Oklahoma City is positively giddy

OKLAHOMA CITY -- By noon, the temperature and woolen humidity increased from merely oppressive into plague, clearing most sane dogs and pedestrians from the sidewalks of the city's hippest downtown neighborhood, Bricktown.

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Retiree Gene Sanders, who is part Choctaw and has weathered 65 summers here, sought relief under a tree casting a cornstalk shadow narrower than the man himself. He wiped his face and agreed the heat really was something.

But, he offered, it's the kind of day where a smile can be a person's umbrella, if not a 68-degree central air conditioning system.

"Oh my goodness," he said grinning at a Seattle reporter. "It looks like we might be getting y'all's team. That would be wonderful for this town. If they decide to move, we'd be pretty enthused."

Pretty enthused? By all accounts, this city bolted past pretty enthused and into delirious within minutes of Tuesday's announcement that local businessman Clay Bennett, along with a group of well-heeled investors, bought Seattle's only two championship teams for $350 million.

Talk radio crackled. Television news reports cut into other programming. The Daily Oklahoman dusted off war-size type for the headline: "SONIC BOOM?" Even the mayor, who cautioned against prematurely connecting the dots between an ownership group and a team's home court, couldn't help but recognize the outline it drew.

"I know the NBA will not let this market sit empty," said Mayor Mick Cornett, who since 2003 has lobbied the National Basketball Association for a team. "We've been a minor league city for 116 years. Oklahoma has changed. And so have people's perceptions of it."


		Jim Beckel / The Oklahoman
	Oklahoma City's hippest downtown neighborhood, Bricktown, was revived as part of a $350 million redevelopment.

In the city and state capitol that gave the country a pigeon museum, a cowboy hall of fame, the municipal parking meter, the shopping cart and the world's largest stockyard, this hasn't been easy to do.

Sometimes jokingly called Norteno Texas, (deeply irritating Sooners in the process), the city and state have shared with their southern rival similarly valuable oil deposits along with the industry's feast or famine economy.

During the past two decades, however, Oklahoma City has stepped away from its cow town and roughneck roots, luring other business and residents in the same manner as it first did in 1889: cheap land. But the economy still lagged.

In 1993, two years prior to the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah federal building here, city voters planted the seeds for what might become the Sonics' new home when they approved a one-cent sales tax increase to fund redevelopment of a decrepit downtown.

Over time, the Metropolitan Area Projects plan, or MAPS, has poured $350 million into local redevelopment and spurred a revival of Bricktown. The money, literally, put water back into a river, restored historic brick warehouses, added a scenic walk along a new mile-long canal and built Southwestern Bell Bricktown Ballpark, a 13,000-seat field for the Texas Rangers' AAA club.

More important for the Sonics' new owners, it also used that money to build the $87.7 million Ford Center that flanks the opposite end of Bricktown -- a slightly smaller version of Pioneer Square -- from the baseball field.

Big, new and publicly financed, the center now houses a successful minor league hockey and arena-football teams and concerts and has been a post-Hurricane Katrina temporary home for the New Orleans Hornets basketball team.

Mayor Cornett and new owner Bennett played key roles in getting the Hornets this temporary home. Both believed it would prove something to the league.

"I'd been to (NBA Commissioner David Stern's office) three times before and I wasn't getting very far," Cornett said. "He said he didn't have a club for me."

But those conversations did touch on teams that might be ripe for moving. The Sonics, as well as Sacramento Kings, were known to be in arena fights and had made relocation threats. Then Katrina hit and the Hornets were left without a home.

Three days later, Cornett was on the phone with Stern. Six days after that, Hornets officials were touring the 19,559-seat Ford Center.

Oklahoma's NBA love affair

The immediate success of the 2005 season caught locals and Hornets owner George Shinn off-guard. The team sold 10,000 season tickets within 10 days. Businesses, organized by Bennett, ponied up corporate sponsorship money. Fans packed the center. Bennett, along with the NBA brass, became convinced the small, isolated market -- potentially the smallest in the league -- could support a team.

"Clay was the reason the NBA was such a financial success in Oklahoma City last year," Cornett said. The Hornets will play another 35 games in the 2006 season.

Bennett saw the long-term potential. When Shinn balked at selling the Hornets, Bennett and his group went shopping. "I knew they were talking to (Sonics owner Howard Schultz) but I didn't know how serious it was," Cornett said. The sale was announced Tuesday.

Although the new owners have promised to make an effort at keeping the team in the Puget Sound region, few Oklahomans interviewed think the Sonics won't come calling to a region called the Buckle of the Grain Belt.

Kevin Burrow, manager of J. Frank's American Grill, is among them. His bar sits about eight blocks from Ford Center, right between it and the ballpark. In winter, Bricktown was a ghost town even after the restoration, he said.

But last season with the Hornets around, it was something else.

"We had about a 75 percent increase in business on game nights," he said. "We would love to have the Sonics here. Oklahoma has been dying for a major league team."

It has been said (with a wink) that the state once did have one of the West's finest professional football teams -- when Barry Switzer coached the Oklahoma University Sooners. It always has been considered more of a football town given the rock-star popularity of the region's college teams.

"I always thought of it as a football town," retiree Sanders said on the Bricktown sidewalk. The former grocery wholesaler admitted he originally opposed the redevelopment tax. "I didn't want their hands in our pockets. I didn't think it would be this successful.

"After what we've seen with the Hornets, maybe it's a basketball town, too."


		Getty Images
	The $87.7 million Ford Center and the downtown Courtyard Marriott in Oklahoma City are shown in this December 2005 photo.

Or maybe simply a real major league town.

Cornett and other locals argued there is a civic value and ethos linked to professional sports. "There is a void in Oklahoma City that can't be filled by college teams in Norman and Stillwater," said Cornett, a former television sportscaster and news anchor.

He admits that during the past basketball season, he became proud when he saw the town's abbreviated name scroll across the sports ticker at the bottom of his TV screen. "It's superficial, I know, but it matters in the way we see our city and in the way others do."

The only show in town

Should the Sonics move to Oklahoma City, the team would be one of the handful of sports franchises that operates in a city without competition from another pro sports team.

One such team is the Memphis Grizzlies, where the basketball team's President of Business Operations Andy Dolich said being in a market without any major competition has its advantages.

"It's nice to tool around on a four-lane highway knowing you have all four lanes to yourself," Dolich said. "But you can't lose sight of the fact that you have to bring the principles of competition. No one needs to buy a ticket to a professional sporting event like they need water and life's essentials."

But for some, sports are part of life essentials. Steve Peterson, a sports fan and contractor who moved to Oklahoma City from another western boomtown, Salt Lake City, said he'd love to see the team relocate -- or have the Hornets stay.

"I went to a couple of games last year, the atmosphere was fantastic," he said.

As a town, he said, Oklahoma City isn't the prettiest place. When the weather isn't not baking a guy, its either drowning him in a flash flood or roughing him up in a tornado, said Peterson, who moved here eight years ago.

"And you can never tell where you are going because everything is so flat. There isn't a mountain to be seen."

But, he said, the people are the finest he's met anywhere. And he'd never leave. "Anyone who comes here, they are going to like the people, guaranteed."

P-I reporters Phuong Le and Craig Harris contributed to this report. P-I reporter Mike Lewis can be reached at 206-448-8140 or mikelewis@seattlepi.com.

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