Google "Oklahoma City Thunder" and the ninth entry, the first news story after the official sites, is,
A Basketball Fairy Tale in Middle America-Quasi Official New York Times Magazine.
From 2012. So, of course, I read it.
people forget the stain of their origin.
[Like America itself. A bastard born to a lunatic and Oklahoma is the Middle Kingdom of that civilization.]
ESPN recently named it the No. 1 sports franchise in America.
A Basketball Fairy Tale in Middle America-Quasi Official New York Times Magazine.
From 2012. So, of course, I read it.
N.B.A. scoring champions are, as a rule, weirdos and reprobates and in some cases diagnosable sociopaths.Something about dominating your opponent, publicly, more or less every day of your life...Michael Jordan...Allen Iverson...Kobe Bryant...Wilt, Shaq, Pistol Pete, Dominique, McGrady, McAdoo, Rick Barry— it’s a near-solid roster of dysfunction: sadists, narcissists, malcontents, knuckleheads, misanthropes, womanizers, addicts and villains.
...
Kevin Durant, the star of the Oklahoma City Thunder, is the youngest scoring champion in N.B.A. history. At 24, he has led the league in scoring for three consecutive seasons, and all signs point to him keeping that up for the foreseeable future. It follows, then, that Durant should also be a prodigy of a head case. He should have been arrested for reckless driving at around age 9, broken his hand in a strip-club brawl at age 12 and accidentally shot his chauffeur no later than age 15.
[Ha! That is great, fun writing.]
...
Kevin Durant, the star of the Oklahoma City Thunder, is the youngest scoring champion in N.B.A. history. At 24, he has led the league in scoring for three consecutive seasons, and all signs point to him keeping that up for the foreseeable future. It follows, then, that Durant should also be a prodigy of a head case. He should have been arrested for reckless driving at around age 9, broken his hand in a strip-club brawl at age 12 and accidentally shot his chauffeur no later than age 15.
[Ha! That is great, fun writing.]
...
"In the middle of the overheated summer of 2010, the day before LeBron’s Decision, Durant announced quietly, on Twitter, that he had just signed a contract to stay in Oklahoma — the third-smallest market in the league, a place devoid of beaches and celebrities and night life — for another five years. You got the feeling he would have committed to the Thunder for the rest of his life if only the Players’ Union would have allowed it.
Durant, in other words, seems to have been invented in a laboratory beneath the Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce to serve as the international face of Oklahoma — a state known for its citizens’ kindness, levelheadedness, work ethic, community spirit and, above all, humility. (The mayor of Oklahoma City told me that he thinks Oklahomans are humble because of their proximity to Texans, who will never stop bragging about anything.)"
[Ha! Texas, I hate you.]
"In the middle of the overheated summer of 2010, the day before LeBron’s Decision, Durant announced quietly, on Twitter, that he had just signed a contract to stay in Oklahoma — the third-smallest market in the league, a place devoid of beaches and celebrities and night life — for another five years. You got the feeling he would have committed to the Thunder for the rest of his life if only the Players’ Union would have allowed it.
Durant, in other words, seems to have been invented in a laboratory beneath the Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce to serve as the international face of Oklahoma — a state known for its citizens’ kindness, levelheadedness, work ethic, community spirit and, above all, humility. (The mayor of Oklahoma City told me that he thinks Oklahomans are humble because of their proximity to Texans, who will never stop bragging about anything.)"
[Ha! Texas, I hate you.]
Led by Durant, the Thunder has become one of the N.B.A.’s best and youngest and most popular teams,
[Fast forward 3 1/2 years: the team traded star James ("The Beard") Harden, Durant got injured, Russell Westbrook got injured, they fired their coach and some ludicrously named team of flower children in San Francisco got an elf magician.]
an international icon of brotherhood and good will that has helped to usher in golden ages in both Oklahoma City and the N.B.A., an electric blue Trojan horse inside of which Oklahoma has managed to smuggle its ethos to the rest of the world: good folksy folks humbly helping other folksy folks stay humble and helpful.
...
Oklahoma sits right in the middle of the country: it’s not the cultured East or the wild West or the frigid North or the humid South but exactly where all those things meet. The mountains touch the prairies, which touch the plains. This has created, over the millenniums, crazy animals and crazy weather and crazy 25-car pileups of culture...Oklahoma, in other words, is the Hadron supercollider of states: it slams disparate things together, over and over, producing endless crises of cohesion. Even tornadoes, the region’s defining devil winds, are a result of a meteorological collision: a convergence of three different weather systems that happens with freakish regularity in Oklahoma and its immediate environs. Meteorologists in Oklahoma are basically rock stars.
[Great writing, who is this writer?...Sam Anderson, never heard of him, Sam-you-is, great writing.]
[Great writing, who is this writer?...Sam Anderson, never heard of him, Sam-you-is, great writing.]
...
One of the miracles of the modern Thunder — and there are several — is how quickly they’ve madepeople forget the stain of their origin.
[Like America itself. A bastard born to a lunatic and Oklahoma is the Middle Kingdom of that civilization.]
[Really?]
...
The [General Manager Sam] Presti rebuild, a meticulously rational plan, now looks a lot like a fairy tale. The Thunder has improved, year by year, exactly on schedule: they made the playoffs in their second season, the Western Conference finals in their third and the Finals last year. If the Thunder doesn’t win the title this year, it will seem almost unfair — a violation of the basic laws of narrative.
[And they didn't. Somebody got hurt or traded and and 2016 is their first year back to the Finals.]
Among basketball fans, Presti has become a mythic braniac legend, the managerial equivalent of Kevin Durant: young, focused, dominant and improbably humble.
[And Presti's "legend" of "meticulous rationality" has been replaced by legend-in-his-own-mind venture capitalist Joe Lacob, who fucked the NBA trophy, no lie, and his "chill, dude" ethos with piped in surround sound of the Mamas and the Papas singing Beethoven's Ode to Joy. You don't fuck trophies in Oklahoma, I don't get the impression.]
Okay, enough. Fun article.
