Sixty-One Things I Learned During the Sonics Trial

These are the last 61 things that I will say about the Seattle
Sonics. No, that’s a lie. These are the last 61 things that I will say
until I think of some other things a few months down the road:

1. I’ve given thousands of speeches, readings, and interviews, and
once gave shit to then president Bill Clinton for claiming Cherokee
heritage when we appeared together in 1998 on NewsHour with Jim
Lehrer on PBS. But the trial testimony in Seattle vs. Sonics was by
far the most terrifying and stressful public speaking gig I’ve ever had
to endure.

2. There are many Sonics fans who think they could have done a
better job than I did testifying. To that, I say: ha, ha, ha, ha, ha,
ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Ninety-seven percent of you would have folded
like an origami crane, two percent would have crapped your pants, and
that magical one percent of more-
effective witnesses would have
worn a light-blue button-down shirt and khaki pants.

3. Sometimes, after testifying, one will weep in front of sports
reporters.

4. The sportswriters who hated my testimony or press conference
subsequently overwrote their stories in cute attempts to outwrite me.
Relax, guys, you ain’t ever gonna be better than me. Or I. Or me. Or I.
Shoot, I can never remember which pronoun I’m supposed to use.

5. The sportswriters who liked my testimony and press conference, or
felt rather neutral or only slightly negative about it, were happy to
note that I introduced emotion into the trial. Isn’t it strange that we
have to highlight the introduction of emotion into a gathering?

6. There are sportswriters who love their jobs. There are
sportswriters who have obviously come to hate their jobs. This trial
has made it easier for readers to tell the
difference.

7. I know that I touched the hearts of every man in that courtroom
when I talked about my late father. I know that each son remembered a
gorgeous and/or ugly moment with his father.

8. I realized that Clay Bennett probably bought this basketball team
in order to impress his father, father figures, and all of his buddies.
As angry as I am with the man, I also understand his motivations. At
heart, he’s a boy who bought the best toy imaginable—a
professional basketball team. But like some preschool tyrant, Bennett
ripped that toy out of the hands of the kid who had it first.

9. Clay Bennett is huge—as in heart-attack huge. I wonder if
he’s a stress eater like me. If so, I would strongly urge him to
consult a nutritionist if all of these trials move into appeals.

10. I strongly urge myself to consult a nutritionist if all of these
trials move into appeals.

11. I’m actually not that big a fan of cucumber sandwiches.

12. For those of you who think that sports doesn’t matter as much as
literature, at least in Seattle, please count the column inches devoted
to my Sonics testimony as opposed to the inches devoted to my recent
National Book Award win.

13. When I think of Howard Schultz, I hear Jewel singing, “Who will
say-aay-aave your soul?”

14. More than anything else, I hate Howard Schultz for making me
think of Jewel.

15. In writing, thinking, and talking about the Sonics’ possible
relocation to Oklahoma City, I shuffle like an iPod through the stages
of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance, and Hall
& Oates.

16. And, yes, it’s true: During a season-ticket holder relocation
party at KeyArena five years back, I played a little one-on-one with a
tall Sonics employee, a young man three inches taller, 20 years
younger, and 30 pounds lighter than me, and I head faked left, spun
right, and hit a 25-foot fadeaway three-pointer on him.

17. And, go ahead, ask my basketball buddies: I hit that crazy shit
all the time. I am sure that all sorts of readers out there think they
could take me on a basketball court. But most of you couldn’t; I’m
better than at least 90 percent of you.

18. In the days leading up to and following my testimony, my friends
told me amazing and poetic basketball stories about their fathers,
sons, and jump shots. These were love stories. My detractors can give
me all the shit they want. I welcome their shit. But I am trying to
write a love story. I did introduce “love” as evidence into a federal
trial. Call me what you will. Accuse me of any and all clichés.
And so, yes, I admit that the “professional basketball players as Greek
gods” argument might have been a tad hyperbolic, but please remember
that I was not motivated by hate, rage, or condescension; I was
motivated by love. God, it sounds stupid to type that and read it
aloud. But, damn it, I am a silly, romantic shithead.

19. Here’s an obvious news bulletin: A whole bunch of males are very
uncomfortable in the presence of masculine love, whether expressed
romantically or platonically. I am often uncomfortable in the presence
of my own gushing emotions. Did I really need to opine that the love of
NBA basketball is at least partially homoerotic? Yes, I did. Of course,
I did. LeBron James is indeed the basketball equivalent of
Michelangelo’s David.

20. And how pathetic was the local television coverage of my
testimony and press conference? Instead of focusing on the serious
issues that I raised—race and class among them—the local
news led their stories with clips of me saying, “And, yeah, that’s
homoerotic, but that’s okay.” Yes, our local TV news folks giggled like
adolescents at the mere mention of homoeroticism.

21. Yeah, I cuss a lot. Get over it. In writing about basketball, it
would be utterly hypocritical to abstain from cursing. Did you catch
the last four minutes of the Boston Celtics game six tap-out of the Los
Angeles Lakers? As they danced together on the sidelines and celebrated
their world championship, Ray Allen, Kevin Garnett, and Paul Pierce
danced and sang so many “motherfuckers” that the bleeped-over broadcast
turned into a John Cage sound collage.

22. In order to explain the previous punch line and to bring two
worlds together: Ray Allen, Kevin Garnett, and Paul Pierce are
African-American basketball players who were employing a poetic
obscenity closely associated with black culture; John Cage was a
Euro-American, avant-garde, and mostly unlistenable musician and
composer.

23. “Motherfucker” is, of course, the purest distillation of mama
insults. Since single mothers are sadly common and sweetly revered in
black culture, mama jokes are ironically hilarious. However, I’ve
always wondered why the term “fatherfucker” is so rarely used as an
insult. I think it’s far more original, powerful, and disturbing than
“motherfucker.” I assume that “motherfucker” is an insult borne of
misogyny, so wouldn’t “fatherfucker” be a more egalitarian, homoerotic,
and therefore more disturbing obscenity? Wouldn’t we all be challenging
the patriarchy if we adopted its use?

24. Kobe Bryant is one mean and gifted
fatherfucker. Does that
work for you?

25. Ray Allen, one of my favorite players and Sonics of all time,
just won a championship with the Boston Celtics, my most hated
franchise of all time. According to F. Scott Fitzgerald, “the sign of a
superior mind is the ability to hold two opposing thoughts at the same
time.” Well, I possess only a slightly above-average mind, but I
decided that I loved Allen enough to also be happy for the hated
Celtics. Crazy, huh? Who ever heard of a compassionate sports fan? But
let’s not get too misty here. I also loved Allen’s epic and
recording-breaking performance in the NBA Finals because it made the
Oklahoma City guys look like fools. In order to make the Sonics a
supposedly better basketball team, Clay Bennett and the gang traded
away a champion who hit a record-
tying seven three-pointers in the
clinching game and a record-breaking 22 three-pointers in the entire
championship series.

26. On defense, Ray Allen also spent most of his time making life
incredibly difficult for Kobe Bryant, the so-called best basketball
player in the world. In playing defense and offense with such passion
and accomplishment, and by breaking himself out of a horrid slump
leading up to the championship series, Allen become one of the greatest
stories in NBA Finals history.

27. For Ray Allen, the Oklahoma City guys got Wally Szczerbiak,
Delonte West, and Jeff Green. Later in the season, in a three-team
trade, the Okie guys sent Szczerbiak and West to the Cleveland
Cavaliers and we received Ira Newble and Donyell Marshall. We soon
released Newble. So, in sum total, the Okies traded a world-champion
all-star for an ancient power forward (Marshall) and a rookie (Green)
who was the 278th best player in the league this past season. In
professional basketball circles, this is known as “rebuilding.” In the
real world, this is known as “wild-ass guessing.”

28. To add insult to amputation, I must also remind you that we
traded Gary Payton, the Sonic of all Sonics, for Ray Allen. So the
generational timeline is Payton to Allen to Green. Let me repeat that:
Payton to Allen to Green. Man, oh, man, do you think Jeff Green thinks
about his (mis)place in Sonics basketball history? In order to make the
world whole, Jeff Green will have to become the third or fourth best
small forward in the league. Will Green become that great? He has
enormous
potential. I will be praying for him. Yes, I pray for
professional basketball players.

29. One last thing about Ray Allen: He was participating in the
Celtics championship parade through the streets of Boston at the exact
time I was testifying in the Sonics trial. Ain’t coincidence a
fatherfucker?

30. If a country were governed like the National Basketball
Association, we’d be sending in UN peacekeeping forces.

31. Oklahoma City is slightly more racially diverse than Seattle. My
dear hometown white liberals, how does that statistic sit with you?

32. The original sin remains the signing of free agent big man Jim
McIlvaine in 1996. And for that legendary mistake, the Sonics have been
punished with a series of Gordian knots named Jerome James, Calvin
Booth, Vitaly Potapenko, Robert Swift, Johan Petro, and Mouhamed Sene.
When a Sonics fan is forced to fondly look back at the Peja Drobnjak

Era, then that Sonic fan tends to repeatedly smash his or her
skull against the wall.

33. After my testimony, I jumped into my car with my family,
completely forgetting that I had scheduled a lunch with the editor of
this newspaper. I’m always forgetting shit like that. Two years ago, I
stood up a friend for lunch, and she wrote me an e-mail that said, in
part, “If you had been courting me, then this would have been your
death. As it is, you are still my friend, but you’re an inconsiderate
asshole.”

34. I know my readers want me to go into detail about my
conversations with the city’s lawyers, and about strategies and secrets
and such, but I am not always an inconsiderate asshole. I will say
this: Nobody likes to lose.

35. But man, oh man, you can certainly do your best to pretend that
a loss is a win. Did you see our mayor and his cronies yukking it up
during the press conference to announce the Sonics’ departure? At least
Clay Bennett had the decency to take his press conference seriously, to
admit that the trial and stress had taken a serious toll on his
health.

36. So, when it comes to the settlement with the Oklahoma City guys
and the NBA, let’s get a few things straight: The NBA has not expressed
any interest whatsoever in expansion, except internationally, so it is
not going to drop some newborn team on our doorstep. And, more
important, if we are to get an NBA team anytime soon, it will happen
because our local rich guys bought another city’s team and moved it
here. And wasn’t that the same battle we Sonics fans just fought and
lost?

37. Hypocrisy is an airborne contagion.

38. I feel like a failure because I couldn’t, with my testimony,
single-handedly keep the Sonics in Seattle. I have been punishing
myself for my courtroom failures of nerve, imagination, and poetry.

39. I should have said, “But my father didn’t live in Minneapolis,
he wasn’t a season ticket holder, and nobody in Los Angeles ever lied
to him.”

40. I should have said, “I wrote those articles before the Oklahoma
City guys started lying to me.”

41. I shouldn’t have said anything about those fucking cucumber
sandwiches.

42. Of course, there are plenty of things that I wanted to
say—I tried to get the city’s lawyers to let me say
them—but I would have been objected clear out of the courtroom.
If I had tried to speak as I actually speak—with a whirling and
spinning and beautiful and ugly and intelligent and stupid stream of
metaphors, profanity, dick jokes, insults, Whitman and Dickinson
quotations, Hall & Oates lyrics, the lifetime statistics of my
favorite 127 NBA players of all time, and aching grief songs for my
father—I would have been held in contempt and tossed into a
holding cell.

43. But my lawyer friends were shocked that I was allowed to say as
much as I did. One friend said, “The judge gave you a lot of room.”
Yes, she did. Thank you, Judge Pechman.

44. I’ve always thought of myself as a vengeful person. I always
thought that if we lost the Sonics, I’d only feel rage at the Oklahoma
City guys and at the city itself. But I don’t. Oh, I’m pissed at Clay
Bennett and his right-wing posse. But I’m not angry with the citizens
of Oklahoma City. I’m not even angry at the trash-talking jerks who
found my e-mail address and sent me insults, porn, and metaphorical
threats to remove parts of my body and place them inside other parts of
my body. Instead, I find those Oklahoma City fans to be very cute and
innocent. You see, they think they’re getting an NBA basketball
team.

45. Well, okay, Oklahoma City folks, you are getting an NBA team,
but it is going to be the worst team in the league for the next three
years. Over the next three years, your new team will lose somewhere
between 160 to 180 games. That’s going to be tough for you because,
frankly, you don’t love the Sonics. You love the idea of professional
basketball being played in your city. But once reality sets
in—once you realize that you have a horrible team coached by an
incompetent and unpleasant man featuring an offense that puts your
superstar into a dozen different places on the floor where he should
not be—you are going to lose that glow. Your initial infatuation
will end and then the hard work of being a fan will begin: You will
have to learn how to love a loser.

46. And I have to be honest about something else, too. I like your
city. I’ve only had positive experiences in your town. But I am not a
twentysomething newly minted millionaire (and especially not an
African-American newly minted millionaire). I guarantee you that the
best players on your new team—along with their agents, business
managers, and lawyers—are already strategizing about how to get
out of your town. Seattle is a gorgeous, cosmopolitan city and
we had difficultly keeping and signing big-time free agents. How
do you think Oklahoma City is going to do?

47. As I write this, the general managers and owners of every other
NBA team are making plans to clear their cap spaces so they can offer
massive money to Kevin Durant, Jeff Green, and Nick Collison.

48. And don’t go telling me about how small-market teams like Salt
Lake City and New Orleans are doing well and winning games. If you can
find a great coach like Utah’s Jerry Sloan, then you can talk. If you
get lucky with your draft picks and end up with a player as great as
Chris Paul because a number of other teams were too idiotic to draft
him, then you can talk.

49. Oh, to make you happy, I think your new draft pick, Russell
Westbrook, is going to be an amazing player. I don’t think he’ll be as
good as Chris Paul, but he’s going to be close.

50. Westbrook is going to be a free agent in 2012, I believe.

51. When the mayor’s press conference was over, I screamed. And my
scream was immediately answered by thunder and lightning. My friend
Aaron e-mailed me and said, “Can you believe it’s fucking RAINING right
now?” Distraught, wanting and needing my family’s attention, I drove
home. As I walked up the front steps, as I began to cry, as I touched
the doorknob, it thundered so loudly that car alarms went off. Then, as
I stepped into the house, closed the door behind me, and fell onto the
floor and loudly wept, the wind blew open our back door. That’s the
power of grief.

52. I don’t believe in magic. But I do believe in interpreting
coincidence exactly the way you want to.

53. Do you know why Indian rain dances always worked? Because the
Indians would keep dancing until it rained.

54. The last time I fell on the floor and cried like that, it was
the day my father died. These two events are not unrelated. I bought
Sonics season tickets for my father, and though he only went to a few
games before he died, his ghost was always sitting between me and my
guest.

55. A few folks, including one who writes for this paper, think I’m
naive for my faith in and love for professional basketball. Well, I am
a reservation Indian who has never once believed anything a white man
in a suit has ever said to him. It is historically, politically, and
culturally impossible for a reservation Indian to be naive.

56. Don’t you wish Howard Schultz were a reservation Indian? A rez
Indian would have never signed that deal with Clay Bennett.

57. Ah, who am I kidding? Reservation Indians are still signing
treaties with lying, evil white guys (and also with other Indians who
are evil liars).

58. My love of the game has not diminished at all. For those Sonics
fans out there who are threatening to give up the game because of this
trial, I only have this to say: Fuck you and your fake-ass love; I’m
happy that I’m not married to you.

59. Okay, well, my love has been tested. So I take back the previous
insult. I understand that many Sonics fans are speaking out of genuine
pain and heartbreak. I respect that. So I’ll give you a year to mourn,
and then you better get your ass back on the NBA wagon.

60. I just bought a 10-game package for the Portland Trail Blazers.
My two best basketball buddies and I are planning our road trips. We
kind of feel like the bastard widower who married the hot
twentysomething a few months after his wife died. But it’s ball, man.
It’s pro hoops.

61. And hey, I live just a few minutes from Brandon Roy’s childhood
home and high school, and I taught the man in college, so I think I can
justify rooting for him and his Blazers. And Portland is coached by Mr.
Sonic, Nate McMillan, and owned by Paul Allen, and—ah, hell, I’m
a hoops junkie, man, and I need my fix.