I’m a Selfish Seattle Sonics Fan

If love is something that makes you more than a little crazy, something that makes it impossible to think about the beloved in any kind of objective way, then I guess I love my hometown Seattle sports teams. When I am not in the throes of romance, I’m cynical enough to know that pro sports are played by millionaires who are paid by billionaires, none of whom give a damn about me. Most of the players don’t choose to live in a city where the two seasons are “summer” and “rainy,” and they play for owners so miserly that they created ”20”-ounce cups that held 16 ounces of (overpriced) liquid. Still, when the Sonics left Seattle in 2008, I felt the bad news settle in my stomach like I had just gotten a call from my mom telling me that my dog had died. I know that sounds overwrought if you don’t care about sports, but I couldn’t help it—just like I can’t help being thrilled, pathetically and irrationally, now that there’s a chance the Sonics might come back.

The story of the Sonics’ leaving has been told over and over, probably best by the documentary Sonicsgate. Essentially, Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks, sold the team back in 2006 because it wasn’t making him enough money and because the city wouldn’t give him a bunch of money to remodel KeyArena, where the Sonics played. In fact, voters explicitly said that public funds shouldn’t be spent to support sports franchises owned by billionaires, which I still think was the right decision, even though it led to “Coward” Schultz selling the Sonics to Clay Bennett, of Oklahoma City, who said he wouldn’t move the team until at least 2010, before—whoopsie!—moving the team to Oklahoma City in 2008, where they soon became one of the best teams in the league. (The fan consensus is that at least Bennett was trying to do something for his town, while Schultz was just a money-grubbing sellout piece of shit.)

But then! A fabulously wealthy hedge fund manager named Chris Hansen, a Seattle native and Sonics fanatic who currently lives in the Bay Area, decided he wanted to bring basketball back to his hometown—he wanted to so much, in fact, that he was willing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to do so. He bought some land south of the baseball and football complexes (an excellent spot to build a basketball arena) and, last Thursday, took the podium with Mayor Mike McGinn and some other important civic folks to announce that they were going to find an NBA team, as well as an NHL team, and then build a new arena without spending any taxpayer money at all. I watched the press conference on a livestream, and because I wasn’t actually there covering it, I was free to fist-pump as much as I wanted to. I may have actually said, “Whoo!”

And that shows why I’m an idiot about the Sonics—the city is a long way from having a team. Hansen needs to buy a franchise (the league-owned Hornets or the beleaguered Sacramento Kings are the best options). Then, he needs to find someone who wants to buy an NHL team, because the arena needs to have both sports as tenants to be viable. An NHL team will be tricky: While the Phoenix Coyotes are owned by the league and constantly besieged by relocation rumors, it looks like they might very well stay where they are. And if another warm-weather team wants to move (or is forced to), Quebec City might be able to offer a much sweeter deal.

And, of course, for Seattle to get a team, another city needs to lose one. If Hansen buys a franchise, he’s going to move them, and fans in Sacramento or New Orleans or wherever will hate him and say nasty things about Seattleites, just as Seattleites said nasty (and deserved) things about whatever the fuck people from Oklahoma City are called. In one sense, if the Sonics are resurrected, Seattle fans will just be transferring their pain to another set of aggrieved fans. We’re even willing to harm two cities—one for hockey, one for basketball—just to satisfy our selfish need to watch some athletic millionaires play a game.

I know all of this. I know it’s pretty fucked up that I don’t care at all about hockey, but I’m happy to see the Coyotes move to Seattle if it meant the Sonics would roll back the stone and come alive again in green and gold. Sports at their best are supposed to reduce us to childlike states of glee and awe, but when we’re talking about taking a team away from one group of fans and giving it to another, we turn into the wrong kind of children—self-centered little pricks who don’t care who they hurt.

And then, at the press conference, in response to a reporter’s question I couldn’t hear, Mayor McGinn said, “Absolutely, it should be named the Sonics,” and I lost my shit—the Sonics are coming back!

@hcheadle