“Boom Town” Book Review
A Sports & Socialism Reading Series
Sam Anderson’s 2018 book Boom Town has a great premise: telling the story of Oklahoma City through the lens of the 2012-13 Thunder season. That was the year OKC traded James Harden to the Rockets days before the season started, breaking up a potential Big 3 of the Western Conference, to counter the Miami Heat Big 3 of LeBron James/Dwyane Wade/Chris Bosh.
Of course, phrases like “traded James Harden to the Rockets” and “Miami Heat Big 3” are enough to make you sound like a confused old man—that was several NBA lifetimes ago, and even though 2012-13 was not that long ago in calendrical time, it is the distant past when it comes to world of professional sports. So Anderson’s book is not only a history of a city, but a look back at the last decade of the NBA.
It’s nice to revisit that season, and not just for the sake of nostalgia. It is useful to think about how the NBA has changed in the intervening years, and Boom Town draws interesting parallels between those changes and the history of a city. Telling the story of a city through the story of its sports franchise is something all sports fans should be intrigued by, and Anderson’s book is good, even if it doesn’t quite make its points as forcefully as it tries to. Indeed, from the leftist perspective of Undrafted, the book’s argument has two particularly noteworthy shortcomings.
1) Urbanism’s Fantasy: Boom Town’s premise is such a good one, and Anderson writes about it with such enthusiasm, that you really want his thesis to come together better than it does. The problem is that, while Anderson is clearly taken with Oklahoma City, he never quite convinces you that the city is, as he calls it, “the great minor city of America.” It has a quirky history—founded basically overnight with the Land Run of 1889—and some truly insane weather, and Anderson features some interesting stuff, particularly regarding the city’s civil rights history, and a bonkers story about the city agreeing to subject itself to regular sonic booms as part of a science experience, until citizens nearly revolted. So the city is not without charm, and its devotion to the Thunder and excitement over their 2012 Finals run is appealing.
But in most ways, OKC is generic in the way of so many American cities: cut through by interstate highways, plagued by persistent segregation, and ill-prepared for the extreme weather events that are becoming more and more frequent. Even its commitment to the Thunder is not as unique as Anderson presents it. Oklahoma City is not the smallest city to support a major American sports team: Buffalo has roughly half as many people as OKC and supports not just the NFL’s Bills, but the Sabres in the NHL. Even in the NBA, Salt Lake City is smaller and Memphis has a smaller metropolitan area than the Thunder play for. And I’m sure a thorough writer spending a year in those places could uncover compelling stories similar to the ones Anderson unearths here.
My point here is not that cities are all the same, of course, but that it’s not really helpful to talk about them as if they have personalities. The ones with pro sports franchises all have at least hundreds of thousands of people in them—they contain multitudes. Attempts to assign them some kind of identity are inevitably going to obscure more than they illuminate. Boom Town is full of compelling characters, but it misses what makes a city itself, which is the institutional structures that govern it.
For example, Anderson devotes several chapters to “the Great Annexation” that took place in Oklahoma City in the 1960s under the stewardship of business leader Stanley Draper. Draper pushed the city to grow from 80 square miles to over 608 square miles in just a few years—passing the geographical size of Los Angeles while being almost ten times smaller by population. It turned the city into “an outrageously sprawling blob,” as part of Draper’s plan to become a “universal city.”
Anderson presents this as evidence of a municipal psyche specific to the city. A recurring theme of the book is Oklahoma City’s odd blend of ambition and dysfunction, as evinced by the on-court pairing of Russell Westbrook and Kevin Durant, but also off-court things like the weather and rapid growth. But it’s tough to see the Great Annexation as anything but another attempt to romanticize the gross sprawl that characterizes so many American cities. OKC is not even the biggest city in the lower 48 states by area (that would be Jacksonville, FL), and its low density is on par with many other minor American cities, like Nashville, Lexington, and Kansas City, all of which hover around 1,200 people per square mile.
These numbers are pathetic by international standards and, frankly, unsustainable for the environment. The Great Annexation is not evidence of something unique to Oklahoma City—it’s a story about the country’s reliance on automobiles and the precarious political position cities face due to the peculiarities of American federalism.
Urbanism is, in general, a double-edged sword politically. On the one hand, I completely get the appeal of cities. They allow art and culture to flourish. They tend to be more tolerant, accepting, and diverse. And, importantly, they are places where members of the working class can come together. The rise of socialism in the last few years has been a largely urban phenomenon. But at the same time, an overreliance on cities is very limiting, and not just because American political institutions have a rural bias. One point Anderson makes again and again is the Oklahoma City, throughout its history, has depended on the largesse of the federal government for its very existence. Again, this is not something unique to OKC. Without the support of state and federal resources, cities simply could not exist, so any political movement that centers cities needs to find ways to include allies in suburban, rural, and small-town communities.
Too often, urbanism indulges in a kind of fantasy about cities, imaging them as little outposts of hope in a decaying world. Anderson’s book falls into this trap, typically through enthusiasm more than any ideology, but it nevertheless has political implications.
2) The Process: Back to the basketball focus of Anderson’s book. Another funny thing about reading about the 2012-13 season is him referring to “the Process” in an unironic way.
Personally, I’d completely forgotten that Sam Presti used “the Process” before Philadelphia ever hired Sam Hinkie, and it’s somewhat jarring to read the term get used in anything but an insulting context. But in some ways, the Thunder were the prototype for the current 76ers. Like Philadelphia, OKC had top draft picks in three straight drafts. But unlike the 76ers, the Thunder hit on all three. There were no torn meniscuses (menisci?), no Jahlil Okafor-style busts, and no Ben Simmons-style crises.
No, in Presti’s case, the lethal wound was self-inflicted. The decision to trade Harden before the 2012 season is generally remembered as an example of a team facing too brutal of a cap hit. At the time, it was thought that Thunder simply “had” to trade Harden, because deals they already had with Durant, Westbrook, Kendrick Perkins and Serge Ibaka placed them too close to the salary cap. Shortly afterwards, when the cap increased to the point where Harden’s contract would have been affordable, it was seen as just bad timing. After all, Presti didn’t know team valuations would go up so much…
But Anderson’s book undermines both excuses. As he points out, the Thunder were already prepared to go over the luxury tax for Harden: The last offer they made him was only $4.5 million less than the max he could’ve gotten, and would’ve put Oklahoma City over the cap. But when Harden refused, Presti traded him.
“It was, of course, the Process. That $4.5 million gap was symbolic: a test of Harden’s civic commitment to the Thunder… To remain a part of the team, Harden would need to prove he was willing to sacrifice. If he wasn’t willing to give up that fraction of a maximum salary, he probably wouldn’t be willing, later, to sacrifice more important things: playing time, shots, individual glory.”
This is the kind of stupid bullshit that “the Process” is really about: turning wage suppression into some kind of test of character. Notice how the logic here equates sacrificing for your teammates with sacrificing for your boss. How it makes trying to win the same as protecting the team’s financial position.
And yet the book still treats Presti with the kind of gravitas typically reserved for General Managers who have not just fucked their team over. The trade happens by page 70, and the rest of the book unfolds as if it is a referendum on Presti’s move. This is an odd storyline to focus on, since I have to imagine anyone reading a book about the Thunder in 2018, when Boom Town was published, already knew that the Thunder team eventually fell apart, with Durant and Westbrook both leaving town before ever getting back to the NBA Finals. Meanwhile, Harden would turn the Rockets into perennial contenders in the Western Conference.
Of course, the 2012-13 season did go well for the Thunder: They were the #1 seed in the West and finished with the most wins in franchise history. But as good as they were, they obviously would have been better with Harden. And they were eliminated in the second round of the playoffs, after Westbrook was injured in Round One—exactly the kind of situation in which the reigning Sixth Man of the Year would have come in handy!
Reading about this season with the knowledge of what came afterwards creates a similar problem to reading Anderson write about Oklahoma City without the perspective of actually being there. In both cases, your distance from the subject as a reader makes Anderson seem hopelessly naïve. Really? Harden might not be able to succeed on his own team? Or: Really? Oklahoma City is going to turn into “a megasettlement that would be served by a supersonic airport”?
Obviously Anderson knows how his story ends, but he seems so charmed by the people he meets along the way that he doesn’t want to dwell too much on their mistakes. But the failures are really the most interesting part of this story…