Seven days inside the Thunder's basketball utopia
EACH BASKETBALL IS perfectly aligned on each rack in the Oklahoma City Thunder's practice facility, one continuous WilsonWilsonWilsonWilson shelf after shelf. The water bottles and sports drinks in the refrigerators are aligned with the same precision, label out, so straight you can imagine someone standing before them, one eye nearly closed, assessing each one as if judging its moral rectitude.
But the sweat towels hit the hardest. The towels are where metaphor begins to blur and a mission statement comes into focus. Each towel has eight blue stripes along one side, and each towel is folded identically and stacked on a shelf with those eight blue stripes lined up like battle-ready battalions. Their utility is so pragmatic and yet the display speaks to something far more important.
...The world outside is unpredictable, tenuous, fraught. The ground shifts without warning. Truth has become subjective, reality distorted...
Inside this cocoon...the chaos of the world has been engineered out of existence. For seven straight days in mid-April, through 85-degree days and days with sheets of rain and days with breathless tornado warnings, I made a note that the lush, weedless lawn that surrounds the parking lot remained the exact same length, as if a crew arrived late at night armed with rulers and scissors to trim each blade individually. Every player arrived on the court with his shirt tucked and left the same way. The overall vibe was high-end Stockholm showroom...
Or Stockholm syndrome. It's Orwellian. It reminds me of the paragon of Cultural Revolution China, Lei Feng, the "rustless bolt". All Chinese were to aspire to be "rustless bolts" in the gigantic machine of state. Very mechanical. The "Thunder" have seemed machine-like to me. Thunder Bolts. "Chaos" is the worst word in the CCP's lexicon. This is creepy.
