Notes
The whole airport is named after him: Will Rogers World Airport. “World” is meaningless here because there are actually no international flights. It’s just another example of one of Oklahoma City’s defining behaviors: trying to make itself seem bigger than it is.
The whole airport is named after him: Will Rogers World Airport. “World” is meaningless here because there are actually no international flights. It’s just another example of one of Oklahoma City’s defining behaviors: trying to make itself seem bigger than it is.
The city conducts itself, whenever possible, like a hiker threatened by a bear in the woods, hysterically exaggerating its size.
William Couch.
Researchers noticed, right away, something peculiar about the citizens of Oklahoma City: a “general reluctance to complain about local problems,” as they would put it in their official report, perhaps due to a “general feeling of futility.”
In 1973, supersonic flight over the United States was legally banned. The people of Oklahoma City, for the benefit of a company in Seattle, had endured the downside of an age of supersonics that would never actually arrive.
The rules were minimal and extremely hard to enforce. You could claim 160 acres out in the country or a small lot on a townsite. All you had to do was get yourself there, hammer in your stakes, and fight off competitors. Oklahoma would be, more or less, a free-for-all.
When President Harrison signed the document announcing the date of the Land Run—April 22, 1889—his signature sent a bat signal out over the end of the nineteenth century. Oklahoma was a gift: a free chunk of America for anyone who needed it.
He won Sixth Man of the Year the way Freddie Mercury would have won a small-town dive bar’s Wednesday night karaoke contest.
The Thunder’s failure in the Finals didn’t matter, and not only because a return trip seemed more or less guaranteed. The team’s failure didn’t matter because even failure, at such a rarefied level, was so much more than Oklahoma City had ever dared to dream it might have.
The Process is for people who trust time. Boom is for people who don’t.
Basketball’s defining challenge, once you get past the physical stuff, is social. More than any other American sport, it is a game of civics. Every player, on every play, has to find the proper balance between self-interest and self-sacrifice—a threshold that moves with just about every bounce of the ball. The game is fluid, with everyone shifting roles and responsibilities more or less constantly. The calculus of selfishness versus self-sacrifice can be crushingly complex. A properly balanced team can make that calculus feel manageable. An unbalanced team can make it hopeless.
The organism broke down into its component parts, none of which was powerful enough on its own.
It is always possible to bind quite large numbers of people together in love, provided that others are left out as targets for aggression. —SIGMUND FREUD, Civilization and Its Discontents
It was a devil’s bargain, this transaction. It was like hiring an actual pirate to perform at your child’s birthday party.
In light of everything Draper would eventually accomplish, this was something like inviting Sherlock Holmes to a crime scene just to put up the yellow police tape.
“We love these white people so much that we are going to make them do right,” she wrote. “The doctrine of non-violence is rooted in the fundamental truth that whites are human….We aren’t defeating him, we’ll be just removing his hostility and insecurities which will prepare him to function as a whole man in a Democratic Society.”
The Nets, somehow, looked like a pack of full-moon Teen Wolves,
In the middle of a game in Denver, Russell Westbrook, absurdly, made a villain of himself by leaping up and swatting away, at the very last second, a backward half-court shot by the Nuggets’ mascot, Rocky—a shot that would have won the entire crowd a prize. Nuggets fans booed, and Westbrook paced the floor and muttered at them like a madman, and later in the game he did it again, catching the mascot’s shot just before it fell through the hoop, and this time he actually flung the ball out into the crowd, and he didn’t smile or laugh, not even slightly.
Stop designing the city around peak traffic volume, which was only two hours every weekday. Think of all the other parts of life.
“The engineers are in charge,” he told me. “They’re not broad-thinking people. In their mind, their job is only to move traffic. They’ll have cars running from one end of the country to the other, and they’ll just drop them off in the Atlantic or the Pacific Ocean. It really wouldn’t matter to them. In my world, there are connections all over the place—multiple different factors that all influence each other—and you try to guide them, as much as you possibly can, in a way that incubates the good and suppresses the bad. But it’s not a perfect science. There are principles that have been proven to work pretty well, but there’s always flexibility. For engineers, it’s much more black and white: get the big projects done on time and on budget. There’s not a lot of thought about why we’re doing them. They’re afraid of things that they can’t get a formula for. These are community and economic development projects, but they’re all being managed as construction projects.”
Familiar
Westbrook now had the entire left half of the floor to himself. He would have preferred, probably, for all of his teammates to actually leave the building, but the rules didn’t allow for that, and he didn’t have enough time to arrange the logistics, so he got to work in imperfect conditions.
Meanwhile, as the Thunder conducted its Socratic dialogue about the true nature of basketball (DURANTUS: “Surely you saw that I was open?” WESTBRUS: “But can anyone be more open than a man who already possesses the ball?”),