SEATTLE — You have come, like so many visitors to the Pacific Northwest before you, in search of Sasquatch.
Not literally, with the feet and the fur, but you seek a mythical beast all the same. And you wonder if you might find this a similarly fruitless pursuit. The hunt begins, like any good one, well before dawn, when you slide into the back seat of a Lyft just outside Sea-Tac, bleary-eyed from an early flight.
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The where-are-you-in-from question comes not a minute into the small talk. You say “Oklahoma,” and almost before you finish “City,” there comes from a front seat a tone of undisguised disgust.
“Aw, shit,” Griffin Sutich says, and you were warned to prepare for this.
OKC is a sore subject here, and this is why you’ve come.
Eleven years ago, the Seattle SuperSonics ceased to be, relocating to become the Oklahoma City Thunder. In four days here — and in phone calls to locals and visits to Portland — you will learn just how hard the feelings are. You will hear a string of complaints from locals about the city that stole the Sonics. You’ll hear of some sideways glances and one shattered window.
You have come to find those brave fans here who dare to wear the Thunder colors.
And mere moments after your arrival, a 22-minute Lyft ride with Sutich will make you make it clear why they might want to keep a low profile.
There are transplants here from everywhere, Sutich says, and they quickly learn that there are two rules to engaging with Seattle sports fans, two topics on which it is imperative that you agree.
One is that the Seahawks, at the Patriots’ 1-yard line with 30 seconds to play in Super Bowl XLIX, should have handed the ball to Marshawn Lynch.
“Two,” Sutich says, “is fuck the Thunder.”
On that second point, it turns out, there is not universal agreement.
John Phillips is used to life as a fan outcast.
Though he lives in Seattle now, Phillips grew up in San Diego, where most everyone rooted for the Lakers or the Clippers. But Phillips always wanted a team of his own, and when he met Sonics forwards Shawn Kemp and Michael Cage at a Southern California basketball camp, his loyalty was sealed.
He couldn’t have imagined then the headaches his Sonics allegiance would cause him later in life when he settled in Seattle. The team had relocated years before he moved here, but — with no connection to the city — he hadn’t skipped a beat, shifting his rooting interest to the Thunder.
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When he first came to Seattle, there was a Thunder sticker on his car.
There isn’t anymore.
“Someone broke my car window because of the decal,” Phillips says. “They left a note that said ‘Go back to Oklahoma City.’ But I had Arizona plates.”
You’ve come to meet Phillips in a Seattle suburb, at a Starbucks — his suggestion, made apparently with no sense of the irony.
Howard Schultz, the former chairman and CEO of Starbucks who is considering running for president, bought the SuperSonics in 2001 and in 2006 sold the team to a group headed by Clay Bennett, an Oklahoma City native who purchased the Sonics under a much-debated good-faith agreement to keep the team in Seattle.
Bennett didn’t, and though old-school Sonics fans spread the blame for the team’s move to Oklahoma, they put much of it at Schultz’s feet. Phillips isn’t thinking of any of that when he suggests Starbucks. It’s a matter of convenience.
He’s not rocking Russell Westbrook’s signature shoes when he comes to meet you, but he owns a pair. He has some Thunder gear, too, but says he rarely wears it in public.
“You can’t really watch them in any bars here,” he says. “People are super bitter about it.”
And Phillips has come to understand that part.
For the longest time, before moving to Seattle and since, he didn’t grasp it, didn’t get why the locals couldn’t just get over it, already. New owners bought the team and moved it, he thought. Big deal. And then his own hometown team, the NFL’s Chargers, moved from San Diego to Los Angeles, and Phillips found he can’t root for them anymore.
So he roots for the Thunder but doesn’t rub it in. He’s started wearing Oklahoma City shirts to work out, and the dirty looks have been minimal. But he tries not to be too brazen about it.
Stephen Dolan is a little more open. An accountant and Tulsa native, Dolan relocated when his now-wife — they met at Oklahoma State University — took a biotech job in Seattle.
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“The traffic is the worst part,” he says over a drink at Fuel, a sports bar in Seattle’s Pioneer Square neighborhood. “The sort-of-closeted Thunder existence might be the second-worst part.”
In truth, though, Dolan hardly keeps his allegiance a secret. He tweets frequently about the team, co-hosts the “Topic: Thunder” podcast and blogs at Thunderous Intentions, a site on the Fansided network where his bio proclaims “I like to think I’m the biggest Thunder fan in Seattle.”
On this rainy January night, he comes to meet you wearing an OKC t-shirt under his jacket, and together you have taken the bold step of asking a waitress to flip the TV to that night’s Thunder game. The booth you’ve chosen is out of the way, in a small loft that overlooks a light Sunday night crowd in the bar below, and the request seems harmless enough.
You ask for “the Wizards game” anyway, just to play it safe.
A regular runner, Dolan often wears a Thunder workout shirt on jogs through Seattle. He’s spotted a few fellow Thunder fans — probably tourists, he suggests, given the picturesque parts of the city he runs through — and doles out the occasional fist bump.
Sometimes there’s a suspicious glance at the logo on his chest, but by then Dolan has sprinted away.
“They don’t chase me,” he says, and it might not hurt that he’s fit and nearly 6-foot-5.
There’s a Lakers fan in Dolan’s office, and they engage in hoops debates. For the most part, though, Dolan has found a reluctance to discuss the Sonics and their move, and he tries to avoid the topic.
“It’s not a fear of angering them or that they won’t like it,” he says. “It’s more a fear of hurting them. It causes them real pain. And I get it.”
If the Thunder up and moved to say, Kansas City, Dolan says, he’d have hard feelings.
And there’s a lot of that around here.
Ian Saran isn’t a Thunder fan, but his cousin is.
He thinks.
You’re in another Lyft and another driver has a story to tell. Saran had a scam in his younger days, he says, to get into Key Arena on inexpensive tickets and sneak down to courtside seats for Sonics home games. He’d sit in Bennett’s, he says, when the owner was absent.
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Saran holds a grudge against Bennett and he laments that the city of Seattle couldn’t agree to fund arena construction or renovation to keep the team in place. But he reserves most of his anger for Schultz, the owner who sold the team.
“There was talk of him running for president,” Saran says. “And I had told myself, ‘Whoever challenges Trump, I’m gonna donate my time to their campaign.’ I found out he might be the one and I was like, ‘Oh my God. What do you do?’”
Still, Saran says, he tried to let his fandom follow the Sonics to Oklahoma City. And he’s pretty sure his cousin Paul did, too.
This “Paul” sounds like just the man you’ve been seeking.
Phillips and Dolan came to Seattle, fandom in place, from elsewhere. But a hardcore Sonics fan in the city who stuck with the Thunder? That’s someone you need to meet.
“We can call him,” Saran says, and seconds later Cousin Paul is on the phone
I’ve found him, you think.
You haven’t.
“The Thunder?” he says. “Am I fan of them? No. No. I would not want to be one of those fans. I tried the first year and I was like, ‘No.’ It just didn’t make sense.”
Sure, the Thunder had some familiar faces. Kevin Durant and Nick Collison and Jeff Green had played for the Sonics, promising young players with whom fans had formed connections. Those bonds didn’t break when the team’s agreement with the city did.
But for many Sonics fans, the Thunder served mostly as a nightly reminder of what Seattle no longer had.
Oklahoma City took the Sonics, but the team’s greatest accomplishment stayed home.
You can see it, if you’ll pay the $21.95 it costs to visit MOHAI, Seattle’s Museum of History and Industry. Amid exhibits there about Seattle’s founding — and a surprisingly upbeat mostly-musical look at the great fire of 1889 — there’s a display case featuring the Sonics’ 1979 NBA championship trophy. It’s notable that the hardware stayed here, reflective of the division between the Sonics and the Thunder, a line that rarely blurs.
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In 2014, when NBA uniforms featured gold neck patches denoting past championships, the Thunder declined to wear one. The Sonics had won a title. The Oklahoma City franchise was — and still is — seeking its first.
In a February game at New Orleans, Russell Westbrook — who was drafted by but never played for the Sonics — became the leading scorer in combined-franchise history, surpassing Gary Payton, who never played for the Thunder. Oklahoma City didn’t publicize the feat, and Westbrook didn’t know about it until a reporter pointed it out to him.
For many in Seattle, that division feels fitting.
They can’t claim the Thunder, can’t feel connected to the franchise that left their city without one.
Sutich grew up “loving the Sonics,” he says. His wounds from the move run deep, and they’d routinely reopen during his days as a baseball player at Whitman College, a liberal arts school in Walla Walla, Washington. Students from other parts of the state had continued to root for the Thunder, he says, and some would strike up conversations about Durant and Westbrook and Oklahoma City’s championship hopes.
Most wouldn’t do it twice.
“They learned not to bring up the NBA with the Seattleites because somewhere along the way, the conversation was gonna get to, ‘Fuck, the Sonics are gone. Fuck the Thunder!’” Sutich says. “Every single conversation about the NBA would always loop back to ‘Fuck the Thunder. Fuck Oklahoma City. All they have is the Thunder and WinStar (Casino).’”
After a few days here, you start to think that’s how all the real locals feel.
You’ll learn that you’re wrong, but it takes a trip to Portland.
Eli Connor had the tickets, just a few feet off the court at Portland’s Moda Center, behind the Thunder bench. He had a companion for his trip from Seattle. A pregame tour of the Trail Blazers’ arena awaited, and all that stood between 16-year-old Eli and a perfect night was the jersey.
It was proving difficult to procure.
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The Sonics drafted Westbrook on June 26, 2008, and moved to Oklahoma City six days later, and it’s no easy feat to find an emerald-green Seattle jersey with Westbrook’s name and number 0 on the back. Eli and his father, Kevin Connor, passed on some knockoffs out of Russia before settling on one they bought from a guy in Texas. On eBay, Eli thinks. Or maybe Craigslist.
Wherever it came from, Eli has it on as he sits a few feet from where Westbrook and the Thunder are facing the Blazers. It’s early March, and Eli has come from Seattle with his friend Danny Howe. They were tykes when the Sonics left Seattle and teenagers now, and they represent the logical paths a kid could take when faced with a franchise shifting cities. Eli’s dad remained a fan, rooting for the Thunder, and Eli followed suit.
“Some people still like them (in Seattle),” Eli says, and he and his father are among them. “We were always kind of sad that the Sonics left to be the Thunder, but Westbrook was always my favorite player.”
Danny, who’s wearing a Blazers jersey, sided with the Pacific Northwest’s other NBA option.
It doesn’t impact their friendship.
“When they’re not playing the Trail Blazers, I like them,” Danny says of the Thunder. “It’s sentimental.”
Eli’s friends at school give him next to no grief for his allegiance, he says. Despite what you were told, there remain pockets of loyalty to the orange and blue, even in the Emerald City.
Kevin Connor raised his son in one. Connor moved to Seattle in the early ’90s and was all in on the Sonics. He and a group of friends had tickets and still have inside jokes from their days in the stands. He rooted for Shawn Kemp and Gary Payton, then followed their kids’ careers in the Pac-12. He has a picture of a young Durant high-fiving his daughter.
“When you become a long-term fan, you start to really care about the individuals,” Connor says by phone weeks after his son’s visit to Portland. “And I think that’s the crux of what kept mine and my close friends’ alignment going with the Thunder. We’d seen them play here and you kind of imagine, ‘That’s my team. Those are my players.’”
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That they changed cities didn’t mean much to Connor, who notes that to form a team allegiance means you’re “rooting for a corporation” and corporations sometimes move. He points out that not so long ago, Seattle tried to pry the Kings away from Sacramento.
The Sonics’ departure, from Connor’s point of view, was less about “Oklahoma City trying to abscond with a team,” he says, than about a sports franchise pushing a “very liberal city” for investment into an arena and the city saying no. So he never struggled rooting for Oklahoma City’s team. It helped that after one scuffling season in OKC, the Thunder emerged as a perennial playoff contender, led by former Sonic Durant.
“I think if they had just really laid a turd, we probably would have gone, ‘Hey, how are the Blazers doing?’” Connor says.
Instead, he and his friends put on Thunder colors. Now his son does the same.
“It’s interesting that you see it as a rarity,” Connor says. “Because I don’t.”
Sure, Connor has met some Seattleites, he says, who complain over drinks about the loss of the Sonics. But he’s also noticed that when Eli’s high school has a theme week, there’s always Thunder representation on jersey day.
“So somewhere along the line, the kids’ parents somehow gave them affiliation with the Thunder,” Connor says. “They’re so far away from us that it’s super weird, but there’s always a handful or jerseys. It’s always made me think that there’s still an affection for the boys.”
There’s plenty of antagonism too, and despite Connor’s experience, it’s unlikely to fade in the short term.
But there is a fix for that bitterness.
You have found on this hunt disdain and disagreement, but one thought is almost universal. The way to heal the wound from the Sonics’ departure — and to create a thriving new NBA rivalry — is to bring the league back to the city.
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“It would be amazing,” Saran says. “There’s nothing like live basketball.”
Dolan says he’d love for Seattle to have a team again, “not least of all because I’m here and I would get to go to games.”
In October, NBA commissioner Adam Silver said on the Stephen A. Smith Show that while Seattle “was a great destination and there’s some storied teams that played there, we’re just not in expansion mode at the moment.”
But come here and you will find that no matter the city’s feelings about the team that left, it loves the game that was left behind.
“Seattle’s been synonymous with basketball for a long time,” Phillips says. “I know the city really wants basketball. It’s really big here. It just needs to make its way back.”
Until then, though, he will be like many Thunder fans here. Reclusive. Hard to find.
“I’m opening up a little to telling people they’re my team,” Phillips says. “I probably won’t do another decal. I just got a new car.”
(Top photo: Alika Jenner / Getty Images)