2008 NCAA football season special game alert – Sept.13 – when the Oklahoma Sooners play the Washington Huskies in Seattle: the game has taken on new meaning. Instead of just being a football game between two big time programs played out in a beautiful stadium in the city of Seattle, it will be looked on as more than that. Because the NBA recently approved the move of the Super Sonics to Oklahoma City it will be pictured as thieves returning to the scene of the crime.  
    The Oklahoma University Sooners didn’t steal the NBA team. But it doesn’t help that the word, Sooners, means land thieves. Just like it doesn’t help that the word Super Sonics stands for jet airplanes. Yes, jet airplanes that land. Symbolically, Oklahomans will have stolen a   team with a name of an apparatus that LANDS. Yes, it is a stretch. But Seattlites, folks who are possibly elitist but by no means dummies, will make the connection between land thieves and airplanes that land and will wrongfully want to take revenge on the Oklahoma Sooners.

    That’s why when wagon loads of Sooners, the Dear Wife and I included, descend on Seattle for the weekend of Sept 12th through 14th I fear for them and us. I’m sure most Sooners will be traveling by covered wagon in lieu of flying. Because flying means coming on jet airplanes, the most likely to be Boeing-made, and we’ve all been hearing about their LANDing gear problems.
    Here’s another thing associated with the trip. What is the first thing a visitor wants to do upon arriving in Seattle? Get some coffee, of course. Best coffee in the world. Seattle is known for its coffee. And where best to get Seattle coffee? Starbucks, of course. Especially since it’s not crowded because all the locals are boycotting since the owner of Starbucks, Howard Schultz,  sold the Seattle Sonics basketball team to investors from Oklahoma. This means Oklahomans visiting Seattle should be able to walk in, not have to stand in line, pay way too much for a cup of coffee and enjoy it in a not so crowded café.  That’s fine except for one thing: POISON!!

    I’m telling Oklahomans if you walk into a Starbucks keep both the red and white and the Boomer-Sooner on the down low. Starbucks employees aren’t too happy with Howard Schultz, either. You don’t get any tips when the locals are boycotting. And they especially didn’t care for it when Boss Schultz became whiney, saying things like “NBA salaries are EXPENSIVE!” Well, duhh, Mr. Lord of Lattes, these guys have skills a little beyond telling us “You can have a tall, grande or venti.”

    I looked up a Steve Kelley 2006 Seattle Times article written shortly after Shultz sold the team to Bennett and his Oklahoma investors for $ 350 million. The article had a few Schultz quotes and you could tell from day one Schultz may have had mugs of knowledge about coffee but didn’t know a donut from a slam dunk about running a basketball franchise. Things like the “KeyArena lease agreement” and “economic realities of the NBA” all came across as items just discovered by Schultz, like bags of coffee beans that had fallen behind the refrigerator. There was one other thing Schultz should have known – there were more billionaires living within fifty miles of him than in all of Oklahoma and yet, he couldn’t get a single one interested. “I think there was a little naivete.” That’s another Schultz quote making Starbucks employees cringe when hearing it repeated. Who wants to work for a naïve boss?

    So I’m telling my fellow Sooner fans, be mindful. Bring a food taster along when shopping at Starbucks and don’t dare go to the Waterfront Bar in Bellingham where Ted Bundy, Kenneth Bianchi, John Muhammed and all the other serial killers congregate. Some of those serial killers might be basketball fans… or worse yet, Huskies fans.