It would have been easy for fans who have thronged Oklahoma City’s Chesapeake Energy Arena over the past half-decade to forget they were rooting for laundry. The way they talk about ex-Thunder forward Kevin Durant in OKC, you’d think he were George Bailey in Nikes. Durant lives downtown, hangs out downtown, owns a restaurant downtown. Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin offered him a Cabinet post last month.
Here’s an example of how intertwined Durant specifically, and the Thunder broadly, have become with OKC’s civic pride: After his lackluster performance against the Memphis Grizzlies in the 2014 playoffs, a banner headline in the Oklahoman called Durant “Mr. Unreliable”—and the ensuing backlash prompted a personal apology from the sports editor, who said the paper had “failed” its readership. Durant is the reason the Thunder have the second-best record in basketball over the past six years, but in Oklahoma City, he has come to represent something more: the recent success and competitive aspirations of the city.
The analogizing of pro sports and civic status is one of the more tiresome clichés of sports writing. (Are sports moguls any less brazen in their exploitation of locals, any less willing to uproot for money, than old-fashioned industrialists? No.) But I didn’t say it; Mayor Mick Cornett did. Here’s how he described the role of basketball in OKC in an interview with Sports Illustrated last month: “The Thunder has given us a worldwide brand we’ve never had before. … The exposure has been immeasurable. You tell somebody in another country you’re from Oklahoma City, and they say, ‘Kevin Durant.’ ”
Or they did, anyway. On Monday, the lanky superstar announced he was signing with the Golden State Warriors. The story writes itself: Another highly talented millennial ditches flyover country for the Bay. KD’s departure, Marketplace speculated, “could stall the influx of young techs who’ve energized the city.” OKC’s News 9 worried the city “may feel economic impact.”
But just as Boston went on after the Babe departed for New York, Oklahoma City will do fine in the post-KD era. Stories that link a sports team’s fortunes to its city are told to make people care about sports, not cities. Oklahoma City’s current run of good fortune—characterized by population and job growth, and the birth of a downtown residential area—precedes KD, and will outlast him too.
No one said it better than KD himself in that adulatory Sports Illustrated profile. The piece, by Lee Jenkins, made it sound like Durant was running for mayor. (Though the fact that he likes to spend his summers in Los Angeles might have been a giveaway that he was, like Tom Joad, seeking a better life in the Golden State.)
The city’s rapid growth, Durant told Jenkins, wasn’t the same as winning the title. “But the championships, the records, the who’s the best player—there will always be new champions and new records and new players,” he continued. “What we’re talking about, these are jobs, these are lives, these are things that will matter for 40 years, and that is very cool to me.”
Indeed. There will be small-time losers thanks to KD’s departure. An end to the team’s five-year sellout streak could be in the cards. No more long playoff runs, whose extra home games have brought tens of thousands of people downtown. Television ratings will suffer. Perhaps Enes Kanter and Billy Donovan could become co-owners of KD’s Durant’s restaurant and rename it K&D’s?
But the story of Oklahoma City’s recent rise runs deeper.
In 1993, concerned about its inability to draw in corporate investment, Oklahoma City Mayor Ron Norick helped promote a massive infrastructure package funded by sales taxes. Oklahoma City voters and politicians had long been averse to public spending at such a scale, but the Metropolitan Area Projects plan, or MAPS, earned 54 percent of the vote. It paid for what is now Chesapeake Energy Arena, where the Thunder play. But it also funded a host of other initiatives: renovations to the concert hall, the convention center, and the Oklahoma state fairgrounds; a new downtown library, transit expansion, baseball stadium, and the construction of the Bricktown Canal.
The Chicago Fed called MAPS “a public infrastructure investment in the city not seen since its founding.” MAPS for Kids, a $700 million school district improvement program, followed in 2001, and then came the hugely popular MAPS 3, in 2009, a $777 million seven-year sales tax for a new convention center, downtown parks investments, a streetcar, the Oklahoma River Boathouse District, biking and running trails, and health and wellness centers. (There is currently talk of putting MAPS 4 on the ballot in November.)
The fruits of those decisions have loosely coincided with the period since the Thunder’s arrival in 2008. OKC population is up 9 percent since 2010, according to the Census Bureau, so it’s easy to see the team’s national prominence as a symbol of the city’s growth. But the more dramatic population increase came in the previous, pre-basketball decade, when it rose 15 percent.
If Oklahoma City feels more like a big-league town these days, it’s not because it has that big-city sticker of approval, an NBA team—it’s because 125,000 people have arrived since 2000, raising the population by 25 percent, and because the city has invested more than $1 billion in civic life, tying sports arenas, nightlife districts, and public works together in mega-packages in which voters are likely to see something they like.
Boosters are correct to say that OKC is booming. Out of the 100 largest U.S. metros, the city is 17th in job growth since 2006, and fifth in prosperity growth, according to Brookings.
They are also right that the Thunder have been the national face of that boom. KD was an ambassador of sorts. But his team was a product of the OKC renaissance—not the other way around.
