It was a long afternoon in Oklahoma City. Even though the tipoff for the NBA finals game seven was set for 7pm, but one local TV station begam its pregame coverage at 1PM. By 2PM, a full five hours before game time, the coverage showed Oklahoma City Thunder fans beginning to line up outside downtown bars and eateries. Obviously, the pros (And not the ones playing the game later) and many talented amateurs had arrived on the scene.
Their presence in such numbers that early caused some of us to begin speculating. I was asked what I thought would happen if the Thunder won the game. "Burning cars?" I didn't think so. Arson is the result of an overload of pent up frustration. This town and the fans are new to this sort of situation. The team had arrived from Seattle in 2008. 17 years of not winning a championship is a drop in the bucket to places like New York and Detroit. Hell, even the storied Chicago Bulls haven't won a NBA championship for 27 years and at one point it was routine for them.
I believed if anyone was going to engage in random acts of old-fashioned rioting it would be the Pacer fans. They are an edgy lot, prone to conspiracy theories and their team moved to the NBA from the old ABA in 1976 and they've never won a title. I was asked if I thought dipsomaniacs would be climbing street light poles. I said it was a distinct possibility. Then finally, "How about people jumping in the Bricktown Canal?" There was no doubt in mind there would be. In my younger years I would have been the first one to take the plunge.
The crowd began pouring into the Paycom Center as soon as the doors opened two hours before tipoff. Possibly to escape the heat and increasingly out of control drunks who were partying as if there was no tomorrow. Another reason may have been the team was offering half price concessions up to an hour before game time, an offer no one in this burg will turn down.
The place went mad with noise as the two teams went back and forth. At the end of one quarter the Thunder held a three point lead, but in a NBA game a lead like that isn't safe with anything more than 0.01 seconds left in the game. In the second the Pacers roared back and with just a few precious seconds before half took a one point lead. They had won the battle of the second quarter, but in one excruciating moment might have lost the war.
Indiana's magnificent magician, Tyrese Haliburton went down with a leg injury and stayed down. Haliburton had been favoring the leg the entire series and in truth should have probably sat this one out entirely. As one analyst said though, "In a game seven if you can walk, you play." Tragically it was found he had torn his right Achilles tendon--an injury so devastating, he might be gone all of next year.
In the third quarter OKC hammered the Pacers and the defense, no longer having to worry about Haliburton began to clamp down. A little under half way through the fourth period the lead built to as many as 22. The entire city was building to a crescendo of lunacy. Champaign was being ordered by good ol' boys who wouldn't know Cristal from Ripple with seltzer.
But.
Proving it's never easy, especially against a great team, no matter if they are short handed, or not the lead began to shrink. When it dwindled to seven with plenty of time left--the fucking time clock seemed frozen at five minutes left to play for hours--desperation, no, flat out panic began to set in. Faces became swollen, eyes bulged, cardiac arrest became a real concern for some. Everyone remembered the nightmare last minute of game one when the Pacers ate into what seemed an insurmountable lead and stole one in Oklahoma City.
The kids in sky blue responded though. The defense, which had taken a three or four minute coffee break, once again closed the door. As the clock finally wound down and the lead moved back to 12, the noise in the building became a physical force. TV cameras seemed to tremble from it. The deal was done. Hardly anyone left until after the awards ceremony. As the trophy was presented the crowd morphed into an 18,000 plus ecstatic choir singing, "We Are the Champions."
Outside jubilation rolled through the streets. No cars were torched, but there was one shooting in the park next to the arena. (Moving one local TV wag to say, "There is always someone out there trying to ruin the fun for everybody.") A person was wounded and there was a brief stampede of panicked revelers. A suspect was nabbed immediately and things quickly returned to a peaceful, if raucous normal. Just east in the Bricktown entertainment district a number of people did launch themselves into the canal.--an artificial large ditch lined with concrete and filled with about three feet of dyed water which is a tad questionable when it comes to purity.
You probably had to grow up in this town to understand the magnitude of a NBA title on the citizens. When my family moved us to Oklahoma City in 1959 it didn't have any sort of professional sports franchise. It was a wind blown dusty burg of a little over 325,000 souls. The biggest sports venue in Oklahoma City was a WPA project seating about 10,000 called Taft Stadium. It hosted local high school football games and the occasional mini stock car race on the dirt track surrounding the field. The closest thing to big time sports was down in Norman where the University of Oklahoma played football at a rarely sold out 62,000 seat stadium. It was a town which hung its hat solely on the fact it was and is the state capitol. The place was so obscure many outsiders thought the capitol of Oklahoma was the better known town of Tulsa.
Even after sports teams arrived Oklahoma City dwelled strictly in the minor leagues. A brief flirtation with the National Hockey League died quickly when it was discovered the NHL brass was just using Oklahoma City to extort more money and better facilities out of bigger prospective markets. The fact is for decades Oklahoma City remained nothing more than an overgrown outback village where there was nothing to do.
Thanks to some movers and shakers, but primarily the Thunder it's not that way any more. In this, the year of our Lord, 2025 we have something places like New York, Boston, Chicago, and Los Angeles doesn't We have--the NBA championship.
Or, as the crowd sung last night, for the moment anyway, "We are the champions of the world."
6-23-25
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