At 10am on Thursday morning the intersection between Mickey Mantle Drive and East Main Street in the urban heart of Oklahoma City is deserted – except for one joyrider. He might be in his 60s and elegantly zips about on an electric one-wheel board. He has all the paraphernalia – elbow pads, knee pads, a helmet, and carries a small speaker through which he is blaring Warren Zevon’s Werewolves of London. He is having a time of it and is as safe as houses as he scoots through the avenues, which are not only devoid of people, but also cars.
The urban emptiness is disconcerting. Officially, there are 1.4 million people in Oklahoma City. But it’s a place that grows outwards rather than upwards: the few downtown skyscrapers seem emblematic of a city’s wish to frank its importance, rather than necessity. You can drive any direction for 15 miles before you clear the city limits. Technically, the city centre is walkable, but it appears nobody does that.
Bricktown, in the lower downtown area has, over the past two decades, become a restaurant hub, with patios overlooking the canal and an eclectic range of places to eat – Cajun, Indian, Italian – in red-bricked buildings that were warehouses and factories in the formative stages of what remains one of the youngest American cities. But most of these places were empty throughout the week also, with diningrooms ready for anything from 50 to 100 people often serving just a handful.
The reason becomes clear. Bricktown is right next to the city’s main indoor arena, where Oklahoma’s basketball team, the Thunder, plays games. On home game nights, and at weekends, the area is thriving. But this week, Thunder fans are waiting to discover who they will face in the first round of the NBA play-offs. They’ve had a stunning regular season, leading the entire Western conference table with 68 wins. OKC might just win it all.
On Thursday, it was 31 degrees and a warm breeze travelled through the avenues. On the local news channels, the weather announcers were talking up – a little too chirpily – the possibilities of a tornado-grade wind sweeping through the city. “Yeah, pretty much,” one Oklahoman, Zachary said, when asked if the city was more or less tornado-proofed by now. “We learned the hard way. Except the fringe parts.”
Apparently there is always a wind moving through Oklahoma. Zachary explained that this, right now, was the best time for weather in OKC. Winters are tough. Not snowy, but dark and given to bleak, venomous bursts of hail and rain and brutally cold spells.
Historical information boards inform any walker through downtown Oklahoma of its madcap inception: the overnight creation, in April 1889, of a place that went from zero to 10,000 homesteaders who raced, at the sound of a whistle, to claim their free federal land (of up to 160 acres) in lands confiscated from the displaced native Americans. The Oklahoma Land Run.
The settlers made a hames of things in the early years, which were, by all accounts, utterly wild. And after that, Oklahoma was left to its own devices for decades. Any local old enough to remember will tell you that the horrific bombing of the Murrah federal building in 1995 forced the citizens to lean into themselves and respond with guile, ambition and love to transform what had been a kind of moribund downtown into something more vibrant.
In Boomtown, Sam Anderson’s fond and marvellous social history of the city, he delves into peculiar origins of how the Thunder accelerated that process. Oklahoma was desperate for a big sports team. Which sport didn’t matter. But hockey snubbed its nose at its efforts to woo, even though they had built an arena. When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, the city’s basketball team, the Hornets, had nowhere to play. Oklahoma’s city managers – gallantly, shrewdly – stepped in to offer a temporary home for the arena-less NBA team. The OKC’ers were ecstatic. This changed everything.
“It meant that some of the most famous humans on earth- Kobe Bryant, Shaquille O’Neal, Kevin Garnett, LeBron James – would literally be coming to Oklahoma City, staying in its vacant hotels, eating at its merely functional restaurants,” Anderson writes.
“Thousands of less famous humans would naturally follow. It was not only an economic boon, it was a validation: an outside chance to become a real place.”
It’s not hard to imagine what happened next: “It was an eruption of emotion from a deep primal well. Oklahoma City fell so deeply in love with the Hornets, in fact, that it decided it wanted to keep them forever.”
It didn’t get New Orleans’ team, but through a combination of business-savvy boosterism and chicanery, it did manage, in 2008, to wrestle from Seattle the ownership of its long-standing, storied team, the Supersonics, in one of the more notorious sports business transactions of modern times.
Needs must. Soon, the Oklahoma Thunder will celebrate 20 years in the city. Tickets for their first play-off game, on Easter Sunday night, were selling like hot cakes, even before the rival team became clear. Nobody cared, they had waited long enough for their team to get here.
