-The Kingdome imploded and Seattleites could not look away.
At 25 stories tall and two blocks wide,
it was one of the biggest status symbols on the planet.
For a quarter century since it opened on March 27, 1976,
its 260 million pounds anchored the city in the big leagues.
Mediocre for most of their history,
the Seahawks compiled a respectable 177 record
at the Kingdome.
In their 1979 championship season,
the Sonics led the league in home attendance there.
Come holy triumph or damned defeat,
Seattle fanatics crammed into this citadel
of civic connection, 414,000 strong,
attended the good Reverend Billy Graham's
eight-day of Evangelistic extravaganza in May 1976 there.
That set the record for the largest home crowd
ever for a single event. And in the history books,
the Kingdome had a place that could never be erased.
But a single day shy of its 24th birthday, on Sunday,
March 26th, 2000, it would be reduced to rubble.
Control Demolition Inc.
strapped 4461 pounds of explosives to its roofs,
the Kingdome would implode at 8:30 a.m.
After a course of detonation devices,
the concrete colossus took 16.8 seconds to crumble.
Yellowish-brown soot billowed
from the blast site in Pioneer Square,
sullying a sunny Seattle morning.
The pillar reached as high as the Bank of America
tower 76 stories,
it left dust everywhere it drifted.
It was Mount St. Helens all over again.
And after the show,
Emerald City locals marauded around Pioneer Square,
cupping their hands to the site stadium
to try to saw off the car windshields and into Ziploc bags
because the rubbish could fetch a few bucks
on the new website eBay.
On the city's hilltop neighborhoods,
some of the neighborhoods --
some of Seattle's nouveau-riche held swanky implosion
watch parties on the observation decks of high-rise condos,
some tech VPs and top tier project managers
congregated on rooftop bars,
drinking mimosas and expensive microbrews
while waiting for the final countdown.
They rented the Smith Tower's 35th-floor panorama
and charged 216 bucks a pop for champagne
brunch views of the stadium's demise.
Like their settler forebearers who docked near the place
that became Seattle in November 18,
'51, they sailed their boats to Elliott Bay
and set their sights on Pioneer Square.
Unlike their settler forebearers,
these boats were motorized
and had fully stocked liquor shelves.
Middle managers and IT grunts
who couldn't afford front-row seats
to the spectacle of destruction
got together wherever they could.
They went to visit that friend of theirs place
who had a resemblance of a view.
They shopped at Le Bon Marché for something nice to wear
to watch parties, Nordstorms if they could swing it.
While awaiting their publicly funded stadium's demise,
petite bourgeois party-goers cued REM's
"It's the End of the World as We Know It" on a burned CD.
As the debris settled, they played Queen's
"Another One Bites the Dust#,
and the Verve's "Bitter Sweet Symphony"
because that was the witty thing to do.
The city's introverts, the silent awkward,
overwhelming majority of its population,
to be sure, stayed at home
and watched the King 5 broadcast of the Kingdome's collapse.
"I think a lot of people don't understand
the destruction of a perfectly functional building,
said anchor Jean Enersen."
There's reasons to believe faces of color
were few and far between Kingdome implosion festivities.
In Chinatown, the Asian Counseling and Referral Service
held a gathering to dance on the Kingdome's grave.
Some of the attendees were elders who had fought
the stadium's placement in Chinatown.
At the Kingdome groundbreaking ceremony back in November 1972,
they had thrown mud balls at elected officials.
Organizers leveraged their civil unrest into public resources
for Asian Seattleites in the inner city.
A nonprofit offering behavioral health programs
and human services.
ACRS had grown out of this protest.
"I don't have many fond memories of the Kingdome,"
said Chinatown activist Bob Santos,
"but we got out of it what we wanted."
Seattle spectators didn't come together
to watch the Kingdome's implosion so much
as the Kingdome's implosion revealed the city's divisions.
The last time Seattleites had gathered
en mass was during the World Trade Organization
protests in late 1999.
Three hundred police officers in riot gear patrolled
the Kingdome demolition site perimeter,
looking for civil unrest to stifle.
But with nothing to do, some cops and armored vehicles
let kids straddle their tanks for family photos.
In the days leading up to the main event,
the city eradicated a homeless encampment near the Kingdome.
The Seattle Times had said,
"No wonder they feel at home here near a building condemned,
broken down, and washed up."
By imploding the Kingdome to build the football arena,
voters had elected to fund in 1997,
Seattleites pissed away $668 million in civic debt
for the new facility. At the time, 5000
Seattleites had no roof to sleep under.
The Seattle Post Intelligence
had reported that those incarcerated
at the King County Correctional Facility
had the best vantage point of the waste of resources.
"As the dome fell,
prisoners cheered from their terrific view."
The demolition registered a 2.3 on the Richter scale,
gently shaking meal trays in the jail cafeteria.
Seattle was supposed to be the city
that transcended the old conflicts, a city above history,
but at the turn of the century,
it was sinking like everywhere else.
Two weeks after the Kingdome implosion,
the NASDAQ index collapsed erasing the fortunes
of Seattle's nouveau riche.
By cratering Seattle's economy,
the dot-com recession completed the damage
to the city's reputation that the WTO protest had started.
Seattle was not exceptional.
If capitalism coughed, it would catch a cold.
Seeing Seattle's declining cache
and the increasing outspokenness viewings at Boeing.
After WTO, Boeing announced in March 2001
that it would be relocating its corporate headquarters
to Chicago.
"Seattle hasn't a lot to cheer --
hasn't had a lot to cheer about lately,"
said the Seattle Times on March 27th, 2000,
after what would have been the Kingdome's birthday.
"A dream had imploded with the stadium,
the Kingdome was a public facility conceived
as part of the forward-thrust civic improvements
in the heady 1960s.
It embodied the hope that American city dwellers
could come together to solve their problems
and maybe even have fun while doing so."
What the commentariat who ranked urban areas
in major periodicals like Time and Newsweek
wanted to see were cities
with popular entertainments like pro sports.
They wanted cities with lucrative industries
and widespread prosperity.
Cities with the same arts and culture scenes
that were being displaced in the stratified cities
that they praised.
Cities that pacified urban conflicts
between groups that had all the power
and those that had none.
One by one, the public literati that dissected
and ranked urban areas realized
that no city any longer satisfied
the criteria for city of the future,
not Los Angeles or Cincinnati
with their turn of the century flare-ups over police brutality,
not New York or Chicago with their blighted neighborhoods
and high crime rates, and certainly not Seattle
with its unsightly anti-capitalist protests,
fleeing corporations, and growing population
of people experiencing homelessness.
Consequently, public sentiment in the 2000s
turned not just against individual cities
but against urban America as a whole.
The dream of the great US metropolis was dead,
deader than the Kingdome.
In the past, American cities were seen as having problems.
By the year 2000, many believed they were the problem.
-Hello, everybody, I'm Kurt Streeter.
I'm a reporter at the New York Times
and although I work for the gray lady in New York,
I'm a native of Seattle, grew up in Seattle,
went to Roosevelt High School,
South Shore Middle School near Rainier Beach.
I've deep, deep ties to this city.
And I left town for about 30 years or so
but I've come back fairly recently to work.
And I just want to say I'm really pleased to be here.
Your work is -- your book is absolutely fantastic.
-I appreciate you. Welcome home
and thank you so much for joining on this rainy,
really rainy Sunday afternoon. It's great to be with you.
-Classic Seattle day.
-Absolutely. -How to begin here?
I think one of the things that I wanted to just start
with really was a discussion of why this book?
How did this book begin? Why did you choose this topic?
Because it's pretty unusual.
-Yeah. So, this is -- it's a pandemic book
in a lot of ways and a quarantine book in specific.
The research for the early-going chapters,
the sort of foundation of the book
was laid at a point in time where I think all of us
were pretty starved for connection of various kinds,
civic connection, nonetheless.
In the, you know, months of March, April,
May, June of the year 2000,
the sports calendar had come to a near complete stop.
The games that we had gotten used to sort of marking
the passage of time by opening day,
the NBA Finals, a lot of that was put on hold.
And I think in a lot of ways you could say
that there was a certain amount of --
excuse me -- a certain amount of nostalgia
that crept in for that civic connection
but also realizing that our politics in Seattle
had seemed to have stagnated in much the same way
that our day-to-day lives had stagnated as well.
So I really wanted to try to take the opportunity to go back,
look at our newspaper archives, figure out how it was
that the city had responded to the earlier
slowdown of the Spanish Flu, as it was called in 1918.
And it was somewhere there in realizing
that people were having all the same kinds of discussions,
at that point 100 years ago, that we were having now as far
as when are the Seattle metropolitans
going to resume play with hockey,
when would people be able to go back to UW football games,
when would sort of the quality of life,
the pace of life that people had gotten used to
in the rapidly modernizing progressive era,
a time where automobiles, movie theaters,
lit streets were all invented, right?
So, a very -- a time where there was
a dramatic rate of technological change
that for a time had sort of stopped and paused,
and people were very disoriented by that I think in some ways
as disoriented by technology pausing
as they were by the emergence of all of this technology.
So, I think that was where I started to sort of piece
together the kind of story that I wanted to tell.
So, I think it to answer your question
why this book at this time,
I think it was a response to feeling like there
was a historicity of our own condition
that I wanted to try to explore in our archives.
And reading, you know a lot of our old newspapers,
the rich volume of secondary source material
about the city of Seattle that's been written,
I wanted to try to see if I couldn't add to it.
-And I love the word historicity, that's fantastic.
One of the things that really strikes me about the book
and that I love is you go back
deep into the history of the city.
And this this book really combines two of my great loves,
sports, I was an athlete,
and also the critique and deeper understanding of society.
And for people to really understand this city now,
we have to understand the city in its origins.
What can you tell us about the Seattle of the 1800s,
early 1900s, and its relationship with sports?
-So, an early -- and it's such a cool question.
I think one of the themes
that I discovered really early on that it seemed to me
that I wanted to sort of extrapolate over and talk about
and really spin out was sort of this idea
that Seattle as a western frontier settler city
never really left behind its origins
as a settler outpost in a lot of ways.
Sure, you know, there was the early frontier period,
the early period of contact between White settlers
and the indigenous people who were already here.
And eventually, on top of the civilization
that indigenous people had stewarded,
Seattleites added public parks.
They put on, you know, great bike paths,
there were a great public stadia
that were built, Dugdale Park in 1912,
the Seattle Ice Arena some years later.
But there was an underlying kind of wildness
and an underlying cruelty in a lot of ways
that underwrote both the city's --
what it found entertaining and also its social order.
The fact that there were still a lot of Seattleites who,
for example, had very virulent anti-socialist points of view
because they felt that there was something about socialism
as an ideology that did something
to sort of temper the frontier wildness,
that businessmen and great bureaucrats
were the ones who were supposed to be exhibiting.
This idea that the true nature of the city
was supposed to be a sort of dog-eat-dog city.
So, how dare you have people come in
with social service agencies,
people who are interested in building hospitals,
people who are interested in building mass transit?
These were ideas that were actually pretty tenacious
going all the way into the present arguably,
but definitely into the years of the progressive era.
And you see that in what the city found entertaining, right?
I tell the story about a fight that takes place
in a Seattle Metropolitans hockey game
where somebody writes into the letter --
writes into the Seattle Post Intelligence
or writes a letter of the editor that says --
is actually complaining about the refereeing
of the Stanley Cup Championship
between the Mets and the Montreal Canadians,
not because it was under-officiated
but because it was over-officiated.
And the phrase that he uses, well,
if there's somebody who's a silly ass
who wants to start a scrap, that's his prerogative,
the referee should let them duke it out.
Throughout the 20th century,
we had intensely racialized boxing matches
that I tell the story of one which in the 1950s,
a fight between a local White amateur named Pete Rademacher
who thought he was Rocky before Rocky,
challenges the heavyweight championship of the world.
And there's essentially a White mob in the city of Seattle
that is ready to really throw the heft of their weight
behind this guy because they want to see
the Black champion at that point in time,
Floyd Patterson taking down a peg.
So, I try to tell this recurring theme about this idea
that though Seattle styled itself as a city
that was able to turn its back on its small-town origins,
on its frontier origins.
A lot of the insecurity that came from that position
never was really completely left behind.
And one of the ways that the city was able
to sort of prove its worth in the pop culture arena
was through being a host of great games.
To bring this aspect of the story
all the way into the present, you know, we had --
we're going to have -- getting ready to host,
I believe it's the FIFA World Cup coming up,
some of those matches, in another few years,
the Seattle All-Star Game.
That was an impetus for the Mayor's Office in the city
to go ahead and sweep out some homeless encampments.
And so, I think that there's constantly this tension
between what Seattle feels like it
has to do to get recognition
and, you know, how that actually plays out,
and how we're treating especially some of
our most vulnerable residents
that I wanted to explore over the course of the book.
-Shaun, that's really -- you know,
you mentioned the insecurity of the city
and I've always been sort of struck by that and Seattle
just never seemed growing up.
And even kind of coming back in college
while I was in college and I always felt
that the city was never really comfortable with itself,
could never just be fully comfortable
with what it is and happy with itself,
it always had to be a world-class city.
And that's actually one of the ways
that as I recall the baseball stadium
was as they were trying to sell that to voters
to give millions of taxpayer money
to build the baseball stadium.
The argument was in order to be a world-class city,
we have to have this stadium.
And the same thing with the football stadium, right?
-Absolutely. I think in some ways
the default civic mood in Seattle
is anxiety in a lot of ways
because we're the city that's not --
you know, we're not Fresno or Rochester,
or you know God forbid
Albuquerque, but we're not going to be
New York or Los Angeles or Chicago.
So, occupying kind of the -- I want to call it like sort of
the middle child syndrome of urban America
where we're constantly sort of feeling like
there's somebody that we have to be ahead of
and somebody that we're constantly chasing as well.
So, I think that that's really the motivation
behind a lot of the public resources
that we pour into our sports
because we feel like that's going to be the thing
that's actually going to get us to that sort of next stage.
And if it can't do that, then at least
it will keep us from backsliding and being surpassed by a city
that we believe we're better than, frankly.
-We don't want to be Portland or Tacoma too, right?
You know, I think another thing, Shaun,
that you tease out a lot in -- well,
it's really a theme of this book is sort of the push-pull
between the idea of rugged individualism
and the idea of I guess what I'd call kind of communitarianism
or, you know -- and then the progressive movement.
You're speaking about --
just now about public investment in sports.
Well, part of that too is the City Beautiful movement
which was - and maybe you can explain that a bit.
But I think one of the great things about
Seattle is its park system. And I grew up and I'm definitely
a direct beneficiary of the park system here.
Can you explain to us a little bit of sort of that history
and the progressive movement, and City
Beautiful, and how these parks came together,
and some of the tensions there?
-So, as we're talking to one another in 2024,
the feeling is that though
Seattle is competitive for sort of West Coast dominance
with a lot of cities like Portland, you know,
Boise somewhere up there, Tacoma that there's a reason why
Seattle for many years was known as sort of the Queen City
of the Pacific Northwest, right?
It has to do with the amount of mega-corporations
that are located here,
how much space the city is able to occupy
in the arena of popular culture, general notoriety, and fame.
There was a period in time about a century and a half ago
where that discussion was not settled, right?
Newcastle, Olympia, Tacoma,
to say nothing of Portland, San Francisco.
There were all sort of cities that were sort of vying
for what was going to be the next great trade hub.
And how were these cities going to find a way
to differentiate themselves from one another,
chiefly for the purposes of attracting East Coast capital
and investment? Seattle as it starts to --
you know, the first competition was to figure out
how we're going to go about getting a railroad.
Once that is secured in the 1890s or so,
we're looking around and trying to figure out
what the next step is going to be.
And very early on, city bureaucrats realized
that a big differentiating factor between
Seattle, Portland, and Oakland, other West Coast cities
was whether or not you had a great park system.
And so, Seattle had sort of in the 1880s
had a piecemeal park system
that was funded mostly through the kindness of billionaires
who donated land or donated money to acquire land.
But residents of Seattle in 1902
actually elected tax themselves for the express purpose
of acquiring more parks land in the city.
Later on in that decade,
the city leaders partnered with the Olmsted firm,
which was responsible for great progressive
era public works in the form of parks in many other cities.
There was a public election that takes place in 1912
called the Bogue Plan for that, that was going to establish,
in addition to almost 100 miles of subway transit,
it was going to lead to the acquisition
of thousands of acres of park space throughout the city,
culminating in a great People's Park
that was going to be on Mercer Island,
that was supposed to be the Seattle's answer
to Central Park in New York City.
Well, needless to say, the Bogue Plan in 1912 was not ratified,
but the ambition that I think it encapsulated spoke to this idea
that that in the progressive era,
city dwellers could pull the levers of the public sector,
they could use public funds,
they could motivate public sentiment
to create great institutions.
I want to say probably something like 60 or 70% of the Bogue Plan
eventually made its way out, you know, piecemeal,
and how the city went about acquiring Parks land,
Jennifer has actually written a great book about this topic
that I draw on quite a lot in the research for this book.
But I found this episode really fascinating
because it was one of these instances where you look back
and say there's absolutely no way given stagnation
and the general lack of appetite
I think among too many power holders in our city's history,
past, present, and especially present
and unfortunately maybe future that something like that
would be able to happen again.
In other words, what do you think it would look like
if you were to put a ballot measure in front of city voters
right now to say what we need to do is expand access
to parks' public investment in the construction of parks,
we need to have more public spaces for people
to be able to gather in and, you know,
enjoy the dozen or so sunny days that we get in Seattle.
And that would be a deeply contested fight.
And you could see for people
who are familiar with the city and its politics
where and why all the opposition would come to that.
So, I wanted to really explore kind of this idea
about this was an episode in our history
where we got together to do something really,
really great and big. What is it going to take
to actually muster the similar kinds
of political will to move in a similar direction
at a different and later point, knowing that the same opposition
that we had to a fight like establishing Great Parks in 1912
is probably going to look really similar to what the opposition
to that would look like in 2024?
-Central Park, Mercer Island
so all of Mercer Island being said.
-All of Mercer Island, literally all of it.
It would have been cool. It would have been cool.
-Hopefully, nobody here lives in Mercer Island.
But let's move forward a little bit into more recent history.
The team of my youth, the real great Seattle Sonics team,
not the Seattle Sonics team of Shawn Kemp and Gary Payton,
but the Seattle Sonics of Gus Williams,
Fred Brown, Jack Sikma, Lonnie Shelton, John Johnson,
the team that won the NBA Championship
and was coached by Lenny Wilkens, which was part of --
Lenny was part of this incredible run of history
of Black coaches, well, for the Sonics and Seattle.
What -- why is that team in particular important?
And also just the -- and also if you can dive
into a little bit of the kind of the history of the Sonics?
We got to get them back.
But when they came to the -- when they came to this city
in the, you know, mid to late 1960s,
how the Sonics were treated by the city?
-So, I tried to write a book that unfolded
in a lot of ways as a novel would unfold.
And if you're a fan of fiction, you know that you have --
especially epic historical fiction, right,
it tends to be multiple overlapping stories
that sometimes take up the duration of many generations.
You have hopefully, compelling settings.
Frequently a love interest of some kind,
in this case, the interest is between the city and its people
and its games and the attachment and the heartbreak
and triumph that has resulted from that.
But you also have to have really compelling characters too.
And so, in the process of formulating the book,
I wanted to really try to find characters and motivations
that I identified with.
I don't know what this says about me
but most of my characters tend to be over --
they tend to be driven by spite and like the idea
that we're going to show them one day.
And so, Lenny Wilkens is definitely somebody
who fits into that category as somebody who is named
a player-coach of the Seattle SuperSonics.
In 1967 is sent a hate mail by many residents of Seattle
who are not quite ready to see a Black person
in a position of leadership.
Lenny Wilkens's teams experiences some success
in the middle 1970s until he's summarily released,
at which point the Portland Trailblazers
who Wilkens had had a seminal role
in putting together, win the NBA title.
So, not only is Lenny Wilkens sort of expunged from a city
that he had sort of,
you know, developed really deep ties in and suffered
with trying to bring a franchise into relevancy,
but the other West Coast city that he had coached for
has now won a title without him
but with the team that he put together.
And so he simmered with revenge.
And Lenny Wilkens is eventually brought back
as Director of Seattle SuperSonics as player personnel.
I believe it was in 1977 on the route
to becoming the team's head coach one more time.
And this was going to be Lenny Wilkens's chance
to get back at not only the Portland Trailblazers
who were holding a title that he believed
partially belonged to him
but also, he was going to show a lot of --
the portion of White Seattleites
who had rejected him about a decade earlier
that he can coach, that he's a really good coach.
They have a little bit of heartbreak.
In 1978 come up a game short to the Washington Bullets,
and then come back and really piece together
one of the great championship runs that --
and one of the most under-looked championship runs I think too.
I think actually prior to the Nuggets
winning the title last year,
the Sonics had been the only team
since 1979 to win a championship that was not --
from the West Coast team to win a championship
that was not from California or Texas.
So, in this kind of regional competition,
it was kind of Lenny Wilkens that had made
the city stand out.
His story I think parallels the Sonics' story
generally in the sense
that they were not really accepted
when they first came to Seattle. I tell the story in the book
about how a lot of newspaper columnists,
local newspaper columnists
were saying the arrival of an NBA team
doesn't really qualify Seattle as a Big League City,
what you really need is baseball or football.
Paul Silas, who had played with the Sonics for some time,
had commented that it was an unfortunate sentiment
because what it indicated
was that there were many folks in the city of Seattle
that were not ready to see economically empowered
African Americans,
and especially ones that didn't always pay
the requisite deference to White spectatorship.
And so the Sonics kind of pulled together
all of these kind of -- the individual, you know,
drive for recognition that Lenny Wilkens had,
and I think mirrored in some ways the underdog mentality
that the city as a whole has,
even if the city was not able to quite recognize
that they had gotten an incredible gift
of an avatar in the Sonics
and everything that they represented in the latter 1970s.
-I mean, I think that that's a fascinating theme
and a fascinating time for me when I think about Seattle
because Seattle's always had deep racial issues
that are swept under the rug in a city
that like likes to pat itself on the back
as being very progressive and racially harmonious
when it's in fact one extremely segregated
and there are a lot of problems. But in the 1970s in particular,
and when I was a kid,
this was part of my experience, there was busing.
And busing was a major thing in the city.
And a lot of White folks
especially were really pissed off about it.
And then the Sonics come and the Sonics
kind of bring people together in a way, right?
And they show White Seattle a side,
you know, of Black excellence that maybe it had,
you know, subverted for a long, long time.
You wrote sports -- after that championship,
sports in Seattle were a largely hollow spectacle,
a spectacle of social harmony.
And I thought that that was really, really on point.
Could you -- I think most people who live in this city
don't really understand kind of or live in the city now
and were not part of that deeper history, don't really understand
kind of what was going on in the '70s here.
Can you can you get into that a little bit?
And, man, to me, especially busing.
-The way that I try to frame the immediate post-civil
rights era in Seattle and what I was thinking about
in trying to piece that particular chapter,
which is the seventh inning of the book that covers the 1970s.
It's a period where there's a sense
that the civil rights movement had gone too far.
Frankly, there were many White Seattleites
who felt that way.
The assassination of Dr. King in 1968
coupled with the onset of the Vietnam
War leads to mass protests, and those protests touch down in
Seattle as they touch down in most urban areas.
There is a massive protest where about 6000 or 7000
UW students in May of 1970 actually storm Interstate 5.
There are other protests for racial justice.
The Black Panthers are patrolling the streets
in Seattle, as they are in Oakland.
And so, what you see at that period at around the same time
that the Sonics are beginning their ascent
is the backlash to the push for racial justice.
Articles written in the University of Washington
Daily that suggest -- one that was written by a
Seattle area attorney
that suggests that affirmative action programs
are actually reverse racism.
A young woman sues the university,
a young White woman sues the University of Washington
for reverse discrimination
because she has rejected -- her mediocre application
frankly for acceptance into UW is rejected.
She believes that it is because of her racial background.
Never mind the fact that it is actually
White women who are the greatest beneficiaries
of affirmative action statutes in the 1970s.
Throughout urban America and in Seattle specific,
I think you see a lot of backlash that maybe folks
who are familiar with the city and its politics today
could probably recognize the tenure of.
And then here come the Sonics who are eventually accepted,
eventually able to earn sellout crowds at the Seattle Coliseum
and then at the Kingdome eventually become a signpost
for a kind of model of Black empowerment.
So, we have kind of this contradiction.
On the one hand, there's immense racial backlash
throughout most of the 1970s, and on the other hand,
the Sonics are literally the most popular ball game in town.
I try to think about what the nature of that contradiction
is like how do you have something like that?
The thing that I arrived on was the idea that when you had
mass movements in the streets for police accountability,
to say nothing of police abolition on the part
of the Black Panthers, when you have black students
that are scaling the walls of the admin building at UW
to demand greater minority enrollment into the college,
when you had a Black freedom struggle
that was in a lot of ways challenging
the fundamental socioeconomic assumptions
and pillars of a mid-century capitalist society
as it existed at that point, that's pretty threatening
for a lot of people, it seemed threatening.
But the Sonics could be kind of an antidote to that.
They could be a symbol of what President Nixon had called
in a series of television ads
icons of Black capitalism, right?
They could be really, really well paid
and they could drive pretty nice cars,
they could write articles in the Seattle medium
that were sponsored by Coors Beer,
and you could sell lots of tickets
and people could go to buy,
you know, lots of beer and frequent
a lot of establishments downtown while watching the games.
And so if you are able to find a way to pivot,
I think a more challenging demand
that was levied by Black freedom
struggle activists into sort of a general celebration
of free market capitalism,
then suddenly you actually have more of a grounds
for the kind of racial harmony
that many of us still participate
in and celebrate to this day.
So, that's kind of the way that I kind of land on thinking
about how it was that the Sonics
at a time that was so racially polarized
were able to become through a lot of hard-won effort a team
that was celebrated in the city.
-I mean, I got to say, I mean, I think you really hit the nail
on the head with, you know, with that.
Having lived through it and experienced as,
you know, 12-, 13-year-old at the time,
Black kid, you know, growing up in this city
and, you know, the Sonic Fred Brown,
Gus these guys were my -- you know, among my first heroes
and they meant a tremendous amount to me.
But, you know, Seattle was a very different,
you know -- there's still a lot of --
there's still racial issues here.
But let me tell you, growing up in the '70s here --
and I grew up -- my family is somewhat unusual.
I'm mixed. My parents married in 1954.
My dad had been a basketball star at the University of Oregon
when there were only like 10 African Americans
on the campus at U of O.
-And he shut down Elgin Baylor.
-He shut down -- well, yeah,
we could tell that story a little bit later.
But Seattle was also --
so my folks met at on campus at U of O,
got married in Eugene in '54.
Then were looking for their next place to live,
they didn't want to live in Eugene.
Seattle was one of the few cities
where mixed couples could live and they still caught hell here.
So, but there was always this sort of --
there was a progressivism within the city
and an acceptance within the White community
on the one hand that allowed my family
to grow and myself and my four brothers,
and my dad to get his business off the ground.
But then there was -- I mean, we grew up --
I grew up in the north end. I grew up by Green Lake.
Man, the N-word was ringing, ringing.
I mean, that was -- I had to fight.
I mean, I had to just be ready to fight, you know.
And it was the same --
and it was the same for my Black friends
who were in the central area too.
But for me like growing up in North Seattle,
feeling very isolated and where, you know, the racist --
the real racist White kids were just super emboldened.
It's -- yeah. I just love how you got into all that.
So, fantastic job and I don't want to spiel
on too much about me, this is about you.
Let's talk a little bit about something
that I love to write about in my work
has been the role of female athletes
and which I see is really --
like to me that's the story going forward
or in this present time.
But Seattle has an interesting history with women athletes
and I did not know about Helene Madison, right?
Explain. -Yeah.
So, I really think of probably two or three -
I think especially as a historian,
you really try to sit and achieve
some kind of a critical distance
from the people that you write about,
especially if they were from a past generation
because you need a little bit of distance
in order to piece together
how their day-to-day lives sort of looked objectively,
otherwise, you're projecting, right?
Like it was -- there are two or three characters
I want to say that it was incredibly difficult --
historical figures that it was really,
really difficult to maintain that distance from
because I felt like I identified with certain struggles
that were placed in their way so intensely.
We talked a little bit about Lenny Wilkens.
Helene Madison was definitely one of those two or three.
Helene Madison, as the historian Marine Smith had written,
I think earns or deserves the distinction
of being Seattle's
first individual homegrown sports superstar.
She was a swimmer that was born in June of 1913,
had attended Lincoln High School in Wallingford.
At one point in time, owned every women's
swimming record in existence.
And that was the result of dominance that was displayed
in the 1930 US national championships and then again
in the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles.
She was somebody who through her excellence in the sport
mobilized some of the donor networks
that the now-famous boys in the boat,
the 1936 UW rowing team
literally rode to much greater prominence
and much greater recognition. When the story is told in movies
by George Clooney and the book --
the great book that Dan Brown had written about
Seattleites mobilizing together, you know,
during the Great Depression no less to pull their resources
to send the UW rowing team to the Hitler Olympics in 1936
where they triumph over Germany and Italy in the men's regatta.
That donor network had actually been pioneered
four years earlier by Helene Madison
who is, as far as I'm concerned, erased from,
not only the book that Dan Brown had written
but also the movie that had come out just last year.
I think it's an unfortunate --
the scrubbing of women athletes from the city's history
is an unfortunate legacy of sexism in our city.
Helene Madison bore the brunt of that in her own lifetime.
She comes back from the US Olympics in 1932
one of the most celebrated women's athletes in the world --
excuse me, one of the most celebrated athletes
in the world, is unable to attain a job
teaching swimming in the US or in the Seattle park system
because the jobs are reserved exclusively for men.
She leads a very, very difficult life from that point forward
that I detail in the book. But I do think that that legacy
of a lack of recognition kind of lived
on in subsequent generations in Seattle.
You tell -- you --
other end of the quote that you had mentioned about
Seattle being a hollow spectacle of racial harmony was --
those words --
those words preceded a story that I tell in an article
about a woman columnist in the Seattle Times
who's writing at the time of the Sonics Championship
run who says, "I'm just not really into this
and I'm not into this for two reasons.
Number one, it just feels like if we had women's basketball,
she could probably see herself
a little bit more in the games that were being played.
And number two, her husband who she was
on the brink of divorcing, stopped doing dishes
when the Sonics games were on, generally did not do a lot of --
handle his childcare responsibilities that he had,
and generally turned into kind of an oaf and goofball
when these games came on.
And so, there's a section of that story that I try to tack
to the Sonics' triumphant run in '79
that I think resurfaces a little bit
when we get to talking about the Seattle storm in the mid-2000s,
and their saga tells, you know, takes up a good deal
of the 10th chapter of the book, the Extra Innings chapter.
-You also mentioned the Black female baseball team, the Owls.
-Who grace the cover of the book? Yeah.
The image of Seattle Owls baseball team,
they had won two championships in the latter 1930s,
one was a city championship,
another was a state championship.
And as I was sort of, you know, you're looking for materials
that could, you know, serve as illustrations,
pictures you could use in the book.
What struck me when I saw the photos of the Seattle Owls,
the Black Women's baseball team
was how futuristic it looked like.
They're, you know, Black women who are wearing hoop earrings,
athletic sneakers, and athletic apparel.
And that was sort of a fashion statement
that you saw a lot of people in the post-industrial era
so some, you know, 50, 60 years later start to adopt.
So, it was -- I thought it was, you know,
I was pretty excited about the idea
about having the Owls on the cover
because it felt like you were sort of looking at both the past
and the future by looking at this picture from --
photograph from 1938.
And I tell the story about the Owls --
of the Owls in the fourth inning of the book as well.
-And that's one of the things that I love about the book is,
you know, I feel like --
I felt like I knew a lot about Seattle sports just going in.
And then but there were all these little nuggets
throughout the book I'd never --
what, the black female baseball team
I had never heard, you know, or Helene.
Of course, now, you know, we have the Storm,
we had Sue Bird, unfortunately, she's no longer,
and Breanna but they're going to have a great year this year.
What do you see is the role of kind of that team
in the Seattle scene now?
And I mean, speaking of somebody who's a national reporter
and I mean, the Storm are well known in New York,
they're as well-known as a WNBA team can be.
But what do they mean to the city now from your perspective?
-Well, it's another -- it's a way in which --
Seattle is kind of like we swing big,
miss big when it comes to culture trends.
And I think we're either way, way out of the margins or,
as a result of being way, way out on the margins,
we kind of are able to set certain trends
that are not able to emerge in a lot of other places.
You look at what the sort of basketball
commentariat is obsessed with right now,
a lot of it is women's basketball.
There's kind of a sense right now that some of those --
that the most dynamic personalities
in the sport of basketball
are coming from the women's game.
They're coming from -- I should say not the men's game.
That you have, you know, players like Angel Reese,
and you have players like Caitlin Clark,
you have other sort of generations of stars
that the only reason why we've gotten used to them
is because we had earlier pioneers
if you will had who had sort of set the stage.
And I think the Storm were a huge part
of that drafting Sue Bird
who was at one point in time the best
if not the best marketed women's basketball player
in the country coming out of Yukon in 2001.
So, I think it's another way in which sort of Seattle
set a trend.
And hopefully, friends of yours in New York literary circles
recognize the tremendous debt that they owe to Seattle
for doing its part to popularizing women's
sports in that fashion.
And I know you hold them accountable on that.
-I hope so. Yeah, yes. I will definitely.
I've moved on from sports at the Times
but I wrote about this issue a lot
in my Sports of the Times column and I just --
I'm really enthralled with that.
It's a movement, you know, and it's going to be
really exciting to see how it all unfolds.
By the way, how much time do we have
because I was wondering do you want to do some Q&A.
-Hi, just out of curiosity,
so we're moving from California to Seattle
and this is fascinating.
We just walked in and learning a lot about the city
and wanted to take your opinion on Seattle
having a basketball team back, SuperSonics, if you have any,
you know, opinion or from your research shed some light
if it's going to happen? I am a very fan of basketball.
So, one of the downside of moving here, losing Lakers,
not having all the, you know, great teams was kind of sad.
But if you could just shed light on that? Over.
-And so, when you say the Lakers are a great team,
what do you mean by that exactly?
Just want you to clarify the statement.
-So, you know, I'm a big fan of, you know, sport in general.
I think it brings a lot of harmony, different cultures,
different backgrounds that people come in and play sport.
I think it's a fascinating combination of, you know,
culture, at the same time, also cohesion among,
you know, multi-racial hubs like, you know,
Seattle and other cities.
So, if you could just -- you know,
I see there's a lot of buzz on SuperSonics and Las Vegas
also opening or having an NBA team.
If you could just, you know, what's your sense
and what do you think it's going to bring to the city?
-I think for a lot of years,
Seattle was sort of able to, in NBA circles,
and this is not -- I'm not, you know,
anywhere near the first person to see things this way
or to articulate them this way but I think that
Seattle was sort of the example city
that the NBA was sort of able to use to keep other
NBA markets in line when they didn't want to shell out
hundreds of millions of dollars for a public Arena.
They could always say we took a team,
we literally took a team that loved --
that was loved in, you know, nth level fashion from Seattle.
They had won a championship there,
they were a model for fan support.
If we can relocate them, you know,
New Orleans or Charlotte, or Brooklyn,
we can definitely relocate you.
I think what you're starting to sort of see
is that has been tapped out in a lot of ways.
There has been a lot more public sentiment and public scrutiny
against sort of this idea that we should be shelling out
that much money nationwide in urban America.
So, ironically, what that means I think is that Seattle's
actually better positioned now to get a team
because the economics of how the NBA operates --
and this is, you know, kind of my read on this part of it
is the way that the NBA sort of operates
is basically a predatory business model,
has been tapped out.
There are no more frontiers, you're not going to follow Elon
and put a team on space like there's nowhere
to go but back to Seattle.
So, it's this kind of idea that Seattle was sort of able
to re-enjoy its frontier position
after its frontier position had been one of the reasons
why the team was relocated in the first place.
The team is too far. We need a team in Middle America.
I mean this is what was said at the time
when the NBA relocated the Sonics
and placed them in Oklahoma City.
That was like a direct straightforward ploy to appeal
to voters in Middle America that I talked about --
or to basketball fans in Middle America.
I mean David Stern, you know, is having meetings
with George Bush's campaign strategist in 2004
to talk about how to get the NBA more popular
in some of the states that George Bush had just won.
And so we got screwed, right? Seattle got jobbed.
Now, it's a very, very different climate and the economics
and the politics of it all suggest
that Seattle is probably going to get a team that comes back.
But there's -- and as much as
I'm going to go to the games, I'm going to watch them all,
I'm going to be the most chauvinistic Seattle Sonics fan
that you've ever seen when we get this team back.
There's also some part of me that kind of likes
that we were the one city
that gave the middle finger to the NBA
and said we're not going to do it,
we don't care, you could do whatever you want to do,
we have real needs for child care,
we're getting ready to --
seeming like there's going to be a recession
that we're going to face,
real need for bolstering the social safety net.
We just got done shelling out a huge, you know, arena subsidy
for both the Seahawks and the Mariners.
And so, there was a point where we, you know,
we told the NBA where they could put it
and I thought that was a pretty cool
if underappreciated episode in our political history.
At the same time, it's going to be great
to have the team back at a certain point.
Yeah, and I guarantee we're winning a title
before the Lakers win their next one.
I promise you that. Promise you.
-I grew up in Seattle too
in the '70s and Gus Williams was my hero totally,
partly because he wasn't as tall as everybody else.
-Yeah.
-And I remember going to the Kingdome
and seeing some of the playoffs there
because they did some of the playoff games at the Dome.
And when you were talking about the Dome,
you mentioned Forward Thrust,
that it's a product of Forward Thrust.
And I understand a lot of that was park construction too,
from that legislation. I'm wondering how --
I'm really looking forward to reading the book.
But how you talk about Forward Thrust
the pros and cons of that kind of big civic effort.
-I will never get tired of talking about
the Forward Thrust bond initiatives.
This was a series of ballot measures that were put to
Seattle King County voters in 1968 and then again in 1970
that were the result of civic leader
Jim Ellis's grand vision for what it would take to make
Seattle a more metropolitan city.
Part of that plan was going to be
I think 50 miles of subway transit.
There was going to be a lot of park expansion
which passed as well.
But also, Jim Ellis's idea was that, okay,
we have the slate of 13 initiatives,
you want to have some things on there
that are really, really popular
so they enhanced the overall chance
that the meat and potatoes of the slate,
which was the mass transit system, are able to pass.
The transit system does not pass in '68 or '70 but in '68
Seattle voters do elect to construct the Kingdome
with public funds.
That is the facility that leads to the attraction
of the teams that became the Mariners
and then the Seahawks in the latter 1970s.
And I tell the story at length about the Forward Thrust
and the mixed legacy of it as a triumph, on the one hand,
because it attracted the teams
as a heartbreak, on the other hand,
because the mass transit system that was proposed
would have been finished in 1980 and all of us
probably would have ridden it to have gotten here by now
because it was going to span the entire city.
And I think it's kind of this, in addition to being sort of
like one of the few like political visions
that sort of it galvanizes the same kinds of passions
in a lot of ways that sports do, and the fact that it comes up
just, you know, a yard or two short
if you will of the ultimate goal
is something that was really fun to sort of tease through like
why was it as a campaign not as successful
as it could have been I spend seven or eight pages
talking about in the sixth inning of the book.
But I think that it's another one of these
sort of civic touchstones that shows what can happen
when we move forward with great vision
and the idea that it was a citizen activist.
I mean, Jim Ellis never held an elected office in his life
but was still one of the most influential --
one of the most influential settler
Seattleites to live says a lot about what can happen
when people just get together and decide this is a problem
and we need to have some sort of collective response to fix it.
So, I draw a lot of inspiration from Forward Thrust
even if it is I think part of the legacy
of political heartbreak
that you see in the city's history as well.
Really appreciate that question.
-So, I grew up in San Diego and I kind of just grew up
with the Padres and the Chargers,
Chargers being owned by the Spanos family during my time.
And then the Padres,
I believe it was Moore, I think it was John Moore.
I can't remember the full name off the top of my head.
So, I grew up with two teams
that were constantly trying to like win,
and then they never do and they fall short every single time.
But what was really interesting to me
was the amount of like rally and gung-ho behind both teams
despite the fact that they would fall short every time.
And I only moved to Seattle for college
so I've only been here for like, you know, five, six years now.
During your time, do you --
have you experienced that sort of same
like gung-ho and loyalty for like not just like,
you know, the Seahawks or just the Mariners
but like sports teams in general?
Do you kind of like resonate with that sort of same gung-ho?
Have you experienced that or heard from people?
Like I kind of see sort of at least like, you know,
for example, like the Mariners,
like I've seen a lot of that sort of like community
of people coming together
and be like, you know, whatever happens happens,
you know, it's kind of like this is our team, this is our --
these are our people sort of thing.
And I don't know if that's an attitude that's like changed
over the years or has it started that way?
So I guess I'm just curious because,
you know, I'm from San Diego, we only have those two teams,
and now one of them has left, we only have the Padres.
So, you know --
-Being a Mariners fan and has sent people I love
to very bad places psychologically.
And I mean, I've watched -- I disowned the Mariners in 2018
because I decided enough was enough.
I had been a fan since 1992. And it started to occur to me
that there was actually something,
a semblance of our politics
and the way that people kind of keep
rallying in order to get their hopes dashed.
That that did because it was so public
and it was always such spectacular.
I mean you go to the games, people ride mass transit
to the games.
A lot of people that I know in political circles
are kind of at these games.
And because it's such a mass spectacle
that is the receptacle of a lot of public funds and resources
and the team consistently under-delivers,
it's hard not to think about the Mariners
as kind of a microcosm for everything that's wrong
with the American political process.
That's the state stage that I'm at kind of
with that team like I really hate this team.
I mean, what they end up doing is it's so much public goodwill
and resources that are wasted on austerity.
I mean, you have the owner -- the general manager coming out
and saying, you know, our goal is really to just try to win
54% of our games like we just feel like that's --
if we can hit that goal, we're going to be fine.
And it's like do you not see how you're just getting killed
by every other big market team
and you guys aren't hurting for money?
But they've made the decision, the team's ownership,
to really kind of hold on
to a lot of that goodwill and the fiscal investment
and not reinvest it into the team
in the ways that the Storm have or the Seahawks have.
So, every time I talk to like real
died-in-the-Wool Mariner fans,
I feel like it's like I've never have been a part of a cult,
but I could imagine what it would be like
to have escaped one
and then you try to reestablish contact
with somebody who's still on the inside of it.
And like most cult leaders,
Mariners general management is actually very savvy
in letting people actually keep contact with people who left
because they want you to see what the options are.
But there are people who are so --
just so unused to the idea that things can be better.
And I think the only thing that's going to make
the Mariners better as a team is massive civic disinvestment.
No more, you know, we're going to end -- whatever.
I mean, there's like a litany of public subsidies
that I think the Mariners are able to enjoy
in all kinds of ways and I think the cord needs to be cut.
I cannot stand the Seattle Mariners.
-I like the conversation about the Seattle Storm
and you mentioned Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese.
What is the pushback or where do you think the pushback
against Sheryl Swoopes or some of the OG,
you know, Miller, Cheryl Miller what --
why are people pushing back against them?
Why has their legacy not been preserved
like it should have been?
-It's really unfortunate.
And I think the -- so the question is I standard
is sort of looking at the sort of new wave
of women's basketball players who --
the conversation around whom has been
I think a lot more sophisticated and rich
than it was in the middle 1990s
around some of the women's basketball players
that came a generation before them.
I think that it's another example of --
I actually do think that there has been progress
in the way that women's sports has been marketed.
Frankly, the way that it's been commodified,
the cultural conversation around it
is a lot more sophisticated than it was in the middle 1990s.
I'm going to be -- just try to be very plain-spoken
about this part of it. I think there was a sense
that the Black women's basketball players
in specific were -- well, they were too butch.
They were players that were not going to appeal
to the male spectatorship, brutish as it was at that time.
If you weren't going to wear the things
that you expected women to wear,
and they weren't going to talk as men at that point in time
expected women to talk, they were going to be --
they were going to have a hard time marketing them.
And a lot of the careers of those players,
the recognition of them suffered in a lot of ways.
There was a really great women's --
a documentary about the women's Olympic basketball team in 1996
that was produced, I think it was a 30 for 30
that was done by ESPN where they talked about --
there's a little bit of resentment on the team
because Rebecca Lobo who was probably --
like there were probably like at least five players
on the team that were better than Rebecca Lobo,
but Rebecca Lobo was a player
who was able to get a lot more of the recognition.
Players on that team felt as if part of the reason why was
because if it wasn't racialized,
then it was definitely a fact that Rebecca had played --
that Lobo had played into had sort of just appeased
male spectatorship in ways that the other women did not
and was able to benefit as a result.
And so, even though I think that was a very racialized story,
I think that there's something that everybody can identify
with that where it just seems like
we're all trying to kind of fit into these cogs
and these pre-made templates.
And if you don't fit sort of the mold exactly like perfectly,
you're going to have a hard time
getting the same opportunities as other people.
I think that's a huge part of the way
that the sport was marketed at that point in time.
And I think it's really, really good to see
that that's not as much the case anymore
and that there has been,
as a result of LGBTQ+ fans being as vocal
and as huge a part of the fan base as they've been,
Generation Z and Millennials I think doing a large part
to correct a lot of that discussion.
We're just ready for a lot more different kinds of options
for what our public figures, sports figures,
non-male figures in the public eye
are able to offer and give.
So, the question is sort of around two
Stadium votes that took place in
Seattle, one was in 1995 as the Mariners were going on
probably the most meaningful moment
that they had in franchise history,
the run to the American League Championship
Series that coincided
with ownership's threat to move the team.
And so, if the Mariners did not win as many games
as they did down the stretch, didn't make the ALCS,
the Mariners probably would have been relocated to --
I believe to Tampa.
And once -- the vote actually goes in the other direction,
people by a very, very slim margin,
a countywide vote, the vote is to decline funds
to build the stadium that eventually becomes
what we now know as T-Mobile Park.
The state legislature is forced to convene some weeks later
to authorize those funds because none of them wanted
to take frankly the hit that state legislators later
took for allowing the Sonics to leave.
And so that -- yeah, I covered that book,
that covered that story in the ninth inning of the book.
And then again, there was a vote for a Seahawk Stadium in 1997
was a little bit more palatable to voters
because the stadium paid for itself.
You can get into the weeds about sort of the tax
funding mechanism. But the idea of it
was that the Seahawks' stadium paid for itself
by a certain amount of the ticket
revenue being recycled back into the funds
for the stadium whereas the Mariners
Stadium would have been a straightforward corporate
giveaway so that voters narrowly approved
the 1997 stadium measure.
And this is, you know, you could write --
the book could have been about this episode only.
I mean, just looking at comparisons
between how much we ended up spending on the Seahawks Stadium
or the Mariners Stadium versus,
you know, needs for affordable housing, for example,
or things of that nature could have been
I think its own -- like really its own book in a lot of ways.
But I do try to bring that episode up
just in the context of this
is kind of like one of 15 or 20 examples of the city
pouring a lot of resources into big games
because of the recognition that we feel
it's going to get us as a city. And in fact, might get us
but at what cost is the question.
-It's funny, we haven't mentioned UW football,
which is one of the pillars of sports in this town.
-Yeah, and I talk about them so much in the book.
I mean, I feel like -- I feel about the --
I feel as much love for UW football
as I feel contempt for the Mariners.
It's like really kind of two sides of the same coin.
Like one of those is what it looks like
when you've cut all ties and the other is what it looks like
when you've just seen the face of love,
which is what the UW Huskies represent.
I mean, they are a publicly-owned franchise.
We got to get the players paid.
That's another part of the equation
but they sort of represent what it looks like
when you have a lot of public resources behind something
that actually makes you feel good in exchange.
-Was that love tested when they went --
when they didn't win a game under Ty Willingham?
-You know, you suffer knowing that the highs
are just around the corner.
And when you have that much investment
and that much fan support behind the team,
you know that the eventual triumph
is on the other side of it. If you sort of stick with it.
Not like a privately owned team
that's not accountable to the people.
Like UW football actually has to respond
to alum and donor networks,
and people are just going to be on their asses
if the UW football team is not good in a way
that I think we've just accepted
that the Mariners will just never be
because they're privately owned and not accountable.
But, yeah, there's a reason,
reason why the book is purple for sure.
-I won't hold that against you being a Golden Bear, you know.
I mean -- so I mean I knew a little bit about Gil Dobie.
I think probably --
maybe a few people might here know who Gil Dobie is.
But it was really fascinating to read about him.
He's a seminal figure in the UW football history
that I'd love to hear you expound on a little bit.
And also, really I mentioned Fred Brown and Gus Williams
as childhood heroes of mine.
But Warren Moon was like, you know,
I mean I had the Warren Moon posters,
I had, you know --
I was there when he ran the 70 yards against USC
and what, you know --
those two figures are really fascinating to me.
And Gil Dobie for kind of what he represented at the time.
Warren Moon for what he went through racially in this city
and to become what he became.
-Yeah, absolutely. So, Gil Dobie was the coach
of the UW football team from --
actually, I want to take a step back.
So, one of the coolest parts about
being able to research this book I think was just the idea
that like I mean, 1908 was, you know, 116, 115 years ago
at the time that this was being written.
But feeling kind of the same kind of investment
reading back on teams that may have been around
for like many years before I was born
and feeling the same sense of like pride around them.
So, like Gil Dobie -- I almost feel emotionally
as if I watch this man coach the team to win 50 --
I think they won 59 consecutive games from 1908 to 1915
like literally did not lose against anybody.
Several of these games they won by like,
you know, dozens of points.
I think there was a 72-to-nothing game against Cal.
My condolences. That took place.
That actually inspired the UW football fight song
Bow Down to Washington. But those were --
the significance of those teams was really --
they were like a Gilded Age throwback,
they were playing in the progressive era
where you had manicured parks and street cars,
and a sense that the city was sort of separating itself
from its wild past.
But there was still, the generation after the frontier,
a lust for this kind of spectacle
and this kind of, you know, really grimy entertainment.
So, people would congregate at a UW football facility years
before the Husky stadium that was called the Swamp,
that was a terrible place like people would like cut their --
you know, like cut their faces open when they got tackled
because there was like a bike path
that was underneath some of the grass that they played on.
I mean, they were winning some of these games like two
to nothing, seven to nothing,
and Gil Dobie was just on the sidelines
wearing animal skin sweaters, loving it
because he didn't believe that throwing the ball
was real football like real men
got in the trenches and they ran the ball
and they held the team to no points,
and they only scored because there was a safety.
And I just feel like the same way
that I think people threw themselves
a lot behind the Seahawks in the 2010s
when they played similar kinds of games.
In fact, one of my actually fondest memories
of this building was of watching I think the game
against the first round of the playoffs.
I think we played the Saints in route to beating the Niners
and route to beating the Broncos in the Super Bowl.
But I think the Seattle Public Library
had actually held a watch party
for that game against the Saints, which I was at for.
So, it's just kind of a -- it's just wild how --
I mean, that's 100, 100 years go by
and it's still the same kinds of attachments
whether you're watching the games here
or you're watching them at the Swamp
like there's still kind of that attachment that grows.
And I think the fact that UW football again was a public --
is a public institution, deepens the feeling of belonging
and pride there. Yeah.
-Warren Moon?
-Warren Moon to me --
I mean, we just watched one of the greatest quarterbacks
in history, a Black quarterback,
Patrick Mahomes win another Super Bowl, right?
We are sort of now in the 21st century
used to the idea that Black players can be field generals
that they can be extensions of mostly
White coaching staffs on the field,
that they can exhibit a kind of calm under pressure
that many did not believe
that African Americans generally possessed,
and certainly not those in athletic fields could have.
That took generations and generations of players,
you know, doing well but coming up a little bit short,
passing that knowledge on down. So, Warren Moon, you know,
passing down a lot of the institutional knowledge
that he has as a Black quarterback to Russell Wilson.
And this sort of fraternity I think of Black quarterbacks
that really in a lot of ways he began
and began it at the University of Washington,
and began it under intense scrutiny.
He confesses to Sports Illustrated in 1977
that he plays better on the road because he's jeered.
Family and friends of his come to the games
and they say that they hear racial slurs in the stands.
Some people doubt the facticity of that statement.
What is not up for question is the fact
that the University of Washington daily entertains
whether or not it's time to lynch Warren Moon
after he struggles in a game in 1977.
And he sticks it through, he ends up winning a Rose Bowl,
guides the UW team to a national championship.
And so, there's kind of the overcoming part of it
that I think is a part of the story of Seattle
as a Far West city
that you can see sort of meted out in a lot of ways
that the careers of individual athletes take place
especially ones that are coming from marginalized backgrounds.
So, that's why I focus so much on women athletes.
I try to focus a lot on LGBTQ+ athletes,
especially in chapter 4, Black athletes naturally.
Because I think that when you have that broader --
that A story of sort of the struggle for recognition,
the thing that really substantiates that
is when you have people that are coming from disprivileged
backgrounds substantiating that through sport and politics
that I try to spin out. Yeah.
-I'm just wondering how particularly
the Latino influence,
South Asian influence that's moving into the city,
it's just a completely different place than it was 25 years ago.
-Right?
And I think that Seattleites of all ethnic and racial
backgrounds can appreciate the idea of sort
of what you laid out there with a super diverse crowd
coming out to support a great spectacle
whether it's, you know, sports or really, really good music.
I think that all of us from all backgrounds in the city
I think in a lot of ways are feeling the loss
in some ways of communities
that have been displaced over the years.
And you wonder why it is that people talk so much
about wanting to see the Sonics come back,
why there's been so much support for the storm.
And it's almost as if what we've lost through our politics,
we're kind of trying to make up for through our sport
in some ways.
And I think that as big and diverse as those crowds would be
if we were not a city that has endured waves
and waves of gentrification, I think there's, you know,
a good many of us who would say it doesn't have to be --
doesn't have to be like that, right?
And so, that's a political question
that we have to get really serious about as well.
I mean, the fact that the generation --
I think there was a story that was written in the Stranger,
and this is probably in 2016 where they were talking
about the era of mandated busing in the city of Seattle.
And you look at -- you know, busing is an experiment,
it lasts from 1978 through --
I don't remember actually the terminal date,
but it lasts, you know, long enough for there to be many
Seattleites who pass through public schools that --
-'96, or around there. '98 or '97, as far as I recall.
-Yeah. So, you had like Lindy West
and Sir Mix-a-Lot, and Lynn Shelton,
and a lot of other -- a lot of Seattle luminaries,
people that really put the city on the map culturally.
Well, they got a lot of their world view
and a lot of their ability to sort of deal
like the fact that Sir Mix-a-Lot kind of embodies
like all the post-racial absurdities of what --
you know, what it means to be a rapper like --
-Roosevelt High School. -Roosevelt High, right?
That comes from a certain proximity
that you get when you have people
from different backgrounds going to school,
learning, making a lot of the same mistakes with one another.
So, I think there's a tremendous cultural loss that we have felt
without even knowing it from the lack of proximity.
And you only get that proximity when people get together
and they say, okay, great public schools,
great public housing that working-class people
of all backgrounds can live in, great public parks
so that all of us are going to be out on the 4th of July
seeing each other, enjoying each other's music,
probably making fun of it a little bit too.
Like that's part of what it means to live
in a big cosmopolitan city. So, you lose a lot of that
when the city becomes more stratified.
And right now,
our games are some of the only ways that we have.
I mean, we're not even talking about sort of
the privatized version of what this looks like on the Internet
where people are sort of feeling like they're --
they have proximity when actually you really don't.
Like when you -- there's actually a physical kind
of embodied proximity people from all different backgrounds
like it just makes us better and stronger and less able to be
I think segmented in all the kinds of ways
that some interests in our politics
would hope us to be segmented.
Yeah. Yeah.
[ Applause ]