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Guy Fieri Has a Lot to Say About the Warriors

The mayor of Flavortown talks about his friendship with E-40, his role in recruiting Kevin Durant, and his favorite (and least favorite) memories of rooting for his beloved Dubs.

Flavortown mayor Guy Fieri has to be among the contenders for the title of the Golden State Warriors’s most famous famous superfan, although he’d sheepishly dismiss the notion as absurd if you were to float it. (“Let’s not go acting like I’m any big baller like my man E-40,” he says when I ask about his recent spate of courtside appearances.) After his family moved to rural Northern California shortly after his first birthday, Fieri grew up idolizing the Warriors whenever anyone managed to coax a steady signal out of a TV. “I lived in a town, bro, that only had two channels and no cable,” he tells me. “Back then, if you could get a Warriors game, man, you were there.”

Today, Fieri makes the trip down to Oakland for a handful of games each season, and over the past few years, for a handful of postseason and NBA Finals games, too. He’s friendly with Stephen Curry and his family—Ayesha, Curry’s wife, appeared on Guy’s Grocery Games in 2016—and delightful photos of his nights on The Town with the Bay Area hip-hop legend are among America’s most promising sources of renewable energy.

I have not starred in as nearly as many Food Network shows as Guy Fieri, but I am an at-times-overzealous Warriors fan who fervently believes Curry might be both the most underappreciated superstar in sports history, and also somehow not even the most talented shooter in his own backcourt. So a few weeks ago, with the NBA playoffs approaching, I called Fieri to ask about his favorite (and least favorite) memories of watching this team; his secret role in bringing then-free agent Kevin Durant to the Bay in 2016; and what he plans to do this summer to convince free-agent-to-be Kevin Durant to finish his career in the Bay, too.

GQ: Tell me the history of your Warriors fandom. What are your earliest memories of the team?

Guy Fieri: I don’t remember actually going to a game until the early eighties. But you didn’t grow up in Northern California without being a Warriors fan. When I was in elementary school, that’s what our little intramural team was called. We had the Raiders and the Niners, and the Giants and the A’s. And as a kid, every time you played basketball, you were the Warriors.

How did you and E-40 meet? How does such a beautiful friendship get started?

You hit it right on the head—it’s a beautiful friendship. I live about an hour and a half north of the Bay, so I’m not as tuned in to the connections he has. But for years, I had friends saying we were supposed to meet. And I’m not kidding you, man. It’s like one of those movies, you know? We connected, and it was like, “Seriously? I know why everybody says we were supposed to connect!” Because we are like brothers. I can go three months without talking to him—I’ve got a busy schedule, and he does too—and then pick up the phone like it was yesterday.

A while back, I was down in Texas shooting the show, and he texts me, “What are you doing April 5?” I said I didn’t know, and he said, “Find out and get back to me.” Well, when you get that text from E-40, you find out. I text back, and he goes, “Okay, you and me, courtside!” We had the best time hanging, telling stories, talking about his YouTube cooking channel. It’s great. It’s like I’ve known him all my life.

E, as we know, is the king of Bay Area sports. I’ve asked him secretly, like, “Come on, bro. They gotta be just begging you to show up to sit courtside”—because he’s such a personality, and a true fan, and he knows all the players. And he says, “No, no, no, no. I got to go after it just like you do!” [laughs] And I’m like, “Okay, brother. Alright.”

From what I understand from the Internet, which I know is always a reliable source, you are single-handedly responsible for bringing Kevin Durant to the Warriors. Would you explain exactly how that went down?

[laughs, and then laughs some more] I can’t even entertain the conversation—it’s ridiculous. Look, we love KD. Like, everybody does! I don’t know how that manifested itself in this story, and quite frankly, I think I’ve lost track of what the reality of the story is.

But [before the 2016 off-season] I had reached out to his agent and said, “Listen, by chance, if KD is entertaining coming to the Warriors”—because back in the day, there was just as good a chance of LeBron James coming to the Warriors. Like, KD is going to pick up and leave Oklahoma City? Come on! It’s impossible. So I just thought it would be funny, and I threw it out to his agent. “By the way, if he’s going to come out here, it’d be awesome!” And then [after Durant indeed signed with the Warriors] somebody picked it up, and oh my God—people were calling me, and I’m like, “No, no! I’m not!” [laughs]

But you know what—we all have those things as kids that we hope and wish for. I always say to my kids, “You’ve got to put it out to the universe.” You’ve got to say what you want to happen for something to have a chance to happen. So I’ll take any part of it anyone wants to give me, because it happened, and oh my God, this is the greatest basketball I’ve ever experienced in my life. And then when you share that same enthusiasm with someone like E? I mean, I’m just so enthralled with how the Warriors do it.