Baron Davis, the dunk and the spring of '07

via El Tecolote

By Adam Cancryn

Remembering Baron Davis, and that one magical spring of freshman year.

Baron Davis came into our lives in the spring of 2007.

At the time, we were college freshmen, and more importantly, newly inducted fraternity members. Life was good. We had successfully endured eight weeks of pledgeship and come out the other side with a new group of friends and suddenly more free time than we knew what to do with.

But life was also a bit strange. After all, we had just spent eight weeks focused solely on pledgeship and schoolwork, and it was because of that daily slog that we had bonded with our new group of friends. Now, that crutch was gone. Would we remain as close? Without all of our mandated responsibilities, what would we do together?

The answer for many of us was to hang out in the basement of our new fraternity house, getting to know each other again the best way guys know how: over sports and cheap beer. We would sit and joke and watch TV, all the while trying to confirm that yes, this is where we were meant to be.

That spring, the basketball world belonged to the Golden State Warriors. An assortment of loud personalities and flashy skills loosely supervised by coach/mad scientist Don Nelson, the Warriors barnstormed through the Western Conference. They shunned the plodding, cerebral style popularized by the Spurs and Pistons. There were few set plays, and holding the ball more than 10 seconds without a shot qualified as a lengthy possession. Whomever got the first open look got to take that look. Golden State led the league in field goal attempts and three-point attempts, and finished second in points per game. Seven players that year averaged double-digits in points.

The Warriors' style was so disruptive, so anti-establishment, that it worked more often than not. And along the way, it never failed to entertain the group of guys sitting in the frat house basement, sipping Natty Lights and watching basketball on weeknights.

At the center of the team was Baron Davis. A 6'3" brick of a human being, he led the Warriors with a defiant swagger and a beard fit for a king. He looked like a Spartan out of the recently released 300, and played like one too, and soon we'd adopted him. He was no longer Baron Davis. Around the basement, he was BD, or more aptly, Beard.

By the time Beard and his band of shoot-first misfits took on the top-seeded Mavericks in the first round, we were fully invested. The Warriors were heavy underdogs going up against the best team in the league, and yet they won the first game. Then five days later, while we snuck in and out of a fraternity-sorority mixer to peek at the game, they cruised to another win. And then another. The Warriors took Dallas down in six games, to the delight of the biggest Golden State fans in Virginia. For us, the Warriors had become appointment viewing.

Then in the next series, it happened. Already down two games to none to the Utah Jazz, Beard drove the lane, only to encounter 6'9" shot-blocker Andrei Kirilenko. The smart move was to dump the ball off or pull up for a jumper. But that wasn't the Warrior way. To this day, I can't remember who was watching with me. My friend Mike was there, I think. And surely there were others. But when Baron Davis — BD, Beard — launched into Kirilenko and windmilled a vicious dunk over him, that room in the basement of the fraternity house exploded. It was a devastating blow, punctuated by Davis' What now? celebration.

In the basement, we sputtered and shrieked and made our best bitter beer faces.

The Warriors would eventually succumb to the fundamentally sound Jazz in five games, but few remember that. It was Beard's dunk that endured.

Our friendships endured too. I can't tell you when we all became true friends; it could've happened before that dunk or sometime after. Most likely, it happend at different times for all of us. But five years later, I know exactly how everyone would react to the name Baron Davis. Mike chuckles softly, still in disbelief over that season. Parker goes wide-eyed, replaying all of the team's absurdities in his head. Brian responds with a knowing smile and sublime, "Dude."

The Warriors' magic would evaporate soon after that season, and a string of injuries robbed Baron Davis of much of what made him the revered Beard. On the Madison Square Garden parquet Sunday, going full speed as always, his knee gave out and he crumpled, in what was likely the last play of an up-and-down career.

But for one season, Davis was magical. He was a leader. He was the Beard. And he was just what one group of new friends needed.

Adam Cancryn is an editor and co-founder of Began in '96.