Why you won't see me wearing a Thunder t-shirt

Dave Zirin at thenation.com tells the ugly story of how the former Seattle Supersonics basketball team became the OKC Thunder.

Strip away the drama and the Heat are called “evil” because their star players exercised free agency and—agree or disagree with their decision—took control of their own careers. The Thunder are praised for doing it the “right way,” but no franchise is more caked in original sin than the team from Oklahoma City. Their owners, Clay Bennett and Aubrey McClendon, with an assist from NBA Commissioner David Stern, stole their team with the naked audacity of Frank and Jesse James from the people of Seattle.

For non-NBA fans, as recently as 2008 the OKC Thunder were the Seattle Supersonics, a team of great tradition, flare and fan support. They were Slick Watts’s headband, Jack Sikma’s perm and Gary Payton’s scowl. They were a beloved team in a basketball town. Then the people of Seattle committed an unpardonable offense in the eyes of David Stern. They loved their team but refused to pay for a new taxpayer funded $300 million arena. Seattle’s citizens voted down referendums, organized meetings and held rallies with the goal of keeping the team housed in a perfectly good building called the KeyArena. Despite a whirlwind of threats, the people of Seattle wouldn’t budge, so Stern made an example of them. Along with Supersonics team owner and Starbucks founder Howard Schultz—who could have paid for his own new arena with latte profits alone—Stern recruited two Oklahoma City–based billionaires, Clay Bennett and Aubrey McClendon, to buy the team and manipulate their forcible extraction from Seattle to OKC.

Stern is a political liberal who has sat on the board of the NAACP. Bennett and McLendon are big Republican moneymen whose hobby is funding anti-gay referendums. Yet these three men are united in their addiction to our tax dollars. In Oklahoma City, where rivers of corporate welfare awaited an NBA franchise, Stern, Bennett and McClendon had found their Shangri-La.

To Zirin, the appropriate response to this situation is for all right-thinking people to root for the Miami Heat to beat the Thunder in the current NBA finals. I dunno. I think a better response is to ignore the whole sorry spectacle. Noam Chomsky says that sports in our society serve mostly "to provide training in irrational jingoism," and I think he has a point.

Update: Hat tip to my friend Pat Reaves for finding this recent Miami Herald article. It demonstrates that the owners of the Miami Heat are just as greedy and irresponsible as the owners of the Thunder, and the local government of Miami-Dade is just as irrationally generous to sports teams and millionaires as the government of Oklahoma City is. An auditor's report uncovered serious problems with the county's oversight of the Heat's arena:

The pointed, 60-page document released Thursday faults Miami-Dade for having “little idea” about whether the team has met financial benchmarks that would trigger profit-sharing from the county-owned arena.

Though the Heat’s operating budget is consistently submitted late, it has never faced repercussions from the county. And the county apparently wasn’t aware the Heat was required to submit an annual budget for big-ticket capital expenditures, the audit states.

“The county’s hands-off approach to an operation that now generates more than $60 million a year is perplexing, especially an operation that has yet to produce sufficient profits to result in profit-sharing,” Inspector General Christopher Mazzella wrote.

Neither party criticized in the report acknowledged culpability. Mayor Carlos Gimenez’s office said the audit covers a timeframe that pre-dates his tenure, and he is working to fix any problems. Miami Heat representatives disagreed with the audit’s conclusions. Heat lawyer/lobbyist Jorge Luis Lopez said the inspector general “spent a significant amount of taxpayer money on what appears to be a witch hunt.”

I'm old enough to remember when the private owners of professional sports teams paid for their own arenas, and I think it should have stayed that way. Or else, if professional sports teams are not viable without large and continuing public subsidies, those teams ought to be publicly owned.