Golden State Warriors vs. San Quentin inmates, nobody loses

Sam Amick | USA TODAY Sports

Show Caption Hide Caption NBA Fast Break: Warriors play ball at notorious prison USA Today Sports' Sam Amick talks about the Golden State Warriors staff's visit to San Quentin State Prison.

SAN QUENTIN, Calif. — Allan McIntosh had never been so happy to lose a hard-fought game.

As the long and lean 40-year-old sat on a wooden bench next to the San Quentin prison basketball court he grinned at the way he’d fallen short in the latest annual pick-up game last week. Bob Myers, the Golden State Warriors general manager on most days but McIntosh's nemesis on this one, had earned his revenge in the form of a 43-point, 13-rebound, five-block, two-assist and two-steal show in a 99-76 win.

“Bob’s a beast,” said McIntosh, 40, who grew up in Long Beach and is behind bars after a firearms possession conviction served as his third strike. “I couldn’t do it today. Bob came out with a fury.”

Truth be told, the inmates had already won before the game even started.

If the Warriors were feeling the pressure of their title defense that tips off Tuesday night against the New Orleans Pelicans, this was an experience that made their challenge seem silly by comparison, even for interim head coach Luke Walton.

In pro sports terms, his task is as tough as they come: make the leap from relatively inexperienced assistant to head coach overnight, with a team that won it all the season before but which is without its second-year leader Steve Kerr, indefinitely because of health problems related to offseason back surgeries. On a day like this, perspective comes in heavy doses.

“What these guys go through, man,” Walton said shaking his head during a break in the first-half action. “For me, it’s a nice day away from the constant grind of being the new interim. But for them…”

San Quentin is one of the world’s most famous prisons, opened in 1852 and known for killers like Charles Manson and Scott Peterson and other high-profile criminals. Yet once a year for the past four years, it’s a place that teems with rare joy when a group of Warriors front office members, coaches, staff members and even players show up to offer a welcome distraction.

The men who live here will be the first to tell you about the mistakes they made that put them in this place. But for two-plus hours — with an announcer on one side, scorekeepers on the other, officials and players in between and hoops-loving inmates all around — there is a little light amid their daily dose of darkness.

“It means a lot for all of you guys to come to what a lot would say is the worst place on earth,” McIntosh wrote in a handmade program that featured the Warriors logo on the front and hand-written messages from inmates on the inside pages. “It’s more than basketball when you all show up, so thanks for really taking the time to see us as regular people! Win another (championship). Sincerely, Allan McIntosh #35”.

History of high-profile visits

As warden Ron Davis said earlier in the day, and as longtime inmates Lonnie Morris and Mack "Spanky" Brown remember firsthand just minutes before tipoff, the famous folks who visit here every so often are always a special treat. Mother Teresa was here before she died in 1997. Santana performed Michael Jackson’s Smooth Criminal here in 1988. Two years later, blues legend B.B. King stopped by and wound up leaving with one of the best live albums of his career.

Bonnie Raitt came by in 2001, not only to sing her songs but to share her struggle with alcohol and drugs in the hopes that she’d inspire a sober lifestyle. Former San Francisco 49ers football star Ronnie Lott touched souls with a powerful speech about how there are four quarters in every man’s life.

But the difference this time, the thing that had them buzzing as if Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson were in the building, was that the world champions were in their house.

“This is huge,” said Curtis Carroll, a mid-30s man known as “Wall Street” for his ability to make money on the stock market — and teach others how to do so — behind the walls. “They’re the champs now, so it’s a totally different experience. It’s camaraderie, credibility. What other place can you go for something like this?”

Yet still, it wasn’t as raucous as the night they won it all.

A prison celebration

By all accounts, San Quentin is a place full mostly of Warriors and Los Angeles Lakers fans — a byproduct of its location. So when the Warriors finished off the Cleveland Cavaliers in Game 6 of the Finals on June 16, with many of the “Mainline” inmates having watched the ABC broadcast inside their cells on televisions they can purchase for a few hundred bucks from approved vendors, the halls looked no different than those inside nearby Oracle Arena.

Because it took place during the allotted time in which the “Mainline” inmates are allowed to have their cell doors open, there was some rare freedom to roam. Grown men hooted and hollered as they ran up and down the line, their wait having been made worth it after months of radio-only enjoyment of their favorite team. The first two months of the Warriors’ magical run, you see, was aired on cable channels that are not among the five that they receive (six including the closed-circuit SQTV).

“A lot of the LA guys didn’t like it,” Morris says with a grin about the celebration.

At least one guy saw it coming.

The thing about Spanky’s championship tribute, a work of Warriors art that couldn’t be completed until he’d scrounged for spare paint around the prison yard, is that he finished it before they had actually won the title. The Warriors were playing the Houston Rockets in the Western Conference Finals at the time, yet Spanky — who has been behind bars for 45 years and who first learned how to paint while using human hair and M&Ms during his time at Pelican Bay — still scrawled those words in white above the images of the Golden State starting five staring over a white-picket fence.

“World Champions,” it reads.

“I had an epiphany,” Brown says with a proud smile.

Before the Warriors contingent would leave the premises, he would have a few autographs added to the painting too.

Grudge match ensues

As Myers walked into the facility with his group a nearby guard was quick with a punchline.

“You guys know the rule, right?” he said. “If you lose, you stay.”

Myers, a four-year player at UCLA and member of the Bruins’ national championship team in 1995 whose Warriors team had fallen short for the first time in their visit the year before, fired back.

“Yeah, we’re not here to lose,” Myers said.

In hindsight, the Warriors’ 92-88 loss the summer before was one of the few blemishes on their otherwise-sterling record. Kerr’s first-season magic that served them so well with the Warriors actual team had not been enough in the second half, after he took over for former Warriors associate head coach Alvin Gentry (now with the New Orleans Pelicans). The San Quentin community had certainly cherished their victory, as evidenced in the lead to the game story that was published in the prison’s newspaper.

“Incredible, but true,” San Quentin News sports editor Rahsaan Thomas wrote.

“You guys won the right to be called the Real Warriors fair and square,” assistant general manager/owner’s son Kirk Lacob told them at the time.

Lacob, sympathetic sort who has become a champion of the Warriors’ San Quentin visits and who sees it as evidence of the power of sports, wasn’t there to lose either.

Even before the game began, the 27-year-old who played high school basketball in nearby Atherton was trash talking in ways that one would typically not advise in this type of setting. But the prison politics — the separation of the yard based on race and affiliation, the constant need to be alert that can wear down the mind — fall by the wayside when the Warriors are here.

“Sports has a way of breaking down barriers,” Morris said.

There is a respect and a rapport built over the past few years that makes this special scene possible, a decency that serves as a reminder that there are two sides to almost every man. So Lacob, unflinchingly, found his way to a familiar face underneath the rim for a bit of friendly banter.

The loudest of Lakers fans — a heavy-set man wearing the blue standard-issue garb — had made a habit in previous meetings of highlighting the Warriors’ many failures from the darker days of their history. Lacob was sure to share how the Warriors had routed the Lakers in a preseason game the night before, to which the man quipped that they’d be headed for the proverbial parking lot if not for the restrictive state of his current condition. Two minutes into the game, Lacob was at it again.

“Weak ass move,” he yelled after receiving a disagreeable foul call.

The nearby corner full of convicts erupted in laughter.

Before long, Walton — a two-time champion during his playing days with the Lakers who had his fair share of supporters — would face the kind of critics who put anyone in the NBA media world to shame. He airballed a three-pointer.

“Big men don’t shoot threes, Luke!” one man yelled.

He drew a foul on a shot attempt, then went to the line amid a chorus of boos with the Warriors up 18-13. Then the Warriors – coached by assistant coach Jarron Collins, with Myers, Lacob Walton, assistant coach/player development Chris DeMarco, and special assistant Nick U’Ren making up the starting five and reserve big man Marreese Speights on hand for moral support – began to pull away.

But harsh reality set in. The alarms sounded, signifying a disturbance of some kind on the premises and mandating the “Get Down productions,” as the announcer playfully calls it. The visitors can stay standing, but the inmates must hit the ground. When the all-clear message was sent, the game resumed.

The inmates took this in stride, in part because it’s routine but also because they’re not about to let this mood be soured. Near the end of the game, Bob “Big Money” Myers — as he was deemed — got an unprecedented standing ovation when he checked out for the final time. They all said their goodbyes not long after, taking pictures and sharing handshakes and hugs as if this were one big family barbecue.

Their day at this prison park was over.

“It’s easy to get lost in the NBA life,” Lacob says. “It’s easy to forget how we got here, the path we took to the life that we have and to take that for granted. Sometimes all we need is a little perspective. We may think we know what it’s like for other people, but until you go and see it with your own eyes and touch it and feel it, you don’t know.”