Thunder championship demands an original best-in-lifetime Oklahoma list
The Thunder get one spot.
It’s the top spot, but they get only one. But just to prove we’ve been paying attention, we’ll throw in a quick NBA-only list to complement their spot.
Got it?
What we’re doing is ranking the top five events, stories, moments in Oklahoma sports history.
There is one rule.
It must have taken place in my lifetime, which is to say since Sept. 2, 1968, and for reasons I can’t explain, I’ve got seven because five just won't do.
If I utterly miss something, I apologize. If we merely disagree, such is the nature of lists and you’re free to offer one of your own.
Ready?
Go.
1. Oklahoma City’s NBA championship.
The Thunder are at the top, for they’re the only team the whole state claims. That they’re the second-youngest team ever to do it makes it bigger. That they did it with off-the-charts humility and camaraderie make it more unique, special and appreciated.
Durant, Westbrook and Harden could have won a title, but it wouldn’t have been like this.
Because we don’t want the Thunder to dominate the list, which they very well could given their bridging of the Bedlam divide, here’s four more NBA-only items.
1b: The Sonics move from Seattle to become the Thunder prior to the 2008-09 season, which might have been the skullduggerous plan all along, not that anybody around here’s complaining.
1c: The aforementioned Thunder of Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook and James Harden steering Oklahoma City to the 2012 NBA Finals, only to fall in five games to Miami.
1d: The New Orleans Hornets relocating to Oklahoma City in the wake of Hurricane Katrina for most of the 2005-06 and 2006-07 seasons, a natural disaster calamity without which OKC would have remained a minor league city.
Think about that!
1e. Paul George’s trade to the Clippers, the move that brought Shai Gilgeous-Alexander to OKC, not to mention the draft capital that’s allowed general manager Sam Presti to work his magic.
Now, back to the top seven.
2. Barry Switzer leading Sooner football to the 1974 and ’75 national championships.
They were the Sooners’ first two crowns since Bud Wilkinson’s last one, claimed in 1956. They were accomplished over a span of time Oklahoma was beaten only once. And Switzer was such a swashbuckling, colorful and charismatic rookie coach, even today he’s still called “The King.”
3. Wayman Tisdale and the birth of “Billy Ball.”
Wayman came along in 1982 and Sooner basketball, led by third-year coach Billy Tubbs, exploded.
Tisdale became the first freshman ever to earn consensus first-team All-America honors. He averaged 25.6 and 10.1 rebounds over three seasons in which OU went a combined 84-20.
And over a span of eight seasons beginning with his arrival, the Sooners won 30 or more games three times, 29 in another, received four No. 1 NCAA tournament seeds and averaged more than 100 points per game three times.
4. Coach Patty Gasso’s Sooner softball four-peat.
Another option for this spot could simply be Sooner softball, 2000 forward, because the four-peat is also part of eight championships between 2000 and 2024.
Still, the four-peat, by itself, remains the type of dominance we’d all presumed could no longer be attained.
It’s there alongside UCLA men’s basketball, Tennessee and Connecticut women’s basketball and North Carolina women’s soccer.
You can look them up.
Yet, each of those originated before the sport had blown up on the national landscape. OU’s diamond dominance didn’t, making it a much tougher trick.
5. Bryant ‘Big Country” Reeves and the Bedlam basketball rivalry between coaches Eddie Sutton and Kelvin Sampson.
Reeves, from tiny Gans, arrived in Stillwater in 1991 and was an instant folk-hero, leading the Cowboys to their first NCAA tournament since ’83 and three more after that.
The momentum of the stretch eventually yielded another run of eight straight Poke appearances beginning in ’98, the ’04 Final Four included.
The Sooners reached six of those same eight NCAA tourneys, the ’02 Final Four included and Bedlam, in any sport, has not been as passionate since.
6. OU’s 2000 national championship.
The ’99 season may have been the bigger miracle because nobody thought OU could be competitive again so fast, such were the depths of the three-season John Blake era.
But a national championship that quickly, from a second-year head coach, Bob Stoops, with a defense out of the Switzer ’70s and a passing offense OU had never known from a quarterback nobody’d ever heard of until his Norman arrival, in the age of the conference title game, thus yielding 13 wins …
Who could have dreamt it?
7. Barry Sanders’ 1988 Heisman Trophy season.
Yes, the Sooner fanbase may dwarf the Poke one, but Sanders’ season is one for the ages. Officially, Sanders rushed for 2,648 yards over 11 games, scoring 37 touchdowns, rushing for 238.9 yards per game at 7.6 yards per carry.
But if Oklahoma State’s Holiday Bowl appearance were counted in Sanders’ season stats, as bowl and playoff games are now, the numbers would instead be 12 games, 2,870 rushing yards and 42 touchdowns.
Nonetheless, though 13- and 14-game seasons have become commonplace over the last 25 years, Sanders' lesser rushing yardage count — 2,648 — has still not been eclipsed.