SuperSonics' move leaves a bitter taste

The reason it feels as if I just swallowed a handful of hot embers? It's my hometown team, the SuperSonics of Seattle. I grew up watching them, me and my dad, up in the cheap seats, game after game. The Sonics were the first team to make me cry (1972, a loss to the Lakers), and the first team to make me shout to the heavens with joy (1978, a playoff game against the Washington Bullets). They were also the first team to make me realize, when ownership wouldn't give Gus Williams a fat new contract, that pro sports was about business more than anything else.

Boy, was that lesson underscored last week.

In case you missed it, the Sonics are no more. They've gone the way of the Rams, shipped from the thriving west to the weary, mid-state flats.

Two years back, Seattle's team was bought by a group of buzz-cut boys from Oklahoma who told anyone who was numskulled enough to listen that they intended to keep the team right where it belonged.

And so it was then that a befuddling public game of chicken began.

It went something like this: The new owners immediately demanded a new arena in Seattle, even though the old one had been completely remade, at massive expense to common residents, in the mid-'90s. To build their digs, the Oklahomans, in their kindly, snake-oil salesman twang, asked the public to dole out a little more chump change: $300 million.

The rather enlightened people of Seattle, the vast majority of them anyway, quickly and loudly wondered why a bunch of millionaires were asking for such a generous guzzle from the public trough. If taxpayers were going to spend $300 million, the reasoning went, they'd rather spend it on beefing up the once-pristine public school system or old roadways such as the weary, elevated one that winds by the waterfront, looking as if it will fall in the next downpour.

What followed were months of name calling, hemming and hawing. There were lawsuits and clueless politicos and there was that money-lusting zealot, NBA Commissioner David Stern, castigating the people and the politicos for not being willing to dish out welfare to a bunch of out-of-town tycoons.