Future of big league sports on the line

Well, it is Bedlam Week. What is certainly the last Bedlam Game for a while and potentially the last Bedlam Game ever. But it is another sports story I would like to focus on this week. Given that it is college football season, you may have missed this but Oklahoma City has the Thunder on the ballot this December. How and why? Let’s talk about it.

On Dec. 12 there will be a citywide vote in Oklahoma City on a 1 percent sales tax that, if passed, would last for six years and fund a new $900 million dollar arena in downtown Oklahoma City. The Thunder ownership group has agreed to pay $50 million toward the cost and said that if the measure passes, they guarantee the Thunder will be playing games in Oklahoma City until 2050. The proposal passed the City Council 7-2 and that is why it has gone to the voters of OKC.

One of the opposition votes on the City Council wrote that, “This deal was negotiated from a position of fear and scarcity.” She is exactly correct. The OKC Council is deathly afraid that if they play hardball with the Thunder, they will just leave and go play somewhere else. Because, ultimately, that is what the team did when they came to Oklahoma City. The Thunder (then the Seattle Supersonics) were rejected by the city of Seattle for a publicly funded arena so they moved to Oklahoma City. One could argue that Seattle had less to fear. They already had an NFL and MLB franchise (and they have subsequently added an NHL team — the superbly named Kraken) and the voters of Seattle had stadium fatigue. In OKC there is no other game in town. Without the Thunder, OKC has no big league franchises in any of the four major sports.

This is a problem unique to American sports. Relocation simply does not happen in European soccer clubs because ownership of most of them is highly tied to the local community. But in American sports there is only one franchise, the Green Bay Packers of the NFL, that can say that. This allows teams to use our American system of governmental division of powers against local communities. You may have forgotten, but this is still a politics column. Under the Constitution we divide power horizontally (the three branches of government) and vertically (between federal, state and local government). Sports teams in America, just like any business, can go to a local community and say, “if we do not get X deal then we will find a community who will give it to us.” In 2007 the Sonics did not get that deal from Seattle, but they did get it from Oklahoma City. In 2023 if they do not get that deal from Oklahoma City again, then maybe they end up in Kansas City or back in Seattle.

I suspect that the voters in Oklahoma City are not going to risk losing the Thunder. One of the things former Mayor Mick Cornett used to say about them was that the Thunder helped to make OKC a, “big league city” and it certainly did that. Would OKC have gotten there without the Thunder? Perhaps, but the Thunder certainly helped. I would also note that I do not think that the Thunder’s improvement last year into this year was an accident either. The team was not going to be intentionally bad with a $900 million dollar stadium deal on the line. The team is fun again. Shai Gilgarious-Alexander is a legitimate MVP candidate and the team is on the rise in the Western Conference. Voters could reject the stadium deal in December but, like I said, I doubt they will do that.

Sports may seem like an odd topic for a politics column but they mean sometime to people. It is a failure of Oklahoma politics that they could not save Bedlam. This game is important to Oklahomans, even though OU wins most of the time. It is important even when both of the teams are bad. Despite that importance it is going to be gone. It would be a failure if the Thunder were to leave.

Councilwoman Harmon is right to say that this is a deal written out of fear. There should be a better system where communities work together to stop the relocations of these teams. But as long as one community will undercut another, this is the system we have. Which means the sale tax is probably going to be high in Oklahoma City for the foreseeable future.

David Searcy holds a master’s degree from Oklahoma State University and a PhD in political science from Southern Illinois University.