Aubrey’s spending was infectious. He led the funding of a sleek new $3.5 million boathouse and training center on the recently restored and renamed Oklahoma River, which drew the U.S. Olympic Committee to the onetime drainage ditch to run the trials in sprint canoe/kayak for the 2008 Beijing Games. And wouldn’t you know it, Chesapeake’s biggest competitor in the shale gas play, Devon Energy, announced plans to build a $10 million boathouse right next door. When Chesapeake embarked on an expansion of its corporate campus, along with a big commercial development nearby, Devon Energy again went Aubrey one better. In March 2008, Devon’s chairman and CEO, Larry Nichols, heralded his own company’s plans to build a thirty-seven-story, million-square-foot, $350 million office tower in the heart of downtown Oklahoma City. By late spring, with gas prices on their dizzying upward trajectory and Devon’s workforce still growing, the building specs were expanding. “Those numbers are no longer good numbers,” Nichols said. When Devon Energy finally unveiled the scale models that August, the tower-to-be was now a fifty-four-story, 1.8-million-square-foot, $750 million behemoth. “We want to create a building that adds to [the city’s] momentum,” Nichols said. “A building that says to the rest of the world that Oklahoma City is an exciting, dynamic, vibrant place to be.”
Construction cranes sprouted on the Oklahoma City horizon like oil derricks. A Dell computer office complex was already up and running, and an American Indian Cultural Center was rising on the riverfront. Residents of Oklahoma City had got to believing their own press: fourth on the list of best cities for commuters, according to Forbes, seventh cleanest, nineteenth best for job seekers. And the coup de grâce: the most recession-proof city in America. This seemed a mighty tall stretch for a city whose economy was built on the always-fickle boom-and-bust oil and gas industry. But, well, who didn’t want to believe? Who didn’t want to be part of this adventure?
Aubrey-ness seems to have fired up the entire city and urged it forward. “The coxswain is the one who steers the boat, the inspiration,” one of his many local acolytes said of him. “If you have a good coxswain, you can win the race even if you don’t have athletes as good as those in the other boats. And Aubrey was our coxswain….There were naysayers, not that they were critical, but it was hard for them to imagine. But Aubrey got it. For him, no dream was too big.” Aubrey McClendon truly believed he could change the future, one of his friends would say of him. And the thing he had already changed in 2008 was his hometown’s idea of itself.
Oklahoma City’s long-standing habit had been to see itself through the eyes of outsiders, and it was not a healthy habit. The lyrics to the famous Broadway musical notwithstanding, the residents of Oklahoma City knew that in the popular imagination of the nation, “Oklahoma” rarely brought to mind wavin’ wheat, or corn as high as an elephant’s eye, or meadows bathed in bright golden haze. “Oklahoma” was more likely to conjure a black-and-white world of want and woe, of underfed domestic refugees fleeing a dusty hellscape. “It’s burned in everybody’s mind, that ‘Grapes of Wrath’ image,” lamented an aspiring young architect to The Oklahoman in the spring of 2008. The most hard-hearted Americans regarded residents of OKC as the descendants of folks who lacked the gumption to git up and git to California seventy years earlier. It was an unfair and uninformed opinion, but that didn’t make the reputation any less tough to live with or to live down. “We kind of inherently knew that the rest of America did not consider us a place worth talking about, living in, visiting, and doing business in,” Oklahoma City’s current mayor, David Holt, explained to an out-of-town reporter. “For a long time, people were sort of embarrassed if you were to run into your cousin on the east coast. You would have instinctively sort of badmouthed your own city, and that would have been part of the deal of living here.”
But even facing these cultural headwinds, Oklahoma Citians had been trying, by God, for a couple of generations at least, to get themselves some national respect. And naturally, OKC’s big-city ambitions sparkled to life in the effulgence of its oil and gas industry. The first big move came in the early 1960s, at the tail end of a long and insistent postwar oil boom, when city fathers had the cash on hand to entice a renowned architect to come to Oklahoma City and give it a full-on makeover. I. M. Pei had already pulled off the Mile High Center in Denver and had hired on to perform similar urban renewal projects in Boston, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, and New York. He agreed to make Oklahoma City another of the big jewels in his crown. Maybe the biggest. The Pei Plan, when approved by the city council in 1965, was bold in vision and in promise. Much of downtown Oklahoma City’s stodgy, low-slung, redbrick history would be wiped away and replaced with a new convention center, office towers, residential buildings, wide avenues, parks, gardens, and lakes. “Perhaps a monorail in the future,” boasted the promotional material. The urban landscape included a public park modeled on the Danish amusement park that had inspired Walt Disney’s famous Disneyland. And the entire development was to be anchored, of course, by a million-square-foot shopping mall called the Galleria.
The bulldozers, dynamite shooters, and wrecking crews got right to work. The Urban Renewal Authority’s hired contractors razed nearly 450 downtown buildings to make way for Pei’s grand plan. Private property owners got caught up in the fever too, taking down another 75 buildings merely on their own recognizance. “They were in a rush to create something shiny and new,” one local newsman remarked. Creation proved much more difficult than destruction. A dozen years in, the forest fire of urban renewal had somewhat arbitrarily wiped away much of the old growth. Venerable and well-regarded structures like the thirty-story Biltmore Hotel, the old Overholser Opera House, the Mercantile Building, the terra-cotta Baum Building (Oklahoma City’s architectural paean to the Doge’s Palace in Venice), and three major department stores were gone. But not much new growth had sprouted in its place. Revenue to fund the big reimagining of downtown—and to fund everything else—had dried up as the oil and gas industry suffered a series of long, slow downward turns, eased only a little by the occasional, too short mini-boom. While the powers at the Oklahoma City Urban Renewal Authority had been able to fund and produce a short booster film with a snappy new theme song—“Listen to the wind that rushes by you, listen to the magic in the air, that’s the sound of people working hand in hand…growing with pride, growing with love, bringing lots of things that we’ve been dreaming of”—the authority had not been able to produce many actual buildings. There was an expanding new hospital complex and a spectacularly ugly theater center building. There was also the beginning of a massive parking structure for servicing the hordes drawn to the Galleria shopping mall. Unfortunately, there was no Galleria shopping mall.
The most ardent downtown boosters stayed strong through the 1970s and into the first years of the 1980s, while hopes of finally realizing the Pei Plan rose and fell with the price of oil and the fortunes of the city’s dominant industry. But then, in 1982, the industry, as one local oilman put it, “just ran over a cliff one night.” The price of oil fell sharply and stayed down. It bottomed out near $10 a barrel in the summer of 1986. Six in ten energy-related jobs in Oklahoma disappeared in just a few years. One in five banks had gone under by the end of the decade. Annual bankruptcies in the state quadrupled. The state’s tax revenues from oil production—which had accounted for more than 30 percent of Oklahoma’s total revenues—fell by half. And Oklahoma City took the worst of it. Seven of the capital city’s ten biggest banks folded. More than a third of the offices in its downtown were empty. The Pei Plan, long on life support, was pronounced dead in 1988.
OKC gumption did not die with it. GOD GRANT US ANOTHER BOOM, read a popular bumper sticker at the time, AND THE WISDOM NOT TO PISS IT AWAY. In 1990–1991, town leaders engaged in a spirited fight against bigger cities like Indianapolis, Denver, and Louisville in the twenty-one-month bidding war for United Airlines’ billion-dollar maintenance center. The new facility promised sixty-three hundred
jobs (minimum $45,000 per annum, claimed United) and a whiff of big-city cachet. OKC’s mayor, Ron Norick, figured his team spent more than two thousand hours per person working to woo the country’s second-largest airline—nights, Saturdays, Sundays after church—and it showed. “[United] said Oklahoma City was by far the best prepared, well organized, the most professional, the most courteous, the most responsive,” Norick said, when the final announcement was made in October 1991. But that was cold comfort. Indianapolis had won the day.
“The big enchilada was lost,” Norick admitted, and it hurt. Salt in that wound was the story that went around about the explanation Mayor Norick got from the CEO of United Airlines about what went wrong with the OKC bid. What could the city have done better? the mayor wanted to know. The United CEO, according to the talk of the town, said the mayor and his team had done everything right, but it was never going to be enough. “I just couldn’t imagine making my employees live in OKC,” the United boss had reportedly said. Making them? Whether it was absolutely true or not, the story seemed to line up with Oklahoma City’s bad old habits and long-standing inferiority complex.
Norick himself didn’t confirm the story. “We have nothing to be ashamed about,” he told reporters. “We did an excellent job.”
Norick did his due diligence after the United loss; he flew to Indianapolis, got in a rental car and drove straight into downtown. “I said shoot, I know why they got that United plant,” he explained in a 2009 interview for the Voices of Oklahoma oral history project. “I mean this is a live city. I mean there’s people on the street, and there were restaurants and hotels and a Convention facility and all this stuff….[Indianapolis] had everything. It had Major League sports and they’ve had some big NCAA sporting events….It didn’t take but about thirty minutes driving downtown and I said, ‘Wow, now I’ve got it. Now I’ve got it.’ ”
Norick went to the drawing board when he got home and came up with a new plan to make OKC a worthy opponent in the next competition with the nation’s biggest cities. Then he went to work to convince the residents of Oklahoma City they were capable of competing, if they would just put their money where their hearts were. If you build it, they will come. Norick’s new proposal called for a new indoor sports arena, a minor-league ballpark, a canal, and a public library, along with major overhauls of the convention center and the civic center. And the citizenry backed him. Voters passed a $350 million tax hike to fund this new attempt at downtown renewal at the end of 1993, which meant the ground was just being broken on the early projects when Oklahoma City absorbed its next devastating blow.
On the morning of April 19, 1995, less than a mile from the sites of the proposed new sports arena and library, and for no good reason on earth, an embittered racist, right-wing nutball named Timothy McVeigh detonated a Ryder truck filled with explosives in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. The force of the blast, which was reportedly felt thirty miles away, ripped the face off the Murrah building, and damaged or destroyed more than three hundred nearby structures. Nearly seven hundred innocent people were injured that day, and 168 killed. Among the dead were children who had just been dropped off at the building’s second-floor day-care center. Oklahoma City was suddenly notorious, home to the worst terrorist attack, to that point, in U.S. history. “We know this is making national news across the United States,” a local anchor noted in her report that morning as bodies were being pulled from the rubble.
The effect in Oklahoma City itself was almost impossible to overstate. Two hundred thousand people attended at least one funeral of a bombing victim, and three of every four locals volunteered or gave money in support of devastated survivors. The city took down the remains of the Murrah building, then sanctified and memorialized the grounds.
Aubrey McClendon was among the first major donors to the Oklahoma City National Memorial, and a dozen years after the bombing he and his wife were still donating hundreds of thousands of dollars toward its maintenance and expansion. It stands today as one of the most thoughtful and arresting memorials on American soil. But while that spot will forever stand still, Oklahoma City truly transformed around it. The urban gem so many had hoped for, for so long, finally started to shimmer up out of the prairie. More than $3 billion has been plowed into downtown development since the bombing. Mayor Norick’s entire urban renewal scheme was accomplished, and then some. “The bombings galvanized the average person to realize that the city needed to make a statement,” said Governor Frank Keating. “There was a sense of pride and optimism and faith that bordered on the spiritual.”
The subsequent rise of OKC had doubtless been aided by the renewal of civic pride. And optimism. And faith bordering on the spiritual. But to be honest, what really made it happen, finally, after decades of false starts, was the shale gas boom Aubrey had foreseen back in 2000—the shale gas boom he’d been selling the heck out of for years thereafter. Just like Aubrey, Oklahoma City was riding the wave. By 2008, Oklahoma-based energy companies accounted for something near a tenth of all the natural gas produced in the United States. And the price of natural gas meant those producers were minting money. Oklahoma City’s two biggest, Chesapeake and Devon, scooped up $25 billion in gross revenues in that one year alone. By 2008, the new boom had finally made the dusty little oil and cattle town on the prairie, according to the headline in its glossiest upscale magazine, a “Major League City.”
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Oklahoma Citians could mark the time, to the day, when their city actually gained entry into the Urban Pantheon. “When I look over our history I think there are two birthdays,” Oklahoma City’s mayor, David Holt, likes to say. “One is the day we were created on April 22, 1889, and the second date is when we moved into the first tier of American cities. That’s the day the Thunder took the court.” That is the day, Holt went on, “our descendants will mark all our history as either before or afterwards. It is never going to be the same again….People have this pride in our city now and they take it for granted that we are now part of American pop culture. To feel relevant living here and people knowing where OKC is. That if one of the most famous people on the planet, Kevin Durant, can live here, then obviously it’s an important place in America and the world.”
That a six-foot-nine-inch-tall teenager named Kevin Durant was “one of the most famous people on the planet” in the spring of 2008 is a disputable assertion. But Durant was unquestionably full of promise, and he could draw a crowd—a paying crowd. The skinny, smooth-shooting small forward had won college basketball’s most coveted national player of the year awards and the NBA Rookie of the Year award in back-to-back seasons. His twenty-points-a-game average as an NBA rookie had been one of the few bright spots in the Seattle Supersonics’ dismal 2007–2008 campaign, and as any basketball aficionado could see, he just kept getting better. Durant scored forty-two points and grabbed thirteen rebounds in the Supersonics’ final game of that season, a rare victory for a team that won less than a quarter of its games that year. Three days later, on the thirteenth anniversary of the Murrah building bombing, residents of Oklahoma City woke to the news that the NBA owners had voted 28–2 in favor of moving Durant and all the other Seattle Supersonics players to Oklahoma City. There was a hurdle or two to overcome, like a pending legal dispute between the new owners and the City of Seattle, but it seemed like a done deal. A local news reporter captured the man-on-the-street reaction that summed up the tenor of public sentiment in OKC: “I’m freaking excited about it!”
It felt like a miracle. “The odds of Oklahoma City getting an NBA team in the beginning were incredible,” said David Holt, recalling the story of how Oklahoma City’s then mayor first tried to sell the NBA commissioner on the idea of a franchise in the middle of Oklahoma. It was 2005, and the mayor could point to the growing population, the booming economy (OKC-based companies owned the natural gas industry!), the glass and steel and brick and mortar revitalization of d
owntown, and most of all the brand-new nineteen-thousand-seat arena just waiting for the coming of a professional sports team. Any professional sports team. The NBA commissioner, David Stern, was open to the mayor’s sales pitch, and polite. He did not rub the mayor’s face in the less inviting facts on the ground. Oklahoma City was the nation’s forty-fifth-biggest television market, for instance, on a par with Greenville, South Carolina, and Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The city’s recent history was not so very uplifting. “We had allowed ourselves to be branded by our tragedies,” the mayor admitted. “If you said ‘Oklahoma City,’ chances are the next word out of your mouth was ‘bombing.’ ” And the longer history offered little to brag about. The entire state of Oklahoma, let alone Oklahoma City, had never fielded a team in one of the four major U.S. sports leagues—the NFL, the NBA, Major League Baseball, or the NHL. Stern suggested OKC might want to start with training wheels, so to speak, in the smallest and least competitive league. He told the mayor as he ushered him out of his New York office, “I see an NHL team in your future.”
OKC finally caught a break when tragedy struck another city—when relentless and damaging floodwaters following Hurricane Katrina disgorged the NBA’s New Orleans Hornets from their home arena. Stern agreed to let Oklahoma City host the Hornets’ home games until the New Orleans Arena was put back to rights. In Oklahoma City, turns out, the Hornets drew better than eighteen thousand fans per game for two full seasons, thirty-five hundred more than the team had drawn in New Orleans. The Hornets moved back to the Big Easy two years later, just the same, and that might have been Oklahoma City’s final brief brush with the NBA, if it wasn’t for Aubrey McClendon and a few of his friends. Buoyed by the success of the Hornets, eight Oklahoma City business titans went out in the summer of 2006 and bought themselves the Seattle Supersonics. Aubrey and his partners—each of whom had profited more or less enormously from the shale gas boom—forked over $350 million to seal the deal. “The same amount of money that was put into [the downtown improvement project] by the people of OKC,” David Holt once noted, “was put into a team by four guys and their friends.”
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