A semi-embarrassing curiosity of mine is obscure professional sports leagues — stuff like arena football, roller hockey, team tennis — and one of the observable phenomenon of these leagues is that when they start pulling their teams out of Chicago and Houston and putting them in places like Tacoma, Rochester and Oklahoma City, it's usually a sign of their impending doom.
So four years ago, when the Seattle SuperSonics were sold and relocated to, yes, Oklahoma City, that looked to me like a bad omen for the N.B.A. Not of its impending doom, of course, but certainly of its stagnant prospects. As Bruce Schoenfeld wrote in this magazine in 2008:
Why Oklahoma City? Even in its own state, Tulsa would seem to have greater national prospects, with its rolling hills, mansion-filled neighborhoods and cultural accouterments of a serious place, as opposed to flat, brown, insular Oklahoma City, where unseemly oil wells blight even the Capitol grounds. Farther afield, metropolitan areas without N.B.A. teams include San Diego, St. Louis, Kansas City, Nashville, Tampa and Anaheim, big-league markets all. So it's not surprising that Oklahoma City wasn't even on the N.B.A.'s list of potential candidates for expansion or relocation three years ago.
Well, after a rough first season, the Thunder have become the most exciting, explosive team in the league, as well as the very model for how a mere game can rally an entire city and make it seem bigger and more important than it ever has before. As Sam Anderson describes in this week's cover story, Oklahoma City has embraced the team to such an extent that even a countercultural icon like they psychedelic rocker Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips feels obligated to become a fan:
As OKC's reigning celebrity, Coyne sometimes attends Thunder games, where he sits courtside. Although he seems genuinely fond of the team, he's not what you would call a sports aficionado. When I asked him if he followed basketball before the Thunder came to town, he had to think for a few seconds. "No," he said. "I mean, I liked, like, the Harlem Globetrotters. Or some mythical figure like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar" — and he pronounced "Jabbar" in the most amazing way, with an exotically soft "j" and several extra vowels, as if it were the name of a genie that had come drifting one morning out of his bong.
Coyne admits that at Thunder games, he doesn't always understand what's going on. "It's not like a Steven Spielberg-scripted event when you're there," he told me. "You're like, Well, did we win? I'm confused. Did they win? And then you look up and you're like, Well, is the game over?"
It's a pretty delightful and uplifting read throughout, and good way to spend the first weekend in forever unencumbered by the presidential campaign.
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