THE WIND THAT IS SWEEPING DOWN THE PLAIN IS NOT THE ONLY THING IN OKLAHOMA THAT CAN BLOW ME: Lord knows I've had some good times as a Seattle sports fan. My first sports memory is of when my father's friend, an usher at the Seattle Center Coliseum, snuck us in to watch the second half of a Sonics game. I've seen dominant and near-dominant teams (the 2001 Mariners, the Payton-Kemp Sonics, the 1991 Washington Huskies football team) and good and bad teams that were ridiculously fun to watch (the X-Man-Chambers-Ellis Sonics, the Zorn-era Seahawks, the 2005 Husky basketball team), although the only pro championship I've seen was that of the 1979 Sonics, with DJ, Downtown Freddie Brown, and Sikma. From Chicago, alone in my apartment, I experienced a moment that still gives me chills and makes me want to cry. I've watched athletes whose talent or competence or charisma was transfixing (Ichiro!, Edgar Martinez, Payton, Alex Rodriguez, Easley, X, but especially Kemp, and watch this YouTube if you don't know what I'm talking about). I've loved some players irrationally (Nate McMillan, Daryl Turner, Doyle), and hated some players, perhaps not irrationally (today's whipping boy: wealthy douchebag Scott Spiezio, the guy with the ridiculous tattoo and .064 (!) batting average who nonetheless whined for more playing time, was arrested for DUI, property damage, leaving the scene of the accident, vomiting in a friend's condo, assault with a deadly non-firearm, and stealing $4.5 million from the Mariners by posting a .064 batting average -- some of those may not be crimes). I've also seen some bad times (for example, Mariners management taking only two or three years to renounce the cornerstones of the dominant 2001 team -- on-base percentage, power, and superlative defense that makes pitchers look better -- in favor of grit, hustle, moxy, veteran leadership, superannuation, and lack of baseball ability). But I've never seen anything like this.
There is a guy, his name is Clay Bennett, and he is trying to kill me. He owns the Seattle (formely Super-)Sonics, and he is adamant that he is moving them to Oklahoma City, so that he can impress his friends in that backwater temporarily awash in oil money. As if it weren't bad enough that he's going around openly counting the days until the team can leave (and admitting that the move is probably not good business, i.e., it is not because I must, but rather because I can, that I am fucking you), he's decided to bury the team as deeply as possible in the tank for the two years before the team's lease is up, the better to maximize cap space and draft position so that he can put together a good team once the moving vans are packed. In other words, why would he put a good product on the floor in Seattle if he can save money for a better product in Oklahoma? Now, I am opposed to using public funding for a new arena (the city is still servicing the debt from the last publicly-funded arena project for the Sonics, 12 or so years ago). And I don't presume to say that he can't move the team. He owns it, after all, and once the NBA let him buy it, he got the upper hand.
All I'm saying is that this is a new feeling for me, the feeling that I'm going to be losing a team for which I've rooted all my life. If there is a worse feeling in sports than this, I don't care to know of it.
(ETA: As Bob pointed out in the comments, just a few hours after I posted this, Sports Guy ran a 15,000-word mailbag of anguished emails from Sonics fans).
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