Strange days for Warriors fans

Sports fans are strange. They love success, but resent those who celebrate it with them.

Take the Golden State Warriors, who play the second game Sunday in a previously unthinkable NBA Finals. After years as a Bay Area sports version of that cool band with a few hardcore fans, they're now The Black Eyed Peas. Everybody likes them. That brings some secret resentment from those who followed the team through the lean years. And lean decades.

Those Warriors fans are not alone. Sports fans' passion for their team somehow grows when the team is bad. Fans of great teams share  joy, but bad teams' fans share a deeper connection: Pain.

Don't think so? Consider the Oakland Raiders, whose fans become more committed to the team with each passing bad year. They know that it will eventually turn around and then they'll be on top of the world. It has to, right? Right?

When a long-suffering team finally wins, fans come out of the woodwork. To the hard-core fans, those other fans are front-runners. Bandwagon-jumpers. They weren't there when things were bad, so they are resented.

We've seen it in the Bay Area. The San Francisco Giants are the most popular team in the region after winning three World Series. They routinely sold out their ballpark since 2000, so it's not just the past five years that have brought popularity, but it certainly exploded. Go on Facebook and you see posts about the Giants. Go to the grocery store and you see people wearing the T-shirts. Look around your neighborhood and you see Giants license plate holders. Everybody's a fan.

Of course. They're winning.

Now we have the Warriors. They're different from the Giants because for the past 25 years, Warriors fans were the most passionate, supportive fans in the NBA. Win (rarely), lose (almost always) or Ty(rone Hill, a one-time draft pick), fans turned out to watch and cheer. Even when they were terrible, they had a passionate core.

While maybe 500,000 different people attended Giants games each year, it felt like 30,000 people attended Warriors games – 17,000 at a time. The TV ratings were minuscule.

This year it changed. The Warriors have the NBA's most valuable player. They have some of the league's most exciting players. They have a charismatic coach. The vibe is ridiculous. Suddenly, everyone's a Warriors fan.

Which makes the core fans uncomfortable. Guys like my friends Danny, Que and Jayson. Or Vickie, who attended Thursday's game. And all the other people who attended games in 1996 and 2000 and 2006 and watched losing seasons.

They know that people who talk about how they loved Rick Barry and the Run TMC days don't remember the past 10 years – when Jason Richardson was the team's only star and when Mike Dunleavy was a heralded draft pick. They don't remember when Kalenna Azubuike came up from the D-League or when Muggsy and Bimbo were the point guards. They don't remember Anthony Randolph's potential or Andres Biedrens' horrible free throws.

But now they're all in, which is good news: Because it means the Warriors are winning. And if they cap off one of the greatest seasons in NBA history with a championship, those fans will get the licence plate holders, foam fingers, championship T-shirts and post about the team on Facebook.

Which is all good for Warriors fans. Because it means a championship.

This is the dream, but it feels like there are a lot of uninvited guests. Hard-core Warriors fans may have to get used to the company.

The band that used to be a secret is now winning Grammy Awards.

Brad Stanhope is a former Daily Republic editor. Reach him at bradstanhope@hotmail.com.