Oakland honors Al Attles, coach of the champion 1975 Warriors, during ‘Love Life’ week

Former Warriors players gathered at City Hall last week to honor the head coach who helped them win the Oakland team’s first championship. The event, hosted by the city, honored Al Attles for his innovation and being one of five Black coaches in the NBA.

Attles, who spent his entire career as an NBA player with the Warriors in the 1960s before becoming the team’s coach from 1970 to 1983, died in August at age 87.  

“We had two great coaches and they were like a father,” Clifford Ray said. “We didn’t want to let them down. A good coach, as a player, you never want to let them down.”  

He said Attles and Joe Roberts, the assistant coach, were like parents to the players. Everybody in the community embraced them and that made it easy to focus on winning a championship, he said.

Ray, who played for the Warriors for seven years starting in 1975, joined nearly two dozen people last week at City Hall to honor Attles, the head coach of the Warriors’ 1975 championship team, as part of the city’s “Love Life” week. 

Oakland hosted different events for “Love Life,” a campaign started in 2016 to combat violence and address its root causes. It came out of an effort by Donald Lacy, who for years had petitioned the city to add the words “Love Life” to its signs. The phrase captures the essence of his daughter LoEshe’s name in Igbo. LoEshe was killed by a stray bullet in 1997, when she was 16. 

Lacy started the Love Life Foundation to serve at-risk youth 27 years ago in her honor. 

Ray’s teammate Charles Dudley, as well as Chris Mullin, who was drafted by Attles in 1985, also were there to celebrate their coach.   

Attles and the Golden State Warriors made history by securing the franchise’s first championship while being based in Oakland. The team beat out the Washington Bullets who were favored to win the series. 

Dudley said Attles “would listen to you and he was very supportive, and he wanted the best for you.” He called him a leader, mentor and “somebody you look up to.”  

Kevin Smith, the director of Love Life, said Attles was an innovator who understood what Oakland was all about. He brought a winning culture, which was respected by the community.

“What Al meant to the city of Oakland was that you saw excellence. So when young kids looked at Al Attles, a Black man, they knew that they could achieve the same thing,” Dudley said. “See, when you see somebody who looks like you in a very important role, then there’s hope, you know you can achieve this thing. You can achieve greatness.”  

With cheers and tears, fans say goodbye to the A’s and the Coliseum: “I have so many memories here’