Poignant Sonicsgate a Saga of Love, Loss and Heartache
Sonicsgate is the heartbreaking story about the exodus of the city of Seattle’s first professional sports team, the Seattle Supersonics of the NBA. Starting with the team’s inception in 1967 and ending with its removal to devastating removal to Oklahoma City, the documentary paints a picture of the NBA, about Washington State’s political leadership and about Starbucks’ founder and CEO Howard Schultz that’s hardly flattering, and by the time it was over I didn’t know if I wanted to laugh or cry.
I should point out I’m a little bit biased here. When I was four-years-old my uncle put a basketball in my hand one Christmas telling me I was going to play that particular sport and that I was going to be a Sonic fan. Turns out, he was right on both counts. I played basketball from pretty much grade school through college, while watching Seattle Supersonics’ games became my own personal obsession.
So I am biased, but that doesn’t make director Jason Reid’s documentary any less wonderful. It’s extremely evenhanded depiction of the events surrounding the team’s 2008 departure is remarkable. Where a lesser filmmaker would craft a diatribe vilifying Oklahoman Clay Bennett (the headliner of the PBC ownership group that would ultimately move the team) and coffee titan Schultz (the man most responsible for selling it to him), Reid instead shows how the Sonics’ mismanagement and poor play, along with the public’s growing dissatisfaction for professional sports in the wake of new stadiums for the Seattle Seahawks and Seattle Mariners, put the 41-year-old franchise is play.
Featuring interviews with former Republican State Senator Slade Gorton, all-star player Gary Payton, former general manager Wally Walker, play-by-play announcer Kevin Calabro, local essayist and writer Sherman Alexie, several Seattle area sports columnists and handfuls of current and former NBA players, the film attempts to paint the broadest picture possible. Reid never looks for the easy question, just about everyone he interviews opening up to him in ways that constantly surprise.
Unsurprisingly, it is the climactic dissection of the trail between the City of Seattle and the Oklahoma City ownership group trying to hold the team to their lease where things get the most interesting. But even then Reid refuses to play up the seedier sensationalistic aspects of the story, instead letting city attorney Paul Lawrence and PBC lawyer Brad Keller speak about the intricacies of the case themselves.
And what a case it was! Emails clearly showed the Oklahomans to be lying about their resolve to keep the team in Seattle, while former city mayor Greg Nichols’ missteps on the witness stand were so vaudevillian they might as well have been skits straight from “Saturday Night Live.” Bennett’s time on giving testimony was arguably even worse, while a PowerPoint presentation partly engineered by Walker and Gorton was so damning a person would forgiven for thinking the case was over the moment Keller revealed it to the judge.
Ultimately Seattle and the PBC settled out of court just an hour before the judge’s decision allowing Bennett and his cronies to whisk the team out of town to Oklahoma City where it quickly could be renamed the Thunder. Over a year removed from these events, it’s interesting to now hear the lawyers involved talking about the settlement, and while both of them are fairly positive they would have won the case neither is nowhere near as willing to state the city made the right move settling.
Who comes off worst here? Surprisingly it isn’t Bennett or his ownership group. While they weren’t exactly on the up and up they were Oklahoma businessmen in love with their hometown so it wasn’t exactly a surprise that their intentions weren’t entirely pure. They saw an opportunity and they jumped at it, and while one could have wished for different outcome at the end of the day it’s hard to put the full blame on Bennett and company’s shoulders.
No, the people who come off worst here are unsurprisingly Schultz for being such a clueless dope, the NBA for pushing forward a broken business model that holds city after city hostage, the Washington State legislature for refusing to deal even when a gift horse thanks to a Microsoft billionaire is dropped in the laps and Nichols for going forward with a deal while the trial was still in progress. All of these people and entities end up looking like spineless dopes, and if the film does level vitriol it’s aimed squarely at them.
But, somewhat strangely, Sonicsgate isn’t ultimately about the blame. Instead it is about of all things the love of a game and how people of all stripes can become so intimately connected with it. It is about how sports effects the collective consciousness, and even if the economic value of a professional team can be debated the social value it can levy is virtually without par. Reid’s film is about love, loss and the heartache that ensues when a beloved enterprise decides to skip town, the removal of the Supersonics from Seattle leaving a hole the size of which still hasn’t been fully calculated.
Film Rating: êêê (out of 4)
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