They say Kevin Durant used to sit right there. Back in the corner, just on the other side of the fire pit here at Oklahoma City’s Deep Deuce Grill. Once, the former Longhorn showed up in a UT shirt for the Oklahoma-Texas football game, the only spot of burnt orange in a bar full of Sooner crimson. Another time, he rolled through the door in his wheelchair while rehabbing his broken foot, politely excusing the waiters who nearly tripped over his multimillion-dollar leg. Most often, though, he wandered in after Thunder wins and sat, surrounded by friends or family, unobtrusive and undisturbed. Before he left, someone with him would take care of the bill. This was the picture of Durant that Oklahoma Cityalways held in its collective mind: sitting postgame at his neighborhood sports bar, ordering from a menu that included the 2nd Street Steak Ums and the Okie Chicken Wrap.
He’s here now — at least he is on TV. It is Thursday, November 3, and all televisions are turned to the game in Oakland between the Thunder and Durant’s new team, the Golden State Warriors. It is not going well.
“How many points does he have?” asks Jeremiah Curran, a server here at Deep Deuce Grill.
“Soooooooo many,” says his colleague, Jordan Harris.
Jeremiah has an undercut, pulled into a top knot, Jordan a flowing brown mane. Both are servers and musicians, and neither is an OKC native. Like many, they fell for the Thunder only after moving to this city. And now, after Oklahoma City has suffered its first significant pro sports abandonment, fans are left trying to figure out how the relationship between the city and its team will change.
Welcome to Warriors World
With Kevin Durant’s arrival, the NBA’s gravitational force has moved west.theringer.com
For now, they drink. Jeremiah and Jordan are both off the clock, so they sit at the bar and glance up at the screen, where Durant promptly hits back-to-back 3s. “It’s so weird,” Jordan says. “I’ve watched that exact same stroke — catch and shoot the exact same way — how many times? Thousands, probably. And every single time, I was cheering for it. And here it is, and I want to cheer for it again. But it’s just …” He shakes his head. “
Damn.”He’s like many in Oklahoma City, post-Durant: caught between anger and confusion, sadness and hope.
The game slips increasingly out of control. Whatever success this surprising Thunder team has enjoyed, it remains, like almost every squad in the NBA, no match for these Warriors. Durant’s new team is still figuring itself out but already has the feel of inevitability. So much so that Jordan and Jeremiah drift away from the game, an eventual 122–96 blowout, trading restaurant gossip and talking through weekend plans. Unable to look away for long, Jeremiah glances up in the third quarter to see Durant hit his seventh 3. It’s that familiar motion, dropping the ball gently through the net from on high. As if he’s been conditioned, Jeremiah shouts, “Yes!” He pounds the bar top with a celebratory fist.
Then he stops himself. “Oh,” he says. “Wait.”
“Oh, no.” He shakes his head. “Oh no, no, no.” For a moment, he laughs at himself. He turns to the bartender and smiles.
“Another shot of Jameson, please.”
For so many years Durant was perfect and he was theirs, and it felt like it would always remain that way, the city and the franchise and its superstar all growing together, until finally they earned the title they deserved.
Durant left for reasons simple and complex — some that he’s explained, some that he hasn’t, some that he likely never will. Maybe he wanted a bigger city. Maybe he wanted a divorce from the man to whom his title dreams were wedded, Russell Westbrook. Maybe he envisioned nights like Monday in Oakland, when he could bear witness to Klay Thompson
scoring 60 points in 29 minutes, and Durant himself could fade into the bench mob, just one star among the many, delighting in another player’s performance. Maybe he just wanted to win — nothing more or less.
Many Oklahoma City fans say the same thing: It’s not that he left; it’s
howhe left. After taking a few meetings and making a choice in private, Durant announced his decision
in a Players’ Tribune letter that focused more on how much he would miss Oklahoma City than on how excited he was to move to Golden State. He said he cherished the organization and its fans. “Oklahoma City,” he wrote, “truly raised me.”
When pressed, several fans say, fine, it’s not how he left. It’s where he went: To the team that beat them in the conference finals. The team
he let beat them. “That,” says Jeremiah, “is just weak.” This is one criticism for which Durant seems to have no patience. “How am I weak,” Durant asked Bill Simmons in September
on Any Given Wednesday, “if I’m at the top, elite level of my profession and I just chose to play for a different team?”
In Oklahoma City and around the NBA, Durant has long been less a person than a symbol. Here was the perfect small-market superstar, the man who paired quiet ruthlessness with humility and grace. In that characterization, though, something was lost. “Nobody cares,” Durant said in that same interview, “about what I want as a person. It’s all about what I can do on a basketball court. … Why should I care what they think, if they don’t really care about me as a whole?”
Contrast that with Westbrook. No one has ever made the mistake of turning Westbrook into a symbol. To watch him play is to be confronted by his raw humanity: manic and defiant, spectacularly ambitious and flawed. He says little to the press, but he reveals himself nightly. When he steps onto the court, you always get the sense that Westbrook is delivering the truest expression of who he is.
Oklahoma City has always loved him, but never quite like it loved Durant. “I’ll admit,” says Patrick Riley, editor of
The Lost Ogle, a prominent local blog that covers city politics, culture, and sports. “I was one of those people — Westbrook drove me crazy sometimes. There was Good Russ and Bad Russ. And when he was good, he was really good. But when he was bad, you’re just sitting there looking at Durant and thinking, ‘Here’s one of the most graceful scorers in NBA history, and you won’t just give him the ball.’” He was thrilling and infuriating, his highs and lows brought into relief by the consistency of the man with whom he shared the ball.
At his best, Westbrook bolstered Durant. Always, Durant evened out Westbrook. Fans adored one, accepted the other. But a month after Durant announced his departure, Westbrook announced he was signing an extension. Immediately, he became subject to the kind of love that had long eluded him, even if it remains different from the love the city reserved for Durant.
Now the season is winding its way through December. Durant is scoring 27 points a game on 57 percent shooting, and his Warriors are as good as promised, 19–3, outscoring opponents by more than 13 points per 100 possessions.
In Oklahoma City, the Thunder are hanging in playoff position in the West, built on tough defense, good rebounding, and a Herculean run from Westbrook, who’s on pace to become the first NBA player to average a triple-double since Oscar Robertson did it 54 years ago.
Back on the Fourth, Jeremiah cooked hot dogs and burgers over the flames of a burning Durant jersey. Another fan drove to Durant’s house and put a “For Sale” sign in his yard, changing the sign’s text from “By Owner” to “By Coward.”
Hordes
took to Yelp to leave savage reviews of Durant’s restaurant, Kd’s. (Sample: “I was going to give it another chance but I opted for the other restaurant across town that was better. If you can’t eat ’em, join ’em.”) One fan doused a Durant jersey in gasoline and
sprayed it with bullets until it caught fire.
Months later there is no unified rage like there was in Cleveland, post-
Decision, but Oklahoma City’s pain remains raw. To explain, Rick Moore offers a theory. He’s been a Thunder season-ticket holder since the franchise relocated from Seattle in 2008, and one night this November he sits inside the arena talking through the short history of the city’s relationship with the team. “People need to realize,” he says, “that we’re all still new at this.”
For decades, sports in Oklahoma meant the University of Oklahoma Sooners and the Oklahoma State Cowboys. Barry Switzer in the fall, Eddie Sutton in the winter, recruiting year-round. When the Thunder were formed, team officials intentionally chose a primary color, blue, that nodded to the state flag and bore no resemblance to either school’s signature hue, and a secondary color, “sunset orange,” that looks like a mix between Cowboy orange and Sooner crimson.
Oklahomans learned to be fans by rooting for colleges: rooting for coaches who remained fixtures and players who cycled through in four years but held loyalties that persisted for their entire lives. With college sports fandom comes a culture that values top-down power structures, favoring coaches and institutions over the agency of players. This is the state, after all, where OU football coach Bob Stoops once
bragged about telling his Heisman-winning quarterback, Sam Bradford, “What makes you think those fans in the stands are wearing no. 14 for you? … It could be you, or it could be anyone else. Those 70,000 fans in the stadium are cheering and buying tickets to see Oklahoma.”
For so much of the Thunder’s existence, the franchise seemed to build on the area’s college culture, operating a team that felt divorced from many of the realities of pro sports. Players seemed close. Loyalty was expected. Stars were seen around town, often unbothered by fans. When the team reached the Finals in 2012, Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin borrowed the language of college sports,
predicting to USA Today that the team would be crowned “national champions.” Says Moore: “I don’t think we ever fully got it. This is different than college sports. It’s a business. I think we kind of took that for granted.”
That confusion, Moore thinks, fed the degree to which the city felt pained by Durant’s departure. “It’s like a romance,” he says. “You’re in love with someone, and they leave you, and you never saw it coming.”
Now, Moore is unsure the city will ever attach itself to anyone quite like it did to Durant. Perhaps not even to Westbrook. “Now we’ve seen how painful it can be,” he says. “I don’t think we’ll ever allow ourselves to be hurt like that again.”
