent hotel, drew hundreds of reporters to the team’s spanking-new, swank training facility on the roof of a downtown parking structure.

“I can’t control it,” Carlesimo said. “As we said, we didn’t seek out this situation. We certainly didn’t want it. We’re not happy anybody has to go through this.”

And Smith wearing Sprewell’s number on his sneakers?

“I think that’s good that Joe is loyal and has compassion for a friend and a former teammate,” Carlesimo said. “I don’t have a problem with that at all.”

So, it’s happening again. Everybody has hard times, but with the Warriors,the nightmares keep recurring.