They're OK now
Hurricane Katrina left the New Orleans Hornets without a home, but Oklahoma City has embraced the team.
January 10, 2006
BY SHAWN WINDSOR
FREE PRESS SPORTS WRITER
OKLAHOMA CITY -- It was a sunny morning, play-by-play radio announcer Sean Kelley recalled. And cold.
Especially for late November. Especially in Oklahoma City.
Kelley and the rest of the staff of the New Orleans Hornets were huddled together, making their way through the Oklahoma City bombing memorial on the north edge of downtown, watching old news footage, gazing at photos of the rubble, walking among empty chairs symbolizing 168 people killed by a truck bomb in April 1995.
Hurricane Katrina had forced the team out of New Orleans. The Hornets landed in another city familiar with tragedy. On this chilly day, they were learning about it.
"There was a somber silence," Kelley said. "We were collectively dealing with what we had gone through (in New Orleans) while learning what they had gone through" 10 years earlier.
It was then that the staff began to understand why the Hornets' presence in Oklahoma City meant so much. It wasn't just the arrival -- however temporary -- of the state's first big league sports team, or the NBA stars staying at downtown hotels, or the ESPN crawl at the bottom of television screens that lumped Oklahoma City with New York and Los Angeles and Detroit.
It was that residents thought no other city, with the exception of New York, could relate to New Orleans like they could.
Said Kelley: "As the season has gone on, they are not bashful about saying they'd really like us to stay, but -- and they always follow it with but -- 'If you guys go back, we understand.' "
Home for now is Oklahoma City, but the NBA will decide by the end of the month where the Hornets will be based next season. Publicly, everyone points to an eventual return to New Orleans. Commissioner David Stern, owner George Shinn, coach Byron Scott, players, staff, even fans all say it is the right thing to do. Three games scheduled this season for Baton Rouge, La., already have been moved to New Orleans Arena.
But the sellouts, the college-like noise at Oklahoma City's Ford Center, the season-ticket sales, the corporate sponsorships and the political reception have surprised the NBA and left its brass in a quandary. Before Katrina, the Hornets ranked last in the league in attendance. Now they're in the top 10, despite a 15-18 record entering tonight's game against the Pistons.
For sentimental reasons, the league doesn't want to move a team from a devastated city. But the Hornets might have found better economic success in Oklahoma City, tapping into a surprisingly pent-up desire for the NBA.
Neither the league nor Hornets management wants the negative publicity that surrounded the New Orleans Saints, whose owner wasn't so subtle about his wish to stay in San Antonio, his team's temporary home this season.
Stern was so mindful of avoiding a bad rap he persuaded the flamboyant Shinn to let his less-recognizable people tour the city's arena when the team was considering a move to Oklahoma City.
"David didn't want us to look like vultures," Shinn said.
Oklahoma City is the country's 45th-largest television market -- New Orleans and Memphis are ranked just above it. Roughly 1.2 million people live in the metropolitan area.
So far, no one in Oklahoma City is outwardly competing for the team. Besides, who knows how long the fans will pack the 19,000-seat Ford Center? Is the town another Sacramento, which has supported the Kings through good and bad for two decades? Or another Vancouver, whose Grizzlies were popular for a short time before fan interest waned and the team moved to Memphis?
Stern is betting on the former and has said the city is next in line for an NBA franchise.
What might make Oklahoma City different is what happened 10 years ago on an April morning, when a region without a national identity became known because of tragedy.
Great atmosphere
Three months ago, any contemplation of Oklahoma City beyond a Ryder Truck and a bombed-out federal building fell to Dust Bowl memories or clichis: cowboys, oil, God, an empty expanse bordering Texas. And Sooner football. (Norman, home to the University of Oklahoma, is 25 miles south.)
Last Wednesday night, in a standing-room-only arena, Shaquille O'Neal played his first professional basketball game in Oklahoma City. That same night, Texas -- Oklahoma's hated rival -- and USC unspooled one of the great college football games in the past 20 years.
The public-address announcer occasionally provided updates on the Texas/USC score, and a few televisions in the concourse offered the game. For the most part, fans stayed in their seats, and showered the Miami Heat with three hours of jet engine-like noise.
The night began with smoke, a thumping bass and a prayer -- Shinn invited ministers to say a few words on the court before tip-off when he started the team in Charlotte. He brought the invocation to New Orleans and Oklahoma City.
"Two things I've seen more of here than anywhere else are flags and people praying when I go out to dinner," he said last week.
When the Hornets scored their first basket, the crowd rose, and fans high-fived. Juiced on the vibe, the young Hornets dove and flew around the court, embarrassing the more talented, but uninspired Heat. Miami coach Pat Riley, all scowl and gel, kept calling time-outs to lash his team. The breaks in play only gave 19,326 throaty Oklahomans more inspiration.
The Hornets were up 19 at halftime. Bob Masterson caught his breath in the concourse.
"It's the buzz right now," he said. "Oklahoma has never been known for much."
But the NBA?
"Hard to believe," he said.
Masterson, who lives in nearby Edmond, owns a Ford dealership close to the arena. He was one of 10,000 who bought season tickets the first 10 days they went on sale. Now, he's a few rows from the biggest happening in town.
"I've been in the league 13 years and I've never seen anything like this," said Hornets forward P.J. Brown, a Louisiana native. "It's special."
Mick Cornett always believed it could be. Oklahoma City's mayor began selling his city to Stern long before Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. If he hadn't, the Hornets could be playing in Las Vegas now. Perhaps not the best place to offer courtside invocations.
TOUGH SELL
Cornett, elected in 2004, flew to New York a few months after he took office to pitch his booming city to Stern. Eight years earlier the town began a massive capital improvement project using funds collected from a one-cent sales tax.
They built the Ford Center. Rebuilt the convention center. Opened a new Triple-A baseball stadium. Dug a San Antonio-like canal in an old warehouse district known as Bricktown and populated it with restaurants, bars and movie theaters. The economy was booming, benefiting from the high price of oil.
All that was missing was a big league team. And Cornett, a former local television sportscaster and news anchor, was convinced the city was ready.
"We were branded by our tragedy," he said. "But what people didn't know outside of the region is how much we had changed since then."
Cornett also knew that the city had narrowly lost out on an NHL franchise in the late 1990s, when the league awarded teams to Columbus and Nashville. Still, when he met with Stern in August 2004, the commissioner, though impressed by the city's growth and demographics, told Cornett he had a better chance with hockey.
Then the hurricane hit. Two days later, Cornett called Stern.
"I offered up our town as a temporary home," he said.
Cornett also called local investment capitalist Clay Bennett, who had once owned part of the San Antonio Spurs, and who knew Stern. Shinn, meanwhile, was taking calls from San Diego, Nashville, Kansas City, Anaheim, and, of course, Vegas.
When Stern called him about Oklahoma City, "I said, 'Oklahoma where?' "
Two weeks later a deal was done. The state, city and local businessmen put up $10 million to cover any revenue losses by the team. The city also agreed to pay relocation expenses, provide housing for the team's staff in Norman and find a practice facility -- Southern Nazarene University offered its gym.
Sellouts and the season-ticket rush might actually help the city make money.
"This is a free shot," Cornett said. "Never before has a city had the opportunity to be given a trial run."
Or an owner a clean slate.
When Shinn's expansion Charlotte Hornets began play in 1988, they led the league in attendance for eight years. Then Shinn, who grew up in nearby Kannapolis (home of NASCAR legend Dale Earnhardt), was charged with sexual assault and became the star of a sordid sex scandal on Court TV. He was exonerated, but not before admitting to an affair with a team cheerleader.
His wife left him. He quit attending games. He refused to talk to media. In 2002, after Shinn's personal controversy and a failed bid for a new arena, the team moved to New Orleans.
"Never have I been so humiliated in my life," he says now. "I made mistakes."
When he arrived in Oklahoma -- remarried -- he openly talked about his mistakes. Now he's the talk of the town, a colorful, cowboy boot-wearing, self-made millionaire fond of his courtside seat and pregame meals in the media room.
"Fans are familiar with the story and don't judge him," Cornett said.
In 16 games, Oklahoma City's Ford Center has become one of the toughest stops in the league -- the team is 10-6 there. (The Hornets also lost a home game at Baton Rouge.)
The Hornets are led by Chris Paul, a charismatic rookie who Willis Reed, the vice president of basketball operations, said reminds him of Isiah Thomas.
Paul leads the team in scoring, assists and grins.
"I had never been to Oklahoma City before," said Paul, who suffered a thumb injury Friday night but wasn't expected to miss more than two weeks. "I had no clue. Just heard there were a lot of tornadoes."
And now?
"Love every minute of it. We are the luckiest team in the NBA."
All of which will make the Hornets' return to New Orleans, if it happens, difficult.
At the bombing memorial last week, park rangers and security guards guided visitors around the reflecting pond and through the chairs, telling the story of the city's darkest moment.
A basketball team won't change that. Still, said Todd Cook, a guard who works at the memorial, "it's given us something to talk about."
And the rest of the country a different association.
1.10.06 v. Detroit
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