The 15-year beef between a Warriors announcer and a local columnist

The return of the Golden State Warriors season is also bringing back one of the Bay Area’s longest-running beefs.

Sunday’s game was the first time this season the Dubs weren’t on national television, which meant it was the first time fans tuned in to NBC Sports Bay Area and listened to Bob Fitzgerald, the Warriors’ longtime television play-by-play broadcaster. For the Athletic columnist Tim Kawakami, it was also a chance to needle one of his longtime combatants.

After covering the 49ers game at Levi’s Stadium on Sunday afternoon, Kawakami posted on social media that he was watching a recording of the Warriors’ win over the Rockets that night. In the post, he made his opinion of Fitzgerald clear — though not by naming him directly, but rather by calling him “TV announcer,” or “TVA” for short. A quick search on X, formerly Twitter, shows that Kawakami has been using “TV Announcer” and “TVA” as a reference to Fitzgerald going as far back as 2009.

“The TV Announcer was in midseason form in the/ first NBCSBA game,” Kawakami wrote on Sunday. “Why was TVA so wound up sneering at stories about of CP3 coming off the bench for the first time in his career? It’s a real thing.”

Fitzgerald, an alum of Junipero Serra High School in San Mateo, got the Warriors’ play-by-play job in a controversial manner back in 1997, supplanting Greg Papa after Papa had been mentoring Fitzgerald. In a San Francisco Chronicle story at the time, Papa told Susan Slusser he was “incredibly miffed” with Fitzgerald. 

Fitzgerald has been in the Warriors job ever since supplanting Papa. (He was also a KNBR-AM host for 28 years before being let go in 2019.) But while he can reportedly count the two most important people in the Warriors’ organization as fans — owner Joe Lacob, and Steph Curry — there are many more in the Dubs universe who can’t stand the guy. That includes Dubs fans and local members like Kawakami, who also grew up in the Bay Area. 

Kawakami is no stranger to heated confrontations in the Bay Area sports scene and routinely gets into social media spats that have nothing to do with “TVA.” But time and time again, he goes after the broadcaster, and one of his biggest flare-ups ever involved Fitzgerald, a Warriors forum and some tech-savvy sleuths.

After the 2008-09 season ended, the Warriors held a conference call for season ticket holders with then-GM Larry Riley and then-team president Robert Rowell. Fitzgerald moderated the call, and he was criticized heavily on a Warriors fan forum afterwards. One anonymous comment on the forum stood out as overwhelmingly positive — and was subsequently geolocated to an IP address at the Warriors facility, leading some to accuse the poster of being Fitzgerald himself.

It turned out that the commenter, who’d signed the post as “flunkster dude,” was actually Warriors’ PR director Raymond Ridder. Ridder took ownership of those comments to Kawakami later that day. There were still some discrepancies between Ridder’s claims about his comments that day and other comments from the same account, though, leading many — including Kawakami — to wonder who else from the Warriors’ brass was using that account. One comprehensive post on the online discussion site Quora recounted the theory that Fitzgerald was the author of some of the comments, in particular ones that criticized an article by Kawakami. 

Since then, Kawakami’s feelings about Fitzgerald haven’t been hard to deduce. When the Warriors announced their plans to build a downtown San Francisco arena in 2012, they used Ahmad Rashad as their emcee for the event, which led Kawakami to comment that, “When you have the commissioner on stage, you don’t have a rinky-dink talent like Bob Fitzgerald introduce him.”

Kawakami has continued with the barbs over the years. He even once made direct reference to how Fitzgerald got the job in the first place, posting in 2010 that Lacob made an “awful” decision to keep “TV Announcer” instead of trying to land Papa.

It’s not ancient history, either. As he apparently continued his rewatch of the Rockets game, he wrote Sunday: “If last night (the first NBCSBA broadcast of the season) is the way it’s going to go for TVA, this is going to be excruciating.” 

“He’s always shrill. Last night it was incomprehensible,” he continued.

In some ways, this is a sign of both men doing their job. Fitzgerald is a Warriors employee and constantly tells the story of the team in a positive light while broadcasting, even if it means hitting back at what the local media members are writing about the team. Kawakami, as a columnist, is supposed to offer his opinions on locally relevant issues and people, and offering takes on the local team’s broadcasters is column gold. As far back as 2006, he referred to “the same old mindless Warrior radio and TV excuse-makers.”

Still, it seems clear that there is more than just a dislike of broadcast style at play here for Kawakami. While this new Warriors season will surely take further twists and turns, one thing is clear already: One of the longest-running Bay Area beefs is as juicy as ever.