The Outsiders' Edge

(Welcome to the 3rd Edition of the Seattle Chronicles from our man Brad. If you wish to bestow Brad with compliments or to send death threats, follow him on twitter at: http://twitter.com/bivlo)

Finding Something to Root For and Against

Part One: Settling for Acceptable

Several waves of devastation ruined Seattle’s teams last year, so now fans are already looking back warmly on 2009 as not a conquering return, but a needed end of the pummeling.  The Mariners ended their season celebrating on the field and supporters labeled them an absurdly lovable third-place team.  The Huskies are mixing improbable wins on the football field with requisite heartburning losses.  The Sounders will be in the Major League Soccer playoffs, though there are decent odds they won’t score another goal this year.  The Seahawks are halfway to their four-win total from last season, and have vulture-like eyes on St. Louis, Detroit, and Tampa Bay.  We have no reason to gloat, but at least we’ve stopped weeping.

We're Number 3!

With this restored mediocrity, now’s as good a time as any to reassess old wounds.  In Seattle, that means watching Sonicsgate.

Video: http://vimeo.com/7030942

This 80-plus minute recounting of how the Sonics left town instills the multi-year living death of Seattle basketball fans for everyone to enjoy.  The first quarter recounts the team’s glory days in the 1970s and 1990s, with reverential references to local legends like Jack Sikma, Xavier McDaniel, and Hersey Hawkins, plus the players outsiders have heard of.  After that comes an hour of gut-punches, beginning with Starbucks Coffee head Howard Schultz failing at running the Sonics, followed by Oklahoman Clay Bennett succeeding at alienating Seattle from their longest-running pro franchise, and culminating with Seattle politicians screwing up legal efforts that would have stalled and probably stopped the team’s departure.

This documentary agonizing but necessary, like every Super Bowl halftime show since 2004.  It has no problem casting its legion of villains as liars, idiots, and people who look bad in selected photos.  There’s a lot of people to throw your ire at:  Sonics owners Schultz and Bennett, NBA commissioner David Stern as well as lame-duck Seattle mayor Greg Nickels and other politicos, the untalented Jim McIlvaine and Wally Walker.  Fan bias aside, there are some eye-opening sections, especially Stern’s belligerent press conference at the 75-minute mark, and Nickel’s awful showing in court ten minutes later.  The optimist in me says I’ll better remember the heroes of the movie, smart journalists like Art Thiel, the Sonics’ remarkably truthful announcer Kevin Calabro (who now sounds great calling Sounders games), and Seattle’s rage-and-feelings spokesman Sherman Alexie.  These sages are buoyed by a great soundtrack of Seattle hip-hop, which isn’t as ludicrous as it seems. The movie ends with where we are today: Seattle’s either a craven city looking to steal away the prize of Sacramento, Memphis, or some other city, or a solemn totem for what happens when the public doesn’t cave into building a new stadium.

Caption: Anyone else getting a little misty eyed? Nick Collison always brings out the emotions.

Part Two: Finding An(other) Enemy

The all-but-over American League Championship Series between the Angels and the Yankees creates an impossible choice for Mariners fans: which of these two horrible teams do you rooting for?  Either one could be the M’s top rival—the Angels have an annoying geographic identity (Los Angeles and Anaheim are totally different places), annoying fans reliant on Thunderstix and a Rally Monkey, and an annoying habit of dominating the AL West.  And the Yankees, in addition to being the Yankees, cut short the Mariners’ postseasons in 2000 and 2001 and pay Alex Rodriguez what he’s worth, something Seattle was never been willing to do.  The Yankees are oversaturated thanks to the media, but the Angels are oversaturated thanks to an unbalanced schedule that forces Vladimir Guerrero & co. on us every few weeks.   Both teams are good, which is why both teams are awful.

The worst part of the ALCS matchup is that neither team’s fans would list the Mariners as a top rival.  The Yankees, being the high fructose corn syrup of baseball, are in everyone’s crosshairs, and the Angels have to contend with two teams within a hundred miles of them.  The Mariners’ lack of rivalry symmetry is a problem endemic to Seattle.  The Seahawks were quietly punted from the AFC to the NFC due to rivalries between Oakland, San Diego, Denver and Kansas City that go back to the AFL in the 1960s.  NFL officials must have assumed no one would notice when the Seahawks started playing in St. Louis and Phoenix every year.  As for college football, all Washingtonians gears up for the Apple Cup every November, but the University of Washington shouldn’t bother hyping a game against a school with roughly half its enrollment, history, or culture.  The matchup against the University of Oregon is pretty good, if you only look at the past 20 years.  The Seattle Sounders are waiting for the Portland Timbers to step up to the big kids’ table in pro soccer, while the Vancouver Canucks could say the same thing about Seattle’s unimportant hockey team, the Thunderbirds.  We feel awfully marooned up here in this corner of the country.

Seattle residents begrudgingly accept our hockley overlords from the North.

Of course, there was one perfectly acceptable regional rivalry that had been great: the Seattle Supersonics and the Portland Trail Blazers.  Both have ridiculous, archaic nicknames, championship teams from the 1970’s remembered by none, and good teams from the 1990’s that ran into Michael Jordan.  A few years ago, Portland and Seattle lucked into the top two picks in the NBA Draft, which laid out the script for an engaging Greg Oden/Kevin Durant battle for years to come.  Since draft night, that next chapter of the rivalry has been derailed.

Geographic isolation, league machinations, and a lack of vicious indoctrination may have kept Seattle from enjoying a mutual bloodthirsty hatred of other teams, but I think there can be a revival in hating those who are different solely because they live elsewhere, or root for a pack of jerks or criminals.  Here are my proposed new rivalries for Seattle.

Brandon Roy against the Thunder.

-Brandon Roy vs. the Oklahoma City Thunder

You can’t expect Sonics fans to flip a switch and root for the Blazers.  Those guys are awful.  They try to sneak weed onto airplanes and fight dogs.  (Those incidents were a decade ago, but enemy-fuel is long burning.)  The best we can do is root for Brandon Roy, who starred in high school and college in Seattle, but now has to settle for living three hours away from a decent city.  Roy can be the weapon that strikes back at Oklahoma City for moving.  Both Roy’s Blazers—maybe it’s okay to root for them if you put his name in front—and OKC are brimming with young stars that could keep the teams in the playoffs for years.  Everyone in Seattle will happily root for Brandon Roy, and his 8-plus years of shining in Seattle, over Kevin Durant’s one year of playing shooting guard for P.J. Carlissimo in the Thunder’s year zero.  Other Seattle-bred ballplayers can take up the Thunder-killer mantle, but Nate Robinson seems to be more concerned with jumping really high once every couple months, and Aaron Brooks went to college in Oregon, alienating all of his home state.

This is a rivalry by desperation.  Both teams feel somewhat lost in transit, shuttled through the NFL’s divisions.  While the Cowboys and Broncos used to be big enemies to fans in Phoenix and Seattle, now both just face each other, as well as St. Louis and San Francisco squads that are shells of their former greatness.  Besides bonding over a weak division, the Seahawks and Cardinals can bond over their bird mascots—I’d take the osprey over the seed-eater—their charity toward running back Edgerrin James, and their soul-crushing Super Bowl losses to the Pittsburgh Steelers.  It’s hard to find that much to hate about the Cardinals, but the Seahawks lose to them so often that they’re starting to become annoying.

Growing up, sports teams based in Washington, D.C. were a vexing problem.  Was I supposed to care about the Washington Redskins or the Seattle Seahawks?  (The correct answer is that rooting for others will result mostly in agony, especially this year.)  Who was dumb enough to name a city after a state?  (As a slow and self-centered kid, I didn’t get that the name origins went the other way.)  Washington: city v. state is a compelling matchup on name alone, and these two soccer teams already have some bad blood.   These teams played a close, exciting U.S Open Cup championship game, which gives the winning team the honor of an overbooked schedule the following year.  The key moment of the game was a goal by Fredy Montero to break the scoreless goal in the second half.   Immediately after conceding the score, D.C. goalkeeper Josh Wicks applied his cleats to Montero.

That’s a red card.  And one can only hope that that one mistake by Wicks will lead to years of bad blood.

~ by globalcorrespondent on October 27, 2009.

Posted in Uncategorized
Tags: Brandon Roy, Ken Griffey, Oklahoma City Thunder, Seattle Mariners, Seattle Sounders