OKLAHOMA CITY — 6501 S. Meridian Ave. is not the type of place where a championship parade would be expected to kick off. Twenty minutes southwest of downtown Oklahoma City, along a little-used road just outside the city’s international airport, a chain-link fence separates a parking lot with a few dozen spaces from an airplane hangar and a small runway. Yet should the Thunder win an NBA championship Thursday night in Game 6 of the NBA Finals in Indianapolis, the celebration that ensues across Oklahoma will symbolically, and logistically, start here, where every Thunder road trip ends and the city's embrace of the team begins.
The first time Devin Newsom drove to South Meridian to stand at the chain-link fence, it was 2012, when the Thunder, who had relocated from Seattle to Oklahoma City only four years earlier, were in the midst of a breakout playoff run that enthralled their new home. A Thunder employee at the time, Newsom wanted to celebrate a critical playoff win and asked friends who also worked for the team when the plane carrying coaches and players home from Dallas would land. He spread the word, and when the Thunder stepped off their charter jet well after midnight, they did so to cheers.
Newsom has been organizing “airport welcomes,” as they are called, ever since. “What it really comes down to,” Newsom said, “is coming together as a community to support something bigger than us.” Now it is not uncommon to see several hundred people waiting at the fence alongside Newsom, who also livestreams the arrivals to Thunder fans living abroad, who watch as players approach the fence to sign autographs and slap hands.
Cities have rallied behind their teams since sports began, yet in Oklahoma City, what is atypical is the degree to which that relationship is not one-sided. Fans, city officials and the team itself are intertwined more closely than perhaps any other NBA market. Fans show up for the Thunder in uncommon ways — during late nights at the airport, yes, but also at the ballot box, where a 2023 measure to use public money to help fund a new Thunder arena scheduled to open in 2028 passed with 71% of the vote.
Sam Presti, the team’s top basketball executive since 2007, “may be the only GM in America who texts with the mayor,” the mayor himself, David Holt, said with a laugh in his office, which is decorated with a framed Thunder jersey. It hangs to the left of the desk where, this week, Holt signed an agreement that will keep the team in Oklahoma City through 2053 and could extend up to 15 additional years.
The Thunder are Oklahoma’s only big-league option — the scarcity has taken a region divided by college allegiances and coalesced that fandom behind one franchise. Winning, of course, has only deepened the support; since 2010, the Thunder own the NBA’s second-best record, and this trip to the Finals is the team’s second in that span. But to Newsom, the team’s choices to take part in the community and the circumstances of its arrival have also stoked a loyalty that has kept the region exceptionally possessive of its team.
Before 1995, mentioning you were from Oklahoma City to a London cabdriver would have evoked a blank stare, Holt said. After the bombing, the city evoked a different association. “Though we are rightfully proud of our response to that, it’s not really something you can build a brand on,” Holt said. “We were always looking for something else to be identified with.”
The city got that opportunity in 2005, after Hurricane Katrina left New Orleans unable to host
