Kevin Durant, the star of the Oklahoma City Thunder, is the youngest
scoring champion in N.B.A. history. At 24, he has led the league in
scoring for three consecutive seasons, and all signs point to him
keeping that up for the foreseeable future. It follows, then, that
Durant should also be a prodigy of a head case. He should have been
arrested for reckless driving at around age 9, broken his hand in a
strip-club brawl at age 12 and accidentally shot his chauffeur no later
than age 15.
Instead, Durant has a reputation roughly on par with Gandhi. He seems to
be — not just for a scoring champion, but for anyone — almost inhumanly
humble. His motto, which he intones constantly, is “Hard work beats
talent when talent fails to work hard.” His pregame ritual involves
kissing his mother, as does his postgame ritual. Once, in college,
during probably the greatest freshman season of all time, a reporter
asked Durant if he realized that he had just single-handedly outscored
the entire opposing team in the second half of a game. Durant answered,
with absolute sincerity, “Who, me?” When I asked the Thunder coach,
Scott Brooks, to tell me about his superstar, he laughed. “Whatever you
say nice, you can print it out and I’ll just say I said it,” he said.
“Because it’s true.”
Durant could be forgiven for wanting to brag a little. He is currently
the second-best basketball player in the world — a category in which he
trails only LeBron James, who is four years older, and whose Miami Heat
beat the Thunder last year in the finals. The budding rivalry between KD
and LBJ (off the court they’re friends, Olympic teammates and
sometimes, controversially, workout partners) is the kind of thing the
N.B.A. has been fantasizing about for decades, a yin and yang as tightly
balanced as any since Magic and Bird.
LeBron and Durant are, conveniently for storytelling purposes,
opposites. LeBron looks like something out of a Marvel comic: a sentient
pile of muscles. Durant looks like something from a Pixar movie — a
humanoid praying mantis. He is 6 feet 9 inches tall and almost
disturbingly skinny, with disproportionately long arms. Sportswriters,
struggling to describe him, have compared him to capellini and a
pterodactyl. His body looks almost like an engineering mistake, and
early in his career it seemed as if it might actually be one: before the
2007 draft, there was a minor kerfuffle when it was discovered that
Durant couldn’t bench-press 185 pounds, the standard predraft litmus
test, even a single time. (The next pick in the draft, Al Horford,
lifted it 20 times.) LeBron entered the league as a teenager and
promptly knocked around all of the grown men who tried to guard him. As a
19-year-old rookie, Durant drifted around, shooting jumpers and trying
to avoid contact, and still spent much of his time picking himself up
off the floor. Although he won Rookie of the Year, he wasn’t
particularly efficient in doing so, and his team was horrible.
Despite their discrepancy in visible muscle tone, Durant has strengths
that LeBron will probably never have. LeBron’s jump shot, for instance,
is funky-looking, jerky, angular and streaky. Durant’s is natural, pure,
quick and stunningly accurate — somehow, his ridiculous arms manage not
to get in the way but to amplify his power, so it looks as if he’s
shooting with zero effort even from 30 feet away.
Durant’s real advantage over LeBron, however, is civic. LeBron
infamously held a prime-time TV special in the summer of 2010 to
announce that he was abandoning Cleveland for the glamour of Miami — a
P.R. debacle known as the Decision. When he arrived in Miami, he took
part in a histrionic rally at which he promised, on a stage surrounded
by a W.W.E. -style light show and smoke machines, that his new team was
so good it was going to dominate the rest of the league without even
trying.
It’s impossible to imagine that kind of behavior from Durant. In the
middle of the overheated summer of 2010, the day before LeBron’s
Decision, Durant announced quietly, on Twitter, that he had just signed a
contract to stay in Oklahoma — the third-smallest market in the league,
a place devoid of beaches and celebrities and night life — for another
five years. You got the feeling he would have committed to the Thunder
for the rest of his life if only the Players’ Union would have allowed
it.
Durant, in other words, seems to have been invented in a laboratory
beneath the Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce to serve as the
international face of Oklahoma — a state known for its citizens’
kindness, levelheadedness, work ethic, community spirit and, above all,
humility. (The mayor of Oklahoma City told me that he thinks Oklahomans
are humble because of their proximity to Texans, who will never stop
bragging about anything.) Led by Durant, the Thunder has become one of
the N.B.A.’s best and youngest and most popular teams, an international
icon of brotherhood and good will that has helped to usher in golden
ages in both Oklahoma City and the N.B.A., an electric blue Trojan horse
inside of which Oklahoma has managed to smuggle its ethos to the rest
of the world: good folksy folks humbly helping other folksy folks stay
humble and helpful.
Oklahoma sits right in the middle of the country: it’s
not the cultured East or the wild West or the frigid North or the humid
South but exactly where all those things meet. The mountains touch the
prairies, which touch the plains. This has created, over the
millenniums, crazy animals and crazy weather and crazy 25-car pileups of
culture. In 1889, the almost unbelievable land run sent tens of
thousands of ragtag settlers from all over the country literally racing
to claim tracts of practically uninhabitable land. Oklahoma, in other
words, is the Hadron supercollider of states: it slams disparate things
together, over and over, producing endless crises of cohesion. Even
tornadoes, the region’s defining devil winds, are a result of a
meteorological collision: a convergence of three different weather
systems that happens with freakish regularity in Oklahoma and its
immediate environs. Meteorologists in Oklahoma are basically rock stars.
Professional athletes, on the other hand, have rarely had much of a
presence here. That began to change in 2006, when a consortium of
wealthy Oklahomans, led by the financier Clay Bennett, bought the
Seattle SuperSonics — a once-proud franchise that had been stuck for
years in the drain-swirl of mediocrity. Most people assumed, cynically,
that Bennett was buying the team in order to move it, as quickly as
possible, to Oklahoma City, his hometown. He had pledged to make a
good-faith effort to keep the team in Seattle — an effort that came into
suspicion shortly after the sale, when the new owner demanded that
Seattle come up with nearly $300 million to build a new arena. Seattle
refused, at which point the ownership group announced, regretfully, that
it was going to have to move the Sonics to a city with a suitable arena
— a city that also happened to be Oklahoma City. The fallout was
intense: lawsuits, protests, scandal. Even Oklahomans who love the team
admit that they were uncomfortable with the way it was acquired. The
sportswriter Bill Simmons, in solidarity with the people of Seattle,
referred to the Thunder exclusively in his columns as the Zombie Sonics.
One of the miracles of the modern Thunder — and there are several — is
how quickly they’ve made people forget the stain of their origin. The
re-branding of the franchise has been quick and efficient: the team is
now widely perceived as principled, well run and — above all —
thoroughly Oklahoman. ESPN recently named it the No. 1 sports franchise
in America. This fall, it seemed like a step toward closure when the
Seattle City Council approved a plan to build a new basketball arena
there. Simmons announced, just a few weeks ago, that he was officially
retiring the phrase Zombie Sonics. In almost no time at all, the
Oklahoma City Thunder had achieved escape velocity.
Much of the credit for this turnaround goes to Sam Presti, the Thunder’s
general manager. Presti took over the team the year before they left
Seattle. He was 29, the youngest G.M. in league history. His first move
was to draft Kevin Durant, which anyone would have done. His second,
less obvious decision was to strip the roster of all the veterans and
big contracts that would have prevented him from rebuilding from
scratch. When the team moved from Seattle to Oklahoma City, Presti found
himself in charge of not only the worst team in the league but also one
of the worst in the history of professional basketball. The Oklahoma
City Thunder won 3 games out of their first 32. This record, 3-29, is
now a kind of touchstone in the organization — almost everyone I talked
to invoked it at some point, and many of them even exaggerated it to
3-30.
Most G.M.’s would have panicked, but that isn’t Presti’s way: he moved
patiently, methodically. He overhauled not only the roster of the team
but also the culture of the organization. This involved rethinking
everything, no matter how small, from meeting times to media policy to
the decorations on the practice-facility walls. Everyone soon became
familiar with the Presti buzzwords: process, system, patience,
sustainability. He made a habit of promoting people within the
organization so that, from top to bottom, the Thunder became very young
and tightly knit. He stressed community outreach to an unusual degree.
He devoted extra resources to the development of the young Thunder
players and, on the marketing side, refused to call attention to any
single player apart from his teammates, even Durant, who was quickly
becoming an international superstar. Meanwhile, Presti used high draft
picks to surround Durant with other promising young players — Russell
Westbrook, Serge Ibaka, James Harden — all of whom overachieved,
relative to the rest of their draft classes, to an almost amazing
degree.
The Presti rebuild, a meticulously rational plan, now looks a lot like a
fairy tale. The Thunder has improved, year by year, exactly on
schedule: they made the playoffs in their second season, the Western
Conference finals in their third and the Finals last year. If the
Thunder doesn’t win the title this year, it will seem almost unfair — a
violation of the basic laws of narrative. Among basketball fans, Presti
has become a mythic braniac legend, the managerial equivalent of Kevin
Durant: young, focused, dominant and improbably humble.
I met Presti two weeks before the start of training camp at the Oklahoma
City National Memorial, a site that commemorates, powerfully, the
city’s defining tragedy: the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah
Federal Building. Presti shook my hand in the lobby, quickly and firmly,
and then proceeded to say nothing for many minutes. The museum’s
director was giving us a tour, and Presti seemed relieved to cede the
floor completely to her. He wore a polo shirt, casual pants, fashionable
glasses and hip sneakers. He was very slim — no excess — and was
fidgeting a lot, bouncing rhythmically at the knees.
We were at the memorial because, as Presti told me later, “This place is
part of our existence.” Presti sits on the memorial’s board, and he
makes sure that every player who joins the Thunder visits the site
before he ever plays a game. The idea is to teach them the character of
the citizenry they’ve just joined, to help them recognize, as Tom Brokaw
put it on the night of the bombing, Oklahomans’ “essential sense of
goodness, community and compassion.”
After our tour, Presti and I talked for a while outside. He struck me as
one of the most cautious people I’ve ever met, constantly stopping and
rephrasing, weighing and reweighing his words, openly worried that I was
going to misinterpret the team’s relationship to the memorial as a P.R.
grab, or that I was going to focus my article on him at the expense of
others. He ascribed most of the Thunder’s success to either luck or his
colleagues. The most revealing thing Presti said to me that day had to
do with the grounds of the memorial, which were impressively tidy.
Despite a suffocatingly hot run of late-summer days, the grass was thick
and lush and perfectly mowed, with perfect circles around the perfect
trees. Presti pointed out how much work it takes to keep everything
looking like that, how much deliberate organization, but also how
important it is.
At the Thunder’s training center, after a practice in
early October, Kevin Durant and I sat on folding chairs at the edge of
the gym. He was wearing a black tank top, black shorts and ridiculously
colorful shoes. (Loud footwear is one of his few obvious vices.)
Practice that day, according to everyone involved, had been “chippy” —
Durant’s team had lost a couple of early scrimmages to a team full of
rookies and backups, and this had sent everyone, especially Durant and
Westbrook, into competitive overdrive.
Sitting with Durant a few minutes later, though, I could detect none of
that aggressive energy. He was placid, polite, obliging. He said pretty
much everything you would expect him to say, in exactly the way you
would expect him to say it. He took every opportunity to gush about his
teammates, singling out Westbrook and Harden — the team’s two other big
scorers — as “killers” and insisting that, despite the media’s constant
attempts to create controversy among them, there was no tension on the
team about sharing the ball. It would be ridiculous, he said, to “put
those guys on a leash just so I can get two or three more shots up a
game.” He praised his teammates’ unselfishness and said he had learned
to play the same way. He said that, although he’d known almost nothing
about Oklahoma City before the team moved there, now he couldn’t imagine
playing anywhere else.
I told Durant that, all over town, people were giving me spontaneous
speeches about what a nice guy he was. His response was, naturally,
impeccably nice. “I’m just being me, man,” he said. “I’m just enjoying
this all. I can’t complain. I mean, I wasn’t raised to be a jerk to
anybody. You know what I mean? My mama wouldn’t like that, so that’s
just all I know. Just being nice to people and enjoying what I do.”
But how is it possible, I asked, to be as competitive as he must be
while also being so nice? Don’t those impulses conflict?
He answered with a story.
Growing up, Durant told me, he was a sore loser. That all changed one
day when he was 11, after he got destroyed by his father in a game of
one on one in the driveway. “Of course I knew I was gonna lose,” he
said. “He was so much bigger and stronger than me. He was backing me
down, dunking, pushing me. He was screaming, talking trash. I scored
like one point.” Little Kevin was so upset by the loss (and, presumably,
by the bullying) that he burst into tears, ran into the house, locked
the door and refused to let his father in. The intensity of his own
crying surprised him and, after a while, inspired some self-reflection.
“I sat back and thought about it and was like, What am I so mad at?”
Durant told me, and in that moment, he said, he made a decision. “It’s
good to be passionate, it’s good to hate losing — but I’ve got to
channel it the right way,” he said. “You know what I mean? And after a
while I just started to learn to leave it where it’s at, get rid of it.
Once you’re done and you’re off the court or out of the venue or
whatever, go back to being you.”
Durant’s story touched on something I’ve thought about often while
watching him play. If there’s been one consistent criticism of him, it’s
that he’s not aggressive enough — that he fails to use his unearthly
skills, as Jordan or Charles Barkley or Kobe would have done, to destroy
everybody in his path. There are times, during games, when he seems
almost removed from the action, simultaneously there and not there. I
always figured that this detachment was just a byproduct of his
smoothness: it looks so easy for him, when he strokes four consecutive
3-pointers or tosses in a little half-hook over two defenders, that it’s
tempting to imagine he’s thinking about other things the whole time —
that the real Kevin Durant is watching from a little viewing platform
deep inside his own head, reading a magazine and clipping his nails,
ready to re-engage fully when things get intense. But now I suspect that
that uncanny stillness, that sense of remove, is the outward
manifestation of Durant’s internal control, a sign of his fluency in
moving between worlds: aggressive and relaxed, nasty and nice.
Occasionally you can see Durant moving between those worlds, and the
transition is jarring. There are moments, for instance, when he dunks
and in his excitement begins to stare down his opponent, showboat-style,
and you think, No, no, no, no, Kevin Durant, so much of my worldview
depends on you not being the type of person who stares people down after
dunks. And then, inevitably, a second or so later, he seems to catch
himself and jogs back down the court to give all the credit to his
teammates. You can see the impulse and the correction — the (to get
Freudian for a second) ego and the superego.
This turns out to be a useful way to think about the Thunder. In
“Civilization and Its Discontents,” Freud argues that humans are ruled
by two warring impulses: love, which seeks to bind people into larger
and larger groups, and aggression, which seeks to tear them apart. For
civilization to work, on even the most basic level, each of us has to
find an acceptable outlet for that antisocial aggression. Back in the
driveway, Durant’s father directed his aggression toward him. Freud
argues that most of us, however, learn to turn our aggression inward,
where it morphs into what he calls the superego — the policeman of the
psyche, watching us constantly to ensure (with its billy club of guilt)
that we make choices for the benefit of the group, not just for our own
egos. That psychic self-surveillance, Freud says, is one of the big
prices we pay for civilization — a kind of voluntary tax we levy against
ourselves for the privilege of living with others.
Kevin Durant oozes superego. Even as we talked on our folding chairs
after practice, I sensed a duality. He was simultaneously genuine and
polished, open and guarded. This seems to be an inevitable consequence
of living the life of a superstar, especially in a place like Oklahoma
City. Last summer there was public outrage, in some quarters, when it
was discovered that Durant’s torso — the skin under his jersey, which by
design is publicly hidden — is covered with tattoos.
One evening I went to the mall to observe one of Durant’s public events.
He was at a GameStop, signing copies of a new video game that featured
him on its cover. I arrived to find the OKC equivalent of Beatlemania: a
line of people, decked out in Thunder gear, stretching out the door and
wrapping around the neighboring stores. As I approached the scene, a
policeman was dragging a young man who apparently tried to get too close
down an escalator. Just then a huge cheer broke out from the crowd.
Durant had arrived, through a back entrance, along with a small
entourage. I squeezed past the line, stood at the side of the room and
watched him throughout the session. He was wearing his signature “KD”
gear: hat, T-shirt, sweats. He seemed friendly but also not totally
present. Between signatures and photos, he would occasionally grab his
phone and sneak a text message under the table. He bantered, here and
there, with a couple of kids, but mostly he was quiet and dutiful. His
smile seemed automatic. I got the sense that Kevin Durant, the actual
24-year-old guy with the secret tattoos, was hardly even there that
night: he was just an avatar for his own fame — this abstract thing that
doesn’t actually exist but is millions of times bigger than he is. Not
that that was his fault, of course. Even if Durant wanted to genuinely
connect with people that night, the sheer scale made it impossible.
There was too much inflow for a single person’s outflow. I got a sense
of how insane it must be to live that kind of life, in which things are
like that every day, everywhere. Is it even possible to be a good,
thoughtful, civic-minded person under that kind of pressure? Suddenly
all of those sociopathic scoring champions made sense to me. Radical
detachment seemed, in a strange and sad way, almost like the proper
response.
Toward the end of our post-practice conversation, Durant leaned over and
started unlacing his shoes. I took this as a signal that he was ready
to leave. He was tired, no doubt, and had other things to do. I wrapped
up our interview and thanked him for his time. He popped immediately out
of his seat and walked away. After a few steps, he seemed to catch
himself. He turned around, walked back and shook my hand. “Nice to meet
you,” he said.
The full name of Oklahoma City is the City of Oklahoma
City. The police chief of the City of Oklahoma City is named — I’m not
joking — Bill Citty. (“Citty” is pronounced exactly like “city.”) Chief
Citty, hearing that I was in town to write about his city, offered to
give me a tour. He drove me around in his sedan, neighborhood by
neighborhood, casually ignoring traffic laws, occasionally being honked
at, for more than three hours. The last hour or so we spent at the
Oklahoma State Fair, where he drove me around in a golf cart.
Chief Citty’s tour was my introduction to the civic paradox that is
modern OKC: a city that, over the last 15 years, has managed to reinvent
itself while other cities have melted down, a conservative town that
happily submitted to a series of voluntary taxes, a place where the
oxymoron “corporate citizen” almost begins to make some kind of sense.
Citty grew up in Oklahoma City, so he has seen, firsthand, the major
phases of the last 60 years. He was born during the postwar boom, in
1953, when everything was awash in federal money. (It is one of the many
paradoxes of Oklahoma that, despite all its rhetoric of rugged
individualism and free markets, the economy has been heavily depending
on the federal government for decades.) Citty’s mother worked for a gas
company downtown, in an office in the First National Center, one of the
defining masterpieces of the city’s skyline — a 33-story Art Deco tower
with elaborate aluminum decorations based on King Tut’s tomb. As a
teenager in the 1960s, Citty watched as the new malls and highways
started sucking all of downtown’s energy out into the suburbs, leaving
behind the usual inner-city decay. In the 1970s, after some years of
hippyish drifting, he decided to cut his hair, shave off his beard and
join the City of Oklahoma City Police Department.
It was 1977. Citty was assigned to patrol a downtown neighborhood called
the Deep Deuce, an African-American community that had once been home
to world-famous jazz clubs but had declined, by then, into a hub for
drugs and gambling and prostitution. (Just before Citty joined the
force, a serial killer dumped the body of a prostitute in the basement
of a nearby church.) From his beat downtown, Citty watched the city’s
economy boom with oil money. New houses sprouted everywhere. Then, in
1982, he watched it all go bust: banks, farms, oil — everything. People
lost their new homes; thriving businesses closed. “What happened to us
in the early ’80s,” Citty told me, “is what happened to the U.S. economy
in ’08.”
Things were still bad in 1993, when the mayor of Oklahoma City, Ron
Norick, persuaded his constituents to do something improbable: to
voluntarily tax themselves in order to rebuild the city. The program was
called Metro Area Projects, or Maps — a one-cent sales tax that raised
more than $350 million. Over the next two decades, Maps and its sequels
(the city is currently on Maps 3) would change almost every neighborhood
in the city, especially downtown. It built a canal and a minor-league
baseball stadium and a new library; it turned an endless stretch of
empty warehouses into a vital shopping district; it overhauled the
schools; it put water back in the river, which had been so dry that, for
decades, the city had to mow it. And of course Maps built a basketball
stadium, which would come spectacularly into play many years later.
In 1995, just as Maps was getting rolling, life in the city suddenly
came to a stop. On an otherwise ordinary April morning, a 26-year-old
terrorist drove a moving truck full of fertilizer and other chemicals
into the heart of downtown and parked in front of the nine-story Federal
Building. The explosion, at 9:02 a.m., killed 168 people and injured
684. Five blocks west, at Police Headquarters, the tile shook so hard
and so many windows broke that Bill Citty assumed the bomb had gone off
inside. He figured out its real source only when he saw that the paper
raining down everywhere had come from offices inside the Federal
Building. He made it there within 20 minutes and stayed for the next
month. At that point, Citty was the department’s public information
officer, which meant he had to wrangle the media, a suddenly gargantuan
task. He became, in a sense, the link between Oklahoma City and the rest
of the world.
As part of our tour, Citty drove me down to the Deep Deuce, which was
now full of bright new brick apartment complexes. He drove me past the
State Capitol, the only one in the nation with an oil rig in front of
it. He drove me through Automobile Alley, a revitalized hipster pocket.
He pointed out the public bike-rental program, Spokies, that opened over
the summer. Half of the city seemed to be under construction. Near the
basketball arena, an old elevated highway was being torn down: it was
now just a lattice of concrete, with on- and offramps that ended in
midair. The highway will soon be replaced by a grand boulevard — the
Champs-Élysées of OKC — leading right to the Thunder’s home.
This public rebuilding helped bring in private investment, which in turn
brought in more revenue for public works, which brought in more private
investment — and these cycles eventually combined to make Oklahoma City
a plausible home for N.B.A. basketball. When it arrived, the growth and
the basketball amplified each other. “We’d have a lot of good things
happening now even if we didn’t get the Thunder,” Citty told me. “But we
got the Thunder because good things were going on, and now even better
things are going on.” As an example, he drove me past the Devon Energy
Center, the city’s new skyscraper, a 50-story steel-and-glass tube that
dwarfs every other building in sight.
This, then, is part of the city’s love affair with the Thunder. It’s
more than just a basketball team: it’s the culmination of 20 years of
civic reinvention, and the promise of more to come. Over the last five
years, the city and its team have undergone a perfect mind meld, so at
this point it’s impossible to talk about one without talking about the
other. After all of that sacrifice — the grind of municipal meetings and
penny taxes and planning boards, the dust and noise and uncertainty of
construction, the horror of 1995 — the little city in the middle of No
Man’s Land has finally arrived on the world stage. While it’s there, it
fully intends to put on a good performance.
A basketball team is a kind of miniature society, and
the Thunder’s is a strange one. Most great N.B.A. teams are built on a
rational distribution of talents: two or three elite players whose
skills complement, rather than overlap with, one another’s, supported by
a small army of role players. The classic example is the 1986 Celtics,
in which Larry Bird’s all-around game and outside shooting were
supplemented perfectly by the under-the-basket play of Kevin McHale and
Robert Parish. The Thunder, however, were built around three big stars —
Durant, Westbrook and Harden — who all have essentially the same
talent. Each one is an elite perimeter scorer, and each one needs the
ball to be effective. Each could easily be the focus of an offense all
by himself. (Harden, who was recently traded after a contract dispute,
will now put this theory to the test with the Houston Rockets.) As a
result, when the Thunder offense is good, it’s organized chaos — an
embarrassment of riches. When it’s bad, which it is less and less
frequently, it’s just chaos: stagnation, wild shots, wasted possessions.
Scott Brooks, the Thunder’s head coach, told me that he fell in love
with basketball in seventh grade, in a small town in Northern
California, at a free clinic taught by a local coach. What he loved,
immediately, was exactly the problem of this Thunder lineup: the way the
game forced you to braid together individual achievement and teamwork,
the singular and the collective. Brooks loved that he could go to the
gym and work on his game, all by himself, whenever he felt like it, and
then, the next day or week, see that work play out in the context of a
team. Brooks’s mastery of the individual-collective balance allowed him
to become a star in high school and college and then — against all the
athletic odds, as a 5-foot-11 nonleaper — to patch together a 10-year
N.B.A career playing with seven different teams, including the 1994
champion Houston Rockets. Although Brooks had been a scorer in college,
as a pro he accepted the job of the old-school N.B.A. point guard: to
get the ball to his various teams’ stars — Patrick Ewing, Charles
Barkley, Hakeem Olajuwon — and then get out of the way.
This made Brooks the opposite of the Thunder’s point guard, Russell
Westbrook. Westbrook is often referred to as the most explosive athlete
in the league — his physique is so cartoonishly chiseled that one of his
teammates recently compared him to a He-Man doll — and he uses those
superpowers to do things Brooks never could have dreamed of: to turn a
defensive rebound, in just a few reckless seconds, into a dunk at the
other end, or to get his jump shot off over two defenders when everyone
in the arena knows it’s coming. This skill set makes him unorthodox as a
point guard, to say the least. The Thunder’s horrific start as a
franchise in 2008 — that legendary 3-29 — was in part a result of
Westbrook’s wildness. He led the league in turnovers for his first
season. Early on, there were murmurs that Westbrook couldn’t play point
guard, especially next to a scoring superstar like Durant — someone who,
many thought, would have benefited more from a Scott Brooks type, a
teammate who would get him the ball and get out of the way. Even as the
Thunder improved, there were rumors that Westbrook and Durant resented
each other, that they couldn’t coexist, that the ecosystem of the team
might be beyond repair.
Throughout the losing and the turnovers and the rumors, however, Brooks
not only kept playing Westbrook but also encouraged his recklessness.
That confidence paid off. Westbrook is now a superstar in his own right —
if Durant is the second-best player in the world, Westbrook is probably
in the Top 10. He’s still wild, and he still occasionally makes
high-profile mistakes, and TV analysts still love to question his shot
selection — but he has improved in all of those areas enough that his
net effect on the team is overwhelmingly positive. It’s impossible, at
this point, to disentangle the bad from the good. In Game 4 of the
Finals, Westbrook kept taking wild, flying, contested midrange jumpers —
one of the least efficient shots in the sport — and making nearly all
of them. He scored 43 points and almost single-handedly kept the Thunder
in the game. (They ended up losing, after some LeBron heroics, by 6.)
I asked Brooks if he ever had trouble maintaining a balance between chaos and order, crazy Westbrook and sane Westbrook.
He laughed. “Trust me, there are times where my hair is almost out,” he said.
But he defended his point guard. “Is he a natural John Stockton type?
No, but he never will be. Those guys are done. Those guys are over.
You’re not seeing those guys coming back. Russell is a dynamic offensive
player. I would be a foolish coach if I said, ‘Russell, I don’t want
you to go to the basket and draw fouls and score and put pressure on the
defense.’ We need that.”
He also dismissed the idea of a rift between Westbrook and Durant.
“I’m with them every day. Did they have some competitive moments?
Absolutely. But that’s how we work here. We challenge each other. It
gets chippy. James and Kevin, Serge and Russell, me and Perk, Thabo and
Russell — all of us. If it ever gets on the wrong side of being
competitive, I’ll step in. But not once have I had to step in, in five
years. If Russell and Kevin have problems, then I didn’t get along with any of my teammates.”
One symptom of a small sports market is a lack of
celebrity fans. Among N.B.A. teams, the Lakers are famous for their
fame: they have Jack and Penny and Denzel and a whole human gallery of
plastic-surgery glamour; the Knicks have Spike and Woody and Chris Rock
and a rotating roster of Broadway stars. The Thunder has Wayne Coyne,
the singer of the alternative-rock band the Flaming Lips. Coyne is
famous for floating over crowds in a giant bubble at concerts and
generally behaving like a psychedelic space cadet around town. He was
raised in Oklahoma and, unusually — even as his creative peers poured
out toward the coasts — he never left. Over the last 15 years, as the
Flaming Lips have gained worldwide fame, and as Oklahoma City has begun
to rebrand itself as a vital place for young, artsy energy, the city has
embraced Coyne, now 51, as a kind of elder statesman. This has turned
out to be, for both sides, a rather complicated transaction. Three years
ago, the Flaming Lips song “Do You Realize??” was named the official
rock song of Oklahoma, but only over the strenuous objections of several
state politicians. Coyne’s latest OKC adventure, much blogged about in
the city, is a spectacularly ill-advised art gallery called the Womb — a
drab old warehouse, in the heart of downtown, that he bought and
repainted in explosive rainbow colors, complete with cartoonish naked
women and a giant abstract vagina on the front door. After Coyne told
the local paper that he was going to have a huge New Year’s party there,
at which teenagers might be able to drop acid with Yoko Ono, the fire
marshal showed up and shut the gallery down.
As OKC’s reigning celebrity, Coyne sometimes attends Thunder games,
where he sits courtside. Although he seems genuinely fond of the team,
he’s not what you would call a sports aficionado. When I asked him if he
followed basketball before the Thunder came to town, he had to think
for a few seconds. “No,” he said. “I mean, I liked, like, the Harlem
Globetrotters. Or some mythical figure like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar” — and
he pronounced “Jabbar” in the most amazing way, with an exotically soft
“j” and several extra vowels, as if it were the name of a genie that had
come drifting one morning out of his bong.
Coyne admits that at Thunder games, he doesn’t always understand what’s
going on. “It’s not like a Steven Spielberg-scripted event when you’re
there,” he told me. “You’re like, Well, did we win? I’m confused. Did
they win? And then you look up and you’re like, Well, is the game over?”
He said he has been yelled at by other fans for cheering for Kobe
Bryant. (“That was wicked! Who is that?” he shouted the first time he
saw Kobe score. The crowd told him that it was Kobe and suggested,
forcefully, that he stop cheering for him. “But that was wicked!” Coyne
responded.)
Coyne and I spoke, late one night, sitting in his Prius, which was
parked in front of the Blue Note Lounge, a smoky bar at which the
Flaming Lips played their first show 30 years ago. He was wearing a gray
suit (he’d just come from a wedding), and his gray hair poured out in a
big curly plume from his head. His fingernails were painted gold, and
his face was lightly dusted with glitter.
Coyne believes that the Thunder transcend the limits of their confusing
sport — that they channel the energy of the whole community in a way
that resonates across the world. Using a variety of accents, he told me
stories about people in Germany and Switzerland and Sweden — places
where he never used to hear about his hometown — all of a sudden talking
to him about how much they love the Thunder. “I think people like the
idea that, whether you’re a weirdo rock dude or a basketball player, we
all have this spirit of the city,” he said. “Which I don’t think really
exists. But I think the Thunder has probably pulled it together more
than anything else.”
Thunder crowds are notoriously loud and supportive. Visiting players
often say it feels more like a college crowd than an N.B.A. crowd. Fans
wear color-coordinated shirts for big games, and even when the team was
horrible, they never booed. “Sometimes I would think to myself, Do these
people realize that we’re down 20 with 3 minutes to go?” Scott Brooks
told me, remembering the early days. “We’d be walking through the tunnel
and I’d think: O.K., this is the night that I get heckled. This is the
night I get popcorn thrown on me. Nothing. Every single game, it was:
‘Hang in there coach. Players, we love you guys.’ ”
Coyne sees an analogy between basketball games and rock concerts.
Playing a song for the thousandth time, he told me, is just as
meaningless as putting a ball through a hoop. Under the right
circumstances, however, those things take on great collective meaning.
“It’s that idea of everybody being focused on the same thing at the same
time and being together in the bigger experience,” he said. “It’s
silliness, but all things are like that.”
The Thunder has become a surprisingly integral part of hipster life in
OKC. Coyne lives in a residential neighborhood called the Plaza
District, the main drag of which has been — like so much of the city —
radically transformed over the last five years. These days there’s a
vintage shop, a tattoo parlor where people come to get Thunder tattoos
and, in a building that used to be known as a brothel, a new restaurant
devoted to gourmet grilled-cheese sandwiches. I went into an artsy shop
called DNA Galleries, across from the grilled-cheese-sandwich
restaurant, and it turned out to be full of Thunder gear: local artists
had designed, often very cleverly, their own T-shirts, beer cozies,
stickers and onesies. Most businesses around town let their employees
dress in Thunder gear on game days, which has created a big market for
Thunder clothes: many Oklahomans have entirely separate game-day
wardrobes. The store’s owner told me that the Thunder changed her life.
Saleswise, she said, basketball season is like eight months of
Christmas.
And now it is time to talk about James Harden’s beard.
The fate of Harden was the first serious test of the Thunder’s utopian
culture — the first stubborn wrinkle in Sam Presti’s enlightened
basketball collective.
Harden was the first draft pick ever made by the Thunder: they chose him
third in 2009. (Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook and Serge Ibaka all
joined when the team was still the Seattle SuperSonics.) His beard, at
the time, was modest and closely cropped, the kind of thing you could
wear to a business meeting without raising any eyebrows. Harden was a
19-year-old shooting guard with an old man’s game, full of the kinds of
tricks you might see at your local Y.M.C.A.: quick shots, misdirections,
shifts in speed, counterintuitive arm motions designed to bait
defenders into fouls. He wasn’t overwhelmingly athletic, though, and
many experts thought the Thunder had selected him too high. During his
rookie year, he did little to convince anyone otherwise. As Harden’s
beard grew, however, so did his mojo. As it started to hang from his
face, his tricks started, improbably, to work in the N.B.A. The beard
grew thicker and more unruly, and Harden began to exceed everyone’s
expectations. By last season, he had become one of the most effective
scorers the N.B.A. has ever seen.
By the time the Thunder reached the finals, Harden’s beard was a full-on
Rip Van Winkle, and it had become something of an unofficial team
mascot. Photos flew around the Internet: a James Harden cake from an OKC
bakery, with a huge mess of black icing extending off its cake chin; an
Oklahoma City building with a giant beard hanging from its facade; a
James Harden tattoo on some anonymous superfan’s arm. The most popular
item at the official Thunder retail store, its manager told me, was a
Harden-style fake black beard, which fans would wear at home games.
Harden’s beard was gratuitous, quirky and improbable — the same set of
attributes that made Oklahoma City basketball different than Miami or
Los Angeles or New York.
Harden’s rise was great for the Thunder — not many third bananas get
that good, that fast — but it was also a threat. He had always been a
complicated figure in Presti’s scheme. He was an elite scorer willing to
come off the bench — a citizen willing to pay a serious tax (in
minutes, shots and star potential) to be a part of the Thunder society.
The group, in turn, offered Harden some harder-to-measure benefits: As a
sixth man, he got to play against the other team’s bench players, which
made him look even better than he was. When he shared the floor with
Durant and Westbrook, he benefited from the other team’s obsessive
attention to them.
But Harden got a little too good. The cost-benefit balance tipped out of
whack. He wanted a maximum contract and, by league standards, probably
deserved one. The Thunder — having already committed max contracts to
Durant and Westbrook, and having just signed Ibaka to a near-max —
wanted to pay him less. Near the climactic point of the Harden contract
crisis, several people in Oklahoma City joked to me that they would be
perfectly willing to pass another Maps tax to help pay for him to stay.
Then they made it clear that, actually, they weren’t joking; the people
of Oklahoma City would seriously do this. One city official I spoke with
thought a penny tax would be too much — maybe an eighth, he suggested,
with a quarter of that going to improve the city.
Presti’s goal is to build a sustainably excellent organization, which
means one that transcends its players. No individual, no matter how
important or loved, can ever be allowed to trump the group. At 8:28 on
the night of Oct. 27, Kevin Durant tweeted the word “Wow.” Over the next
few hours, that message was retweeted more than 10,000 times. The
Thunder had traded James Harden, just three days before the start of the
season.
For the Thunder, this trade marked a passage from innocence (youth,
ideals, plenitude) to experience (age, cash, loss). The fairy-tale part
of their story, in which they’re magically immune from the muddiness of
N.B.A. success, is over. The team will still be good — Presti got a
reasonable return for Harden, and of course they still have Westbrook
and Durant — but it feels as if they’ll never be the same. Unless, of
course, all that collective energy is strong enough to somehow conjure,
like a phoenix rising from Harden’s beard, another great individual.
