Extra Innings “LOSERVILLE, USA,” 2000–2009

The Kingdome imploded and Seattleites couldn’t look away. At twenty-five stories tall and two blocks wide, it was one of the biggest status symbols on the planet. For a quarter century since it opened on March 27, 1976, its 260 million pounds anchored the city in the big leagues. Mediocre for most of their history, the Seahawks compiled a respectable 100–77 record at the Kingdome; in their 1979 championship season the Sonics led the league in home attendance there. Come holy triumph or damned defeat, Seattle fanatics crammed into this citadel of civic connection: 434,100 attended the good reverend Billy Graham’s eight-day evangelist extravaganza in May 1976. That set the world record for largest crowd ever for a single event. In the history books, the Kingdome had a place that could never be erased.¹

But a single day shy of its twenty-fourth birthday, on Sunday, March 26, 2000, it would be reduced to rubble. Controlled Demolition, Inc. strapped 4,461 pounds of explosives to its roof. The Kingdome would implode at 8:30 a.m.

After a chorus of detonation devices, the concrete colossus took 16.8 seconds to crumble. Yellowish-brown soot billowed from the blast site in Pioneer Square, sullying a sunny Seattle morning. The pall reached as high as the Bank of America Tower’s seventy-six stories. It left dust everywhere it drifted. It was Mount Saint Helens all over again. After the show Emerald City yokels marauded around Pioneer Square, cupping their hands to slide stadium detritus off car windshields into Ziploc bags; the rubbish could fetch a few bucks on the new website eBay.²

On the city’s hilltop neighborhoods, some of Seattle’s nouveau riche held swanky implosion-watch parties on the observation decks of high-rise condos. Some tech VPs and top-tier project managers congregated on rooftop bars, drinking mimosas and expensive microbrews while waiting for the final countdown. They rented the Smith Tower’s thirty-fifth-floor panorama and charged $216 for champagne-brunch views of the stadium’s demise.³ Like their settler forebears who docked near the place that became Seattle in November 1851, they sailed their boats to Elliott Bay and set their sights on Pioneer Square. Unlike their settler forebears, these boats were motorized and had fully stocked liquor shelves.

Middle managers and IT grunts who couldn’t afford front-row seats to the spectacle of destruction got together wherever they could. They went to visit that friend whose place had a semblance of a view. They shopped at Bon Marché. for something to wear to watch parties—Nordstrom if they could swing it. While awaiting their publicly funded stadium’s demise, petite bourgeoisie partygoers cued REM’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It” on a burned CD. As the debris settled, they played Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust” and the Verve’s “Bitter Sweet Symphony,” because that was the witty thing to do. The city’s introverts—the silent, awkward, overwhelming majority of its population, to be sure—stayed at home and watched the KING 5 broadcast of the Kingdome’s collapse. “I think a lot of people don’t understand the destruction of a perfectly functional building,” said anchor Jean Enersen.⁴

There’s reason to believe faces of color were few and far between at Kingdome implosion festivities. In Chinatown the Asian Counseling and Referral Service (ACRS) held a gathering to dance on the stadium’s grave. Some of the attendees were elders who had fought the stadium’s placement in Chinatown; at the Kingdome groundbreaking ceremony in November 1972, they had thrown mud balls at elected officials. Organizers leveraged their civil unrest into public resources for Asian Seattleites in the inner-city. A nonprofit offering behavioral health programs and human services, ACRS grew out of this protest. “I don’t have fond memories of the Kingdome,” said Chinatown activist Bob Santos. “We got out of it what we wanted.”⁵

Seattle spectators didn’t come together to watch the Kingdome’s implosion so much as the Kingdome’s implosion revealed the city’s divisions. The last time Seattleites gathered en masse was during the World Trade Organization protests in late 1999; three hundred police officers in riot gear patrolled the Kingdome demolition site perimeter, looking for civil unrest to stifle. With nothing to do, some cops in armor-covered vehicles let kids straddle their tanks for family photos. In the days leading up to the main event, the city eradicated a homeless encampment near the Kingdome; the Seattle Times said: “No wonder they feel at home here, near a building considered broken-down and washed-up.”⁶

By imploding the Kingdome to build the football arena voters had elected to fund in 1997, Seattleites pissed away $668 million in civic debt for the new facility. At the time, five thousand Seattleites had no roof to sleep under. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported that those incarcerated at the King County Correctional Facility had the best vantage point of the waste of resources: “As the dome fell, prisoners cheered from their terrific view.” The demolition registered a 2.3 on the Richter scale, gently shaking meal trays in the jail cafeteria.⁷

Seattle was supposed to be the city that transcended the old conflicts—a city above history. But at the turn of the century, it was sinking like everywhere else. Two weeks after the Kingdome implosion, the NASDAQ index collapsed, erasing the fortunes of Seattle’s nouveau riche.

By cratering Seattle’s economy, the “Dot-Com Recession” completed the damage to the city’s reputation that the WTO protests had started: Seattle wasn’t exceptional. If capitalism coughed, it would catch a cold. Seeing Seattle’s declining cachet and the increasing outspokenness of unions at Boeing after WTO, Boeing announced in March 2001 that it would be relocating its corporate headquarters to Chicago. After Seattle and its economy crashed swiftly and in front of many spectators, rather like the Kingdome, reporter Kim Murphy penned a 2002 postmortem in the Los Angeles Times: “Seattle has fallen—from its place deep in America’s restless heart, a city of snowy mountains and inland seas to which the disillusioned, ambitious, bored and broke from the rest of the country flocked in the 1990s—to where it is now, which is a city under siege.”⁸

“Seattle hasn’t had a lot to cheer about lately,” said the Seattle Times on March 27, 2000, on what would have been the Kingdome’s birthday.⁹ A dream imploded with the stadium. The Kingdome was a public facility conceived as part of the Forward Thrust’s civic improvements in the heady 1960s. It embodied the hope that American city dwellers could come together to solve their problems, and maybe have fun while doing so.¹⁰ What the commentariat who ranked urban areas in major periodicals like Time and Newsweek wanted to see were cities with popular entertainments like pro sports. They wanted cities with lucrative industries and widespread prosperity, cities with the same arts and culture scenes that were being displaced in the stratified cities they praised, cities that pacified urban conflicts between groups that had all the power and those that had none.

One by one, the public literati that dissected and ranked urban areas realized that no city any longer satisfied the criteria for the “city of the future.” Not Los Angeles or Cincinnati, with their turn-of-the-century civic flare-ups over police brutality. Not New York or Chicago, with their blighted neighborhoods and high crime rates. And certainly not Seattle, with its unsightly anti-capitalist protests, fleeing corporations, and growing population of people experiencing houselessness.¹¹ Consequently, public sentiment turned not just against individual cities but against urban America as a whole. The dream of the great US metropolis was dead. In the past, American cities were seen as having problems; in the year 2000, however, many believed they were the problem.

In 1997 conservative commentator David Brooks popularized the term “latte liberal” to describe what he called “upscale liberal communities, often in magnificent natural settings, often university-based, that have become the gestation centers for America’s new upscale culture.”¹² With its major research university, dot-com robber barons, and growing wealth inequalities, Seattle fit Brooks’s description to a tee. Without intending to do so, he parodied the city precisely: “Latte towns were the birthplaces of coffee shops and microbreweries. The ideal Latte town has Native American crafts and software startups. You know you’re in a Latte town when you can hop right off a bike path and drink coffee at a place with a pun-ish name.”¹³

Conservatives wielded “latte liberal” as an epithet, characterizing liberal big cities as too socially permissive, too soft on crime, too emasculated.¹⁴ What American conservatives objected to wasn’t global capitalism (which they shilled for), but the complexities global capitalism introduced into American life. Those complexities were most evident in big cities. By attacking them, reactionaries had it both ways: celebrating the free market while wincing at the economic empowerment of women and minorities; deregulating capitalism while stigmatizing the immigrants whose cheap labor fueled it; stoking panic over terrorism in major cities while believing there wasn’t much left in major cities worth defending.

In GOP-dominated federal elections in 2000, 2002, and 2004, Americans got accustomed to election-night maps dividing blue, urban America from its red, rural and suburban counterpart. The competition was on. Seattle was on the far left coast of the United States; as far as America’s conservatives were concerned, that’s where it was on the country’s political spectrum as well. In the early twenty-first century, the city’s sports animated the competition between urban America and everywhere else, and between urban America and itself.

Among the team names in the running were the “Emeralds,” “Rainbows,” and “Spin.” Other Seattleites suggested the “Slammers,” “Stealth,” and “Speed.” The Seattle “Hard Drives” ranked as one of the worst mascots ever suggested—in Seattle in 1999, and perhaps anywhere, ever, at any point in human history. Someone else offered the “Thunder,” but what kind of name was that for a basketball team?

An eleven-year-old from Bellevue hit the game-winning name: “Seattle Storm, because they mean business.” The WNBA had gifted Seattle a new franchise in 1999. After the city breezed past the mandatory threshold of fifty-five hundred season tickets sold, publicists in the league front office approved the name. The Seattle Storm were indeed in business.¹⁵

Women’s sports in the United States are a barometer for alternating political climates of reform and regression. During the Progressive Era, women athletes provoked a backlash: a November 1915 article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer cautioned that “girls cannot keep going day and night, playing tennis, golf, and hockey, and expect to keep a favorable balance in the bank of health.”¹⁶ City dwellers got used to biking women in “bloomer” dresses that gave them greater freedom of movement. As the Seattle Metropolitans went on their Stanley Cup Championship run, white women “Hockeyettes” played games at the segregated Seattle Ice Arena, with the Seattle Times noting their “disregard for tradition” in March 1917.¹⁷

After World War I the reinstitution of retrograde gender roles was bad news for women’s sports. Not content to sit idly by as her husband instituted a Gilded Age redux in the 1920s, Lou Hoover—First Lady of the United States—shut down a thriving women’s football league in Toledo in the 1930s. The cycle was repeated after World War II, as the return of men from the warfront curtailed the athletic activity of women and LGBTQ+ motorcyclists and dancers. As cooking, cleaning, rocking babies, folding clothes, and vacuuming took more physical grit than many men would ever know, many women awaited the opportunity to perform their physicality on a bigger stage.

The sexual revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s changed the game. After Congress ratified the Title IX constitutional amendment in 1972, American universities were legally obligated to afford women the same opportunities, in sports and academics, as men.¹⁸ The legislation combined with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to create a demographic revolution in sports. Just as the golden age of boxing expressed the primacy of male breadwinners in the mid-twentieth century, the growing popularity of women’s basketball in the late twentieth century evidenced a deindustrialized, increasingly feminized labor force in which Black women accumulated professional degrees at a rate that exceeded their male counterparts.¹⁹ By the end of the twentieth century, the best basketball players in the country were Black women: Cheryl Miller, Lisa Leslie, Sheryl Swoopes.

The increasing economic enfranchisement of Black women in the generation after the civil rights movement coincided with a decline in blue-collar jobs held by their male counterparts. Many decried this development, arguing that Black matriarchs were symptomatic of Black family dysfunction. Originator of the term “intersectionality,” legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw pushed back in 1989, questioning why “the struggle against racism seemed to compel the subordination of the Black female experience in order to ensure the security of the larger Black community.”²⁰ Echoing the Seattle Owls Club of the late 1930s, city dwellers in the late twentieth century got used to seeing financially self-sustaining Black women in team apparel and athletic shoes, hoop earrings and beanies—a much-copied postindustrial fashion statement born out of a new world of work. Founded as an NBA spin-off in 1996 the WNBA showcased the labors of post–civil rights era Black women athletes like no league before it.

In April 2000 seventy women attended tryouts for the Seattle Storm inaugural team at the Rainier Community Center. Robin Threatt stood out.²¹ While in college, she had given Purdue coach Lin Dunn’s teams nightmares in the early 1990s. Now, there stood Dunn on the Seattle sidelines, head coach of the Storm, watching the thirty-year-old Threatt make light work of grueling drills. She made the team. With a master’s in marketing, she turned her back on her job as a peddler of heart medicine; Threatt would make $83,000 less as a professional basketball player than she did at the Du Pont corporation. She didn’t care: “Anytime you have that fire in you to do something, you have to keep pushing on,” she said in May 2000. “When I feel the option is no longer there, I’ll go have more babies.”²²

Seattleites embraced the Storm with typical enthusiasm, the seeds planted by the US women’s basketball team’s November 1995 visit to the city. Six hundred girls from Seattle high schools turned out just to watch the team practice before its exhibition match against the University of Washington women’s team; fifty-seven hundred rapt fans saw USA humble the Huskies, 92–47.²³ A study released by the American Basketball Council had shown that the number of women who played basketball spiked 23 percent between 1987 and 1995. A year later, the Seattle Reign of the American Basketball League displayed women’s ball to modest but devoted crowds. The league folded in 1998, but not before setting a valuable precedent for the WNBA in Seattle and beyond.

Seattle joined the WNBA in 1999 alongside expansion franchises in Indiana, Miami, and Portland. Illustrating the distance between the league’s elite and its new expansion teams, the mighty Houston Comets drained the Seattle Storm by 30 points in both of their matchups in Seattle’s inaugural 2000 season.²⁴ In the June 2000 blowout, most of the 10,480 Seattle fans at KeyArena didn’t leave early.²⁵ With “Gay Pride” nights and an ample marketing budget, the Storm activated passionate LGBTQ+ and women fans that other major leagues ignored.²⁶

Robin Threatt played admirably in Seattle’s inaugural season—her first and last in the WNBA—scoring 7.8 points per game while having thirteen steals in twenty games. As the Storm compiled an 8–26 record in 2000, fans hoped help was on the way.

Football was a man’s game, a pure game, a game of integrity; a game of irreproachable moral fiber, incorruptible martial discipline, and crushing head injuries that were endured strictly for the honor of the game. It was a noble game—righteous in the same way that farming, fording a river, or fighting a war was. Much ink has been spilled about why the sport resonates as deeply as it does with American fans, rising in popularity parallel to modern suburbs and the mass spectacle of television; most of it falls short of author Frederick Exley’s 1968 musing in A Fan’s Notes: “Why did football bring me so to life? Part of it was my feeling that it was an island of directness in a world of circumspection. In football, a man was asked to do a difficult and brutal job. There was nothing rhetorical or vague about it. It smacked of something old, something traditional, something unclouded.”²⁷

In cloudy Seattle, voters approved Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen’s plan for a new football stadium in 1997. The expectation was clear: in exchange for $300 million in public funds, the Seahawks would demolish football teams from rival cities.²⁸ The new stadium was engineered to trap noise and redirect it onto the field. Seattle fans would paint themselves blue and green and drink overpriced stadium beer. They’d get drunk, shout, and force opposing offenses into the most false-start penalties through sheer clamor. Their home field would be the most feared in the sport. Rivals would be afraid of Seattle; football was figurative war.

Pigskin was the pastime that Ivy League schools used to teach teamwork during the Gilded Age; the Seattle Times called football and war “GREAT LITTLE PALS” in 1918.²⁹ Though the sport flowered in liberal cities, its heartland was in the youth fields of rural America. SUV-driving suburbanites bolstered the league’s stalwart social base, which cross-pollinated with conservative politics. On his presidential runs in 1968 and 1972, President Nixon weaponized connections with gridiron team owners to reinforce his support in the Sunbelt; in Pigskin Nation: How the NFL Remade American Politics, historian Jesse Berrett describes how macho-man-in-chief Ronald Reagan used football imagery “to sell himself as bearer of a reassuring American masculine tradition” during the Cold War.³⁰ By the early 2000s, warlike football was the most popular game in a country that had been at war—with no formal declaration of it—since 2003.

As the Seahawks took flight under the new regime of head coach Mike Holmgren, “No Iraq War” lawn signs were conspicuous in the Seattle neighborhoods Green Lake and Ballard.³¹ In Seattle’s Central Area speakers at the 2003 iteration of the annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day march denounced the coming war. All the while, the Pentagon subsidized NFL teams like the local Seahawks, giving them cash benefits for halftime flag salutes and Air Force flyovers.³² As the United States fought a quixotic “War on Terror” with no end in sight, the Seattle fan refrain “Go Hawks” seemed a double entendre.

After disappointing playoff exits in 2003 and 2004, the Seahawks entered the 2005 season as serious Super Bowl contenders. Running back Shaun Alexander and quarterback Matt Hasselbeck anchored the team’s scoring attack behind a punishing front line; Holmgren’s innovative version of the “West Coast offense” used tactical passing precision to reinforce the team’s ground game. Attacking by land and by air, the Hawks defended their home turf perfectly, going 8–0 at Qwest Field in 2005. Seattle’s (department of) defense was anchored by starting lineman Bryce Fisher, an Air Force Academy graduate and active member of the armed reserves during the 2005 season.³³ “Whenever I put on my [Seahawks] uniform, I think about all the people who put on the [military] uniform,” Fisher said, as the NFL prepared its Veterans Day celebrations in November 2005. “I’ve got friends that have been to Baghdad and Afghanistan, and I do my best to honor them.”³⁴

Fisher totaled nine sacks for the Seahawks in the 2005 season, prompting coaches to comment on his work ethic, a residue, some believed, of his time in the Air Force.³⁵ References to the defensive end’s military discipline were nowhere to be found when he was arrested for assaulting his wife in a dispute over his alleged infidelity. The charges were later dropped.

After compiling an impressive 13–3 regular season record, the Hawks’ frontier war simulation escalated when they vanquished the Washington Redskins, and later Carolina, on the way to Super Bowl XL, where the Pittsburgh Steelers awaited them. On paper, the game shouldn’t have been close: the Seahawks were the best team in the league, while Pittsburgh was a sixth-seeded wild card that had to win three road games to get to the Super Bowl.

It was played in Detroit, where star Steelers running back Jerome “the Bus” Bettis was from. With Bettis set to retire after the game, Pittsburgh had a potent psychological incentive to send him off on a good note. Worse for Seattle, the short distance from Detroit to Pittsburgh allowed Steelers fans to descend upon the game in droves. Detroit’s mayor declared the run-up to the Super Bowl “Jerome Bettis Week.”³⁶ The “neutral field” was stacked against Seattle. At kickoff, ABC play-by-play announcer Al Michaels estimated the game crowd was 80 percent Steelers fans.

Steel City entered the Super Bowl as sentimental favorites over the Emerald City. The national conversation about their chances in the championship game framed Seattle as the more effete team whose “West Coast offense” could be disrupted. The roots of the anti-sissy bias went back to the Reagan-era 1986 NFC Championship Game, when the punishing New York Giants defense made mincemeat of Joe Montana’s finesse-first San Francisco 49ers. Twenty years later, if you had to pick a city to win a football game in the also-conservative, anti-urban 2000s, you picked the midwestern one with an industrial pedigree. Seattle was a coastal latte town; Pittsburgh was tougher. It was right there in their names: Emerald was a decorative jewel, somewhat brittle and subject to breakage; steel was hard and functional, America’s backbone since the days of the railroad. Frontier Seattle met its maker.

Played Sunday, February 5, 2006, at Ford Field in Detroit, Super Bowl XL was a total farce. In the first quarter, official Bill Leavy flagged Seattle receiver Darrell Jackson for a rare offensive pass interference penalty in the end zone, erasing a touchdown that would have put Seattle up 7–0. With Seattle leading 3–0 in the second quarter, a line judge said Ben Roethlisberger crossed the goal line for a touchdown when replays showed he clearly didn’t. As Seattle was driving and Pittsburgh led 14–10 in the fourth quarter, Pittsburgh lineman Clark Haggans—blatantly offsides on the play—baited Seahawks offensive tackle Sean Locklear into a phantom hold, snuffing out a red zone gain that may have led to a go-ahead score for Seattle.³⁷ Of the one hundred thousand fans polled by ESPN, 61.7 percent believed officiating ruined the game.³⁸ The Seahawks fell by the final score of 21–10. A liberal city in red America, Seattle had competed in a conservative arena and lost.

After the game the majoritarian view among Seahawks fans was that the game was probably fixed—a belief substantiated by a lengthy shadow history of foul play in professional sports: As the heady Progressive Era gave way to the materialistic 1920s, the 1919 World Series between the Chicago White Sox and the Cincinnati Reds was over before it started. A powerful gambling syndicate coaxed Chicago players to throw the series for Cincinnati, who ended up winning.³⁹ Later, Dan Moldea’s explosive 1989 book Interference: How Organized Crime Influences Professional Football revealed deep ties between football players and mafiosos that resulted in scores of rigged games in the mid-twentieth century.⁴⁰ A 2007 FBI report uncovered that NBA referee Tim Donaghy systematically fixed basketball games he officiated from at least 2005 through 2007—that is, at the same time the Seahawks lost the Super Bowl to the Steelers due to dubious officiating.⁴¹

With Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice watching from the stands and transparently pulling for Pittsburgh, the Steelers’ win had the creepy air of conspiratorial inevitability.⁴² If the public couldn’t have clarity over why precisely it was at war, it would question everything else. In the digital bunker of MySpace groups and in obscure back channels of TheFacebook, fans lamented the gambling interests that they believed convinced the refs to job the Seahawks on the biggest stage possible. Seattleites were paranoid—but that didn’t mean everyone wasn’t out to get them.

Success and failure collided. While the Storm stumbled to a pathetic 10–22 record in the 2001–2 WNBA season, Sue Bird’s University of Connecticut college squad was literally perfect, compiling a 39–0 record to capture the national championship in spring 2002. After the Storm finished tied with four other teams for the worst record in the league, they won the draft lottery and were given the number one pick in the 2002 WNBA draft. It was a foregone conclusion that they would select Bird, who was by that time the best—if not best-marketed—women’s basketball player in the country, a star-in-the-making whose celebrity was boosted by the ESPN media empire in nearby Bristol, Connecticut. Seattle plucked her. “I don’t plan on losing,” Bird said on draft day.⁴³

Born October 16, 1980, in Syosset, New York, Suzanne Brigit Bird brought East Coast basketball excellence to Seattle. Gotham was the city that produced great point guards, floor colonels who conducted the action and served as coaches on court: Bob Cousy, Lenny Wilkens, Kenny Smith, Mark Jackson, Nancy Lieberman. Bird was part of a national title team at Christ the King High School in Queens, where she moved from pampered Long Island after her parents divorced. Hailing from a family of Russian Jews, she was self-aware of the privileges she grew up with as a white person, crediting her young adulthood in New York City for toughening her on and off the court: “Regardless of whether it was hard or easy compared to other people, my upbringing made me self-reliant in this little apartment in Queens.”⁴⁴

Geographically the biggest borough in New York City, Queens was the most ethnically diverse urban area in the world at the turn of the century, a city unto itself that provoked bigoted remarks from Atlanta Braves pitcher John Rocker in 1999. “It’s the most hectic, nerve-racking city,” Rocker told Sports Illustrated: “Imagine having to take the 7-train next to some kid with purple hair, next to some queer with AIDS, next to some dude who just got out of jail for the fourth time. Asians and Korean and Vietnamese and Indians and Russians and Spanish people. How the hell did they get in this country?”⁴⁵ Though pilloried at the time as fringe prejudice, Rocker’s remarks forecasted a sea change in American politics. George W. Bush captured the presidency in 2000 as a proponent of strengthening the country’s borders, then spawned the Department of Homeland Security and Patriot Act to crack down on immigrants and perceived dissidents after 9/11.

By the time Bird landed in Seattle in April 2002, Republicans controlled the White House, Congress, and thirty-eight of fifty state governor seats, then gained control of the Senate in midterm elections that year. That year Bush had instated a ban on federal funding to family-planning groups that offered abortion counseling, then told an anti-abortion rally a few weeks later in West Virginia: “You’re marching on behalf of a noble cause.”⁴⁶ The conservative shift in American politics followed Bird to progressive Seattle. In her rookie season Bird was the catalyst of the Storm’s offense that ranked near the top of the league in total points scored and field goal percentage in 2003. She made a bet with Seattle radio host Mitch Levy that if her assist-to-turnover ratio—a statistical marker of good decision-making in basketball—was lower than 2:1 at the end of the year, Levy would bend her over his knee, spank her, and exhort Bird to yell “harder, daddy, harder” to thousands of listeners on the air. That Bird won the bet did little to quell the controversy surrounding it.

The skeezy wager became the center of controversy.⁴⁷ In a scathing July 2003 column Steve Kelley of the Seattle Times called Levy “the morning maven of misogyny.”⁴⁸ Washington State senator Jeanne Kohl-Welles castigated Bird for “feeding into images of violence against women.” When ESPN caught wind of the controversy, it became national news. Bird apologized and withdrew her participation in the bet. “I’m embarrassed,” she confessed.⁴⁹ “When I read the Senator’s letter, it made me re-think things.” Levy showed no such contrition: “For Kohl-Welles to equate a consensual radio segment that happened to involve a spanking element to violence against women is offensive to any victim of this horrible crime.”⁵⁰

In 2004, Bird was selected to her second straight All-Star team, while Seattle center and reigning WNBA Most Valuable Player Lauren Jackson was having another strong campaign. Though Seattle downed the Houston Comets 69–63 on June 18, 2004, for their fifth straight win, the focus of WNBA reporting that day was on a different body of work: Jackson had posed nude in an Australian magazine celebrating athletes competing in the upcoming Olympic games. The photos were due to hit stands in a week. “The Storm have provided Jackson with substantial income and recognition,” wrote a commenter on a Storm fan website; “they’re entitled to ask for a higher standard.”⁵¹

While some Seattle fans focused on nude photos in a magazine eighty-two hundred miles away, there was little local scrutiny of radio host Mitch Levy’s annual “Bigger Dance” tournament. For eight years and running, Levy pitted sixty-four actresses, models, and women athletes against one another in an on-air fantasy tournament to determine who was the most attractive—the “Queen of the Hardwood,” as Levy termed the winner. Nor did anyone care when Ichiro Suzuki responded to a 2001 rumor by saying, “If it was true [that a magazine offered me $1 million for nude photos], I’d take the picture myself and send it in.”⁵² In the face of the double standards, Lauren Jackson was unapologetic: “We work so hard, as athletes, on making our bodies look great.”

The uproar around the Storm subsided, but the Storm themselves would not. Seattle romped through the 2004 WNBA playoffs, poaching the Minnesota Lynx in the Western Conference Semifinals and deposing the Sacramento Monarchs in the Western Conference Finals. Awaiting them in the championship round were the Connecticut Sun. Narratively no matchup could sizzle more than a Bird versus Connecticut contest for WNBA supremacy. With the series tied 1–1 and the Storm one home win away from winning the championship, reporter Les Carpenter wrote that “among the cities with three professional sports teams, Seattle’s two championships were more than only two: Phoenix and Atlanta.”⁵³ Looking back on a century of sports futility, Carpenter concluded: “When the most logical sports nickname for your town is Loserville, USA, a WNBA title is a pretty big deal.” On Tuesday, October 12, 2004, the Seattle Storm shaded the Connecticut Sun to win the 2004 WNBA Championship.

Psyched by her return to Connecticut, Bird had struggled throughout the series, posting eleven assists and ten turnovers in three games. Though she didn’t enjoy the benefit of the press attention afforded Bird, Seattle wing Betty Lennox was the best player on either team, scoring 22.3 points per game and winning WNBA Finals MVP honors. Like her superstar University of Connecticut predecessor Rebecca Lobo, Sue Bird was a marketing asset for a league attempting to break into the mainstream—a white woman who was seen as conventionally attractive, contrasting with the hurtful stereotype of “butch” Black women with whom the WNBA had come to be associated.⁵⁴ Still early in her career in 2004, Bird later came into her own as one of the greatest women’s basketball players of all time. But in the 2004 WNBA Finals, Betty Lennox—a Black woman—carried the team to the title. Ten thousand fans attended the Storm’s championship parade downtown on October 15; jersey-wearing fans poured out of downtown businesses and buses. Lennox was on the move, too. A week after winning the championship, she’d board a plane to play basketball in Italy, where player salaries were much higher than in the United States.⁵⁵

To win a Finals MVP is to be the most important player for the most important team at the most important time. But because WNBA player salaries were so low—a reflection of the disparity in resources and attention afforded women’s basketball in the United States—many women players were more valued overseas. The WNBA’s maximum wage was $132,400 in 2004, with most players making near the league minimum of $51,700. The league’s entire labor payroll ($19.3 million) was $7.6 million less than the Boston Celtics paid Vin Baker in the 2003–4 NBA season to score 10 points a game.⁵⁶

The Seattle Storm had given Seattle its first big-league championship since the Sonics in 1979. But the work of many women was not done: “You guys are the best,” Lennox told the parade crowd in Seattle, her travel plans to her second job already made. “This feels like home.”⁵⁷

By now, the crime’s details are well known: winners of the 1979 NBA Championship and a league model for local fan support, the SuperSonics were stolen from Seattle and relocated to Oklahoma City in 2008. We know a lot about the criminals: Clay Bennett, Aubrey McLendon, and Tom Ward were Oklahoma capitalists who bought the team from coffee magnate Howard Schultz with the barely veiled intent of relocating it. After he took control of the Sonics, Bennett clowned Seattle’s lame-duck management group by serving them goat testicles at a team dinner. McLendon and Ward formed the anti–gay rights committee Americans United to Preserve Marriage for the 2000 presidential election, then funded the “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” ads that misrepresented Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry’s record of military service in 2004.⁵⁸ The relocation of the Sonics was a heist, executed by red state oilmen who pilfered liberal Seattle.

What we don’t hear enough about is the motive.

When NBA commissioner David Stern became an accomplice in the relocation of the Seattle SuperSonics, his goal was straightforwardly political. After the November 2, 2004, election in which President Bush prevailed and Republicans increased their majorities in both houses of Congress, Stern consulted with GOP strategist Matthew Dowd. The two thought of ways to bolster the NBA’s support among American conservatives.⁵⁹ Stern’s league was teetering on irrelevancy; low-scoring games with slow paces drove down overall viewership. Some white audiences in particular were alienated by what they considered petulant Black athletes who didn’t pay the requisite deference to white spectatorship. When an ugly melee broke out between fans and players in a November 19, 2004, regular season game between the Detroit Pistons and the visiting Indiana Pacers, the league’s reputation hit a nadir. The 2007 FBI report revealing crooked refereeing further damaged the NBA brand.

In his book Bad Sports, sportswriter Dave Zirin describes how Stern and Dowd acted fast to help the NBA rebound: “Stern met with the 2004 Bush campaign strategist to figure out how to give the league what Stern called ‘red state appeal.’”⁶⁰ In 2004 the league would disallow defensive players from using their hands to guard opponents, leading to more scoring. In 2005 it would force its players to wear business attire to and from games. Then, in 2006, NBA officials began the search for new red state markets.

Hurricane Katrina gave NBA officials a chance to audition Sunbelt cities for entry into the league. As the 2005–6 NBA season got underway, Kansas City, Louisville, Nashville, and San Diego vied to house the temporarily dislocated New Orleans Hornets. Oklahoma City won out, embracing the brilliant play of young New Orleans–born point guard Chris Paul as if he were a native son. A seed was planted for NBA officials looking to rally basketball fans in conservative areas.⁶¹

Back in Seattle, Howard Schultz was running his basketball team like he ran his coffee business: with a healthy disrespect for organized labor and a desire to impose himself upon middle management. Schultz dismantled the squad that made a promising run in the 2005 NBA playoffs before selling the team to Clay Bennett and his associates for half a billion dollars. Bruce Schoenfeld of the New York Times noted that “with his lifelong Republicanism and partners made rich by fossil fuels, Bennett pushed all the wrong buttons in liberal, health-conscious, ecologically sensitive Seattle.”⁶² Schultz swore he sold the team to the Oklahoma City group on the understanding that they would keep them in Seattle. Sonic fans could tell they were being played.

Great thefts have not just robbers (the Oklahoma City ownership group), accomplices (David Stern), and motives (opening up a new market in rural America) but also a stolen object of great value. For Bennett and his cohort, that object was not the Seattle Storm. While the WNBA team had been part of the Schultz sale, Bennett sold them in early 2008 to a group of Seattle businesswomen committed to keeping the team in Seattle. Bringing a women’s basketball team with a fervent LGBTQ+ fan base to Oklahoma wasn’t part of the plan.⁶³ In Tulsa, former Seattle Seahawks receiver and NFL players’ union turncoat Steve Largent had been elected to Congress as a Republican in 1994; he served until 2002, remained a revered figure in the state upon exiting office, and spoke for many an Oklahoman when he said: “No civilization that has ever embraced homosexuality has ever survived.”⁶⁴

What the Oklahoma group wanted was the Sonics: a team that had reached an impasse with the NBA over a new basketball arena. The league wanted Seattle fans to shell out public money for a new arena; tired after dolling out arena subsidies for the Mariners and the Seahawks, elected officials in city government and in the Washington State Legislature refused. The Oklahoma City ownership group settled with the City of Seattle to finalize the franchise move, consequently taking possession of the Sonics’ 1979 championship trophy, retired jerseys, and stadium banners commemorating conference titles and division wins. The Sonics would be relocating to Oklahoma at the start of the 2008–9 regular season, their name changed to the Thunder. On April 13, 2008, they played their last game in Seattle: a 99–95 victory against the Dallas Mavericks.

That the Sonics were moving was unfathomable. In the book Hoops Heist, author Jon Finkel describes how the Sonics had an unusually deep connection with the city’s fan base.⁶⁵ Several future NBA players that came from Seattle had gone to basketball camps put on by Sonics stars: Jamal Crawford, Isiah Thomas, Nate Robinson, Jason Terry, and Brandon Roy were all gifted scorers. Smaller men who played in a big man’s sport, they embodied Seattle’s uphill struggle for recognition on the national stage. The Sonics were a basketball guild that elevated local talent through basketball apprenticeships; this connection between town and team was uncommon in the hyper-materialistic world of professional sports. A rookie on the Sonics roster when the team relocated, departed superstar Kevin Durant later mourned the broken bond: “The energy for the Sonics would have been unmatched in pro sports. The fans would have had an up-and-coming team with me, Russell Westbrook, Serge Ibaka, and James Harden. Sometimes I let myself think about what could have been.”⁶⁶

While the Oklahoma ownership group planned their relocation, Nick Licata, of the Seattle City Council, said the Sonics contributed “zero cultural and economic value” to the city. It’s difficult to imagine a similar statement made about the Washington Huskies, Seahawks, or Mariners, who generated tailgate parties attended by generations of fans and initiated enthused pedestrian and transit trips to and from public stadiums. Although the economic benefits of sports to US cities are usually overstated, it was at least true that these teams created material excitement worth millions in sales taxes, parking fees, and bar and restaurant tabs—not to mention exceptional publicity for Seattle, a benefit identified by officials at the University of Washington a century earlier.⁶⁷ A similar dismissal of the Seattle Storm as the one levied by Licata against the Sonics would have drawn blowback from women and LGBTQ+ fans who understood that fair cultural representation of marginalized populations strengthens a city’s social fabric; to his credit, Licata was smart enough not to go there.

Under pressure from constituents, the venerable councilmember later apologized for his inflammatory remarks. Many felt that what he meant to say was that because the cultural value of the Sonics skewed disproportionately toward Black Seattleites, the team was worth relinquishing. Back when professional basketball first came to town in 1966, Seattle’s sports establishment was slow to embrace the “too-Black” NBA. Over the next four decades, however, the Sonics did as much to foster a feeling of belonging among still-segregated Black Seattleites as all the minority economic empowerment studies, racial sensitivity curricula for homicidal cops, and diversity task forces emerging from city hall. To Black city dwellers enduring waves of gentrifiers in the Central District, the relocation of the team may have seemed one more example of displacement at a time when city leaders let economic forces fritter away a Black community that was forged against all odds. A mom-and-pop small business the SuperSonics were not; but for a people who had looked to sports as symbols of resilience and dignity since before the Great Migration—indeed, since the days of slavery—the team’s departure was met with a feeling of real loss. Everywhere you looked, Seattle seemed a less Black city.

At any rate the Sonics were gone now. Their sale was a proxy battle in the power struggle between blue coastal cities and America’s red state interior. Parallels to the city’s earlier failed rendezvous with the railroad are perhaps too obvious to not make: the city was shafted again by regional rivals and distant capitalists. For many years afterward, heartbroken Sonics fans were reduced to rumormongers, desperately parsing any morsel of gossip that hinted at the team’s return, reproducing the local railroad speculation craze of the Gilded Age. At parks and in coffee shops—on transit and on social media—conversations about the departed franchise inspired defeated sighs and shaking heads: I still can’t believe they let them get away.

Because it was about politics, it wasn’t their fault.

Because it was about politics, it was all their fault.

Seattle was floundering. After the dot-com bubble bust of 2000, the city lost an infamous Super Bowl to a tougher opponent in 2006. Crooked oilmen separated fans from their basketball team in 2008, notching the more conservative Sunbelt another win over its liberal competition. The Seattle Storm won a championship in 2004 and another six years later, but the triumphs were widely disparaged by the national sports establishment. In 2010, ESPN sportswriter Bill Simmons described a “Washington sports malaise,” citing the departure of the Sonics, the ascendancy of the Oklahoma City Thunder, and the fact that “the state’s biggest recent sports highlights involved the WNBA.”⁶⁸ Another recession in 2008 destroyed Washington Mutual, a Seattle-based bank with over forty-three thousand employees that bolstered the city’s status as a center of global commerce.⁶⁹ Sports were a performance of civic ego; in the 2000s poor Seattle’s was bruised. A victim of the tech revolution the city had helped incubate, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer became online-only in 2009, taking with it a rich tradition of sports coverage that started with Royal Brougham a century earlier.

The disappointments didn’t deter Seattle fans. If anything, the regressive Bush administration activated the double helix of sports and civics in the city—genes that stretched back to the Progressive Era’s “City Beautiful” movement, where athletics were a form of civic engagement and a pathway to national recognition. When the placement of a new Major League Soccer franchise in Seattle was announced in 2007, a naming contest provoked thousands of responses from area soccer fans. “A groundswell pushed the name ‘Sounders’ over the edge,” said team owner Joe Roth in April 2008. “I think it shows that we are about democracy and sports.”⁷⁰

A part owner of the Sounders, comic Drew Carey met with fans at a Seattle pub in May 2008 to tout the club’s innovative management model. The franchise gave fans the power to fire the team’s general manager. Municipal ownership of sports franchises was forbidden by all major American sports leagues; Sounders fans had the next best thing.

To American conservatives, Seattle’s passion for soccer confirmed how out of touch the “latte liberals” of the left coast really were. “It doesn’t matter how you try to sell it to us,” said right-winger Glenn Beck in 2010. “We don’t want the World Cup and we don’t like soccer.”⁷¹ Like major cities, soccer embodied exactly the kind of global interconnectedness that conservatives railed against as George W. Bush fought a unilateral “war on terror” in the Middle East. On April 16, 2006, more than fifty-six thousand fans in Seattle went to Qwest Field to watch a friendly between Mexico and China. In a book that hit shelves shortly after the Iraq War started in 2003, pop culture critic Chuck Klosterman complained that “soccer fanatics love to tell you it’s the most popular game on earth, as if that proves its value. The opposite is true. Why should I care that every citizen of Chile and Iran thoughtlessly adores ‘futball’?”⁷²

Had they paid closer attention, right-wingers who hated soccer might have found a lot to like: the sport was a petri dish of white supremacist revanchism. ESPN reported on players of color in Europe suffering racial slurs in 2006, and the New York Times noted ethnocentric views among white Seattle Sounders fans.⁷³ If conservatives who decried “latte towns” could have conjured their own pro-business, free-marketeering, rugged individualist paradise, they also could have done much worse than Seattle: a city of sundry corporate giants where male chauvinists dreamed of spanking women athletes; a city whose reputation as an antiwar environmentalist utopia was betrayed by a half-dozen military bases in the area; a “he-man” city where men couldn’t take more than two years of a woman mayor in 1928 and largely ignored women’s basketball. Seattle housed a sexist traditionalism that was right at home in areas of the country thought to be politically regressive. Large swaths of liberal Seattle also rejected soccer; nobody talked about it much on the city’s sports radio stations, dominated as they were by coverage of men’s football and basketball. These inconvenient truths had no place in the narrative that many conservatives wanted to tell about liberal cities.

Polarized presidential election maps that divided the country’s cities and its ruralities distorted reality. “Blue” urban America had always been home to reactionaries and racists; rural America was “red” partially because of widespread voter disenfranchisement of progressive minority voters. Cities were never as progressive as they seemed, nor the countryside ever as conservative. But during America’s Bush years, political nuance had gone the way of the Kingdome. Thomas Frank wrote in his 2004 book What’s the Matter with Kansas? that the “red-state narrative brought majoritarian legitimacy to [George W. Bush], who had lost the popular vote.”⁷⁴

American conservatives won federal elections in the early twenty-first century by racking up votes in rural areas, suburban towns, and unincorporated districts. While seizing power, they juked many progressives into believing politics were about finding common ground, not about competing; about feelings, not fighting. “We in coastal metro Blue areas read more books than people in the heartland,” wrote David Brooks in 2001, continuing the anti-urban narrative he started with the “latte liberal” stereotype in 1997. “But don’t ask us what life in Red America is like. Very few of us could name five NASCAR drivers.”⁷⁵

For the previous three decades, Seattle was a boomtown that exemplified America’s aspirations for its major cities. Its status as a liberal trendsetter turned into a political liability. In the power struggle between progress and regression, cities were on the defensive. Urban America was losing; Seattle was “Loserville, USA.”