Take me out to a ball game

Tulsa’s problem with sports

It is—really, it is—a perfect night for baseball on Star Wars Character Appearance Night here at ONEOK Field. Little kids with Anakin Skywalker lightsabers are posing with C-3PO, and the Drillers are down 6 in the 3rd to the Midland RockHounds. Tulsa Manager Razor Shines—he with the greatest name ever—is not making a pitching change, and I was nearly just clocked with a foul ball. Hornsby has arrived in a pickup truck, and a young girl in white shorts and a blue top is on the dugout, throwing T-shirts into the stands. 

I’m going to get daiquiris.

***

Meanwhile, not far from here.

“Today is a truly exciting day, and we thank the WNBA for its support in approving the relocation to the Dallas-Fort Worth marketplace.”

If you didn’t see that coming, you just weren’t paying attention.

And with that, Tulsa Shock majority owner Bill Cameron announced that Tulsa’s long 5-year nightmare was over.

I appreciate the local support for the Shock in Tulsa, especially the support from our fans, sponsors and partners over the years.

Thanks. You’re a prince.  

But I digress. A little.

The Shock’s relationship with Tulsa was always a bad marriage, full of unrealized expectations and broken promises. The Shock never made the playoffs, and Tulsans repaid that ineptitude by not watching the team not make it. Only 5,500 showed up per game, which would have been capacity had it been the Union High School arena. 

Former UCLA coach John Wooden once said the women’s game is more fundamentally sound than the men’s, but Tulsans evidently don’t care about fundamentally sound basketball, especially in the middle of summer, especially when executed by a team on the—pardon the expression—rebound. 

The Shock were doomed even before they lost their first game. The best players from the old Detroit team, which won a WNBA championship, didn’t want to play here (and didn’t). Cameron then cynically tried to tap into the city’s reservoir of goodwill for Nolan Richardson (a reservoir that had been dry for decades) by hiring the former TU coach to lead the team, even though Richardson had never coached women or professionals. Add to that their 20-game losing streak in 2011 (still the longest in league history), some perplexing roster moves and the fact that they were one of three WNBA teams not sharing a city with an NBA franchise—and is it any wonder the whole shebang is being poured into a U-Haul and sent to Dallas? 

There was also, methinks, the matter of the Oklahoma City Thunder. When they came here from Seattle, it was clear they weren’t Oklahoma’s team, they were Oklahoma City’s team, underscored by the—count ‘em—one exhibition game owner Clay Bennett graciously bestows on Tulsa every October. The optics were bad, the contrast stark. OKC gets the NBA; Tulsa gets the WNBA. OKC gets LeBron James twice a year; Tulsa gets Elena Delle Donne (Who? Exactly). The Thunder pack the place; the Shock are packing.

But maybe it’s something else. 

Maybe we should stop pretending we’re a sports town. The Oklahoma Outlaws of the USFL were here for about 35 minutes; the Tulsa Talons were shipped to San Antonio; even the Tulsa 66ers didn’t make it—in Bixby. And before you get verklempt, for your dining and dancing pleasure, here are some recent attendance averages of teams that do still play here: 

Tulsa Drillers:
6211
(capacity 7800+)

ORU basketball:
4,236 (men’s),
875 (women’s)
(capacity 11,000+) 

TU basketball:
4,528 (men’s),
978 (women’s) 
(capacity 8,000+)

TU football:
19,647
(capacity 30,000)

Tulsa Roughnecks FC:
4615 
(capacity 7800+) 
inaugural season

Tulsa Athletics:
3439
(capacity 10,900+)  
(The A’s attendance in 2013
was at the top of the National
Premiere Soccer League.)

Aside from sound support for the Drillers and relatively good turnout for the Athletics, look at the numbers. There’s always plenty of parking.

The BOK Center has had many sellouts in its 7-year history, but none involving sports. (What sporting event in Tulsa has ever sold out?) Not only did the Shock have the second lowest attendance in the WNBA, they had among the worst attendance numbers of any major professional sports franchise in North America. (The Western New York Flash of the Women’s Professional Soccer League did better.)

Let us return now to Sept. 6, 2014—OU vs. TU at H.A. Chapman Stadium. Not only was the game stultifying—watching farming would have been more exciting—but even if you believe the announced crowd of 29,357 (and I don’t), there were still empty seats. How does that happen? OU was ranked third in the nation, the team comes to Tulsa merely because Bob Stoops thinks it’s a good idea to play this home-and-home series with Tulsa—and did I mention, it’s OU, for the love of its seven national championships—and we don’t fill the place?  

There is a niche for sports in Tulsa—just watch Union/Jenks, or the Chili Bowl, or the Tulsa Run—but it’s not the major groove of our collective DNA. To find that, you have to go to local theatre, ballet and opera; Cry Baby Hill; Oktoberfest; Guthrie Green; Woodland Hills Mall; and, God help us, Wanenmacher’s Tulsa Arms Show.

This from The New York Times when it put Tulsa in its “52 Places to Go in 2015”—

Its historic Art Deco city center received a much needed investment boom, fueling two major new museums opening in the Brady Arts District in 2013 and another — the OKPop Museum, dedicated to Oklahoma’s place in pop culture — still to come. Along the Arkansas River riverfront, one of the largest public parks projects in the country broke ground in late 2014. Designed by the architects behind Brooklyn Bridge Park, the $350 million green space will be completed in phases over the next two years. Nearby, the new Route 66 Experience, an interpretive center devoted to the Mother Road, is set to open as early as late 2015.

Parks, museums, history, finance, metaphor and art. Our future. And no mention of the Tulsa Shock.

***

Between the 3rd and 4th innings, between foul lines, there was a race between people dressed as appliances. It is now the 7th, and people really are singing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” On the roof of a building, out past left-center field, the U-Haul truck still rotates.  It dawns on me, as the guy next to me screams to The Drillers’ Peter Lavin, now at the plate, that he’ll buy him Whataburger if he scores the runner from 3rd: This is how you do sports in Tulsa. I have no idea of the final score, but I know this: the refrigerator won, and Lavin never got his burger.