The "State's Most Trusted News" is back at it.
In case you missed it, Russell Westbrook gave one of the best regular season performances of his NBA career on Friday night during a blowout win over the short-handed, but still formidable, Golden State Warriors at Chesapeake arena.
He celebrated the performance by doing what thousands of Oklahoma City residents have wanted to do at least once or twice over the years. He told Berry Tramel that he didn't like him.
Like most people, I kind of had a rocky start with Westbrook. I couldn't come to terms with his Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde playing style. On one trip down the court, he could take your breath away like Alexandra Daddario in True Detective and slam an electrifying dunk over a stumbling, overmatched defender. On the next possession, he could take your breath away via a punch to the gut by heaving a 23-foot pull up jump shot with 20-seconds left on the shot clock, leaving you red-faced and furious like you just watched the True Detective finale.
Over the past couple of years, though, Westbrook has grown on me. In fact, I can now say he's officially surpassed Kevin Durant as my favorite player on the team. After several sessions of intense therapy, I'm now able to take the good with the bad, and marvel at Westbrook's full-throttle, Hell's Bells playing style. That attitude and confidence carries over to his off-court personality, which I equally admire. It's so refreshing to hear a player on the Thunder speak his mind and do what he wants to do, rather than give the same canned response like:
"It was a good win. The coaches put together a great gameplan and I just trusted my teammates. We played hard and together on defense and gave great effort. When you trust your teammates, they make you better, and that leads to important victories over a great team like the Warriors. Did you get that for my HBO series? Who's ready for some Fro-yo!"
Sorry, I got sidetracked. Let's get back to the whole point of this blog posting.
After going silent as Russ's post-game shenanigans hit the heavy-rotation on Sports Center and went viral on YouTube, Berry "Boomer" Tramel finally responded with a column today on NewsOK.com. It was preachy, heavy-handed, self-righteous, ignored certain truths, and came across as a little bit folksy.
It's was also removed from NewsOK.com only a few minutes after being published.
Wait? What? They pulled a Berry Tramel column. BULLFEATHERS! Did NewsOK.com think it was Richard Hall clickbait (more on that later) or Jenni Carlson. Nope, according to NewsOK.com, they were having problems with "the link."
That's a new one. Yes, despite every other article on the site working fine, they're having some "link problems." Let me just say that as a guy who has published thousands of blog posts and doesn't have any IT guys or web developers on staff, that we've never had that issue. If you buy that excuse, I got a premium Oklahoman subscription I'd like to sell to you for only $50 a month.
Obviously, the very logical conspiracy theory here is that Clay Bennett had his minions with The Thunder Ministry of Propaganda contact OPUBCO management to pull the article for some quick "editing." That would make sense. Of course, what do I know? I thought Woody Harrelson's father-in-law was behind all the murders in True Detective. I'm not good at conspiracy theories.
Anyway, after a few hours, NewsOK.com got their "link issues" worked out and put Boomer Tramel's article back on the site, and oddly enough, it lacked very interesting and key sentence from Berry's article.
As it's edited now, this is how the columns ends. Mind you, this is after about 1,000 word of exposition and whining by Tramel:
I don't particular care if Russell Westbrook doesn't like me, especially since he doesn't know me. I don't particularly care if he respects me, since I'm quite sure he has no idea what I do. But I do wish Westbrook would respect the process.
I understand that athletes can be driven nuts by the repetitive nature of the season and the media. The league requires these guys to be available to the press after every practice and every game. The Thunder tries to shield the stars as much as possible, asking that the media give them a day or two break when possible, and in Oklahoma City, we mostly cooperate.
Familiarity breeds contempt. I get that. But Friday night, in a game the Thunder desperately needed, Westbrook had a game for the ages. And he was mad at the world. Not just me. Mad at everybody. And when he no-answers The Oklahoman and the Thunder website and Channel 5 and The Sports Animal, he's showing his complete disregard for fans. We're not there to get our jollies. We're there because we all have customers intensely interested in the Thunder. The people who buy tickets and the people who watch the games on television so that the Thunder can sell commercials and pay the bills.
Here's the end of column as it was initially published. You may notice they removed the final paragraph:
I don't particular care if Russell Westbrook doesn't like me, especially since he doesn't know me. I don't particularly care if he respects me, since I'm quite sure he has no idea what I do. But I do wish Westbrook would respect the process.
I understand that athletes can be driven nuts by the repetitive nature of the season and the media. The league requires these guys to be available to the press after every practice and every game. The Thunder tries to shield the stars as much as possible, asking that the media give them a day or two break when possible, and in Oklahoma City, we mostly cooperate.
Familiarity breeds contempt. I get that. But Friday night, in a game the Thunder desperately needed, Westbrook had a game for the ages. And he was mad at the world. Not just me. Mad at everybody. And when he no-answers The Oklahoman and the Thunder website and Channel 5 and The Sports Animal, he's showing his complete disregard for fans. We're not there to get our jollies. We're there because we all have customers intensely interested in the Thunder. The people who buy tickets and the people who watch the games on television so that the Thunder can sell commercials and pay the bills.
When Russell Westbrook says "good execution" to every question, what he's really saying to the fans is, "I don't like you."
Okay, let's ignore the inconvenient truth that Berry fails to mention, which is that The Oklahoman profits from Thunder about as much as any business outside of Bricktown, and as a result, is why they advertise with the Thunder, have two beat reporters covering the Thunder, and publish special issues about the Thunder loaded with advertising targeting Thunder fans (if you can't afford to advertise your brand with the Thunder, do the next best thing an advertise in the paper that dedicates so many resources to them). I guess what I'm saying is sure, The Oklahoman and rest of media does a service for fans by covering the team, but they wouldn't do it if it wasn't profitable and making them money. Basically, they're feeding the beast, but feeding themselves as well.
But who cares about that?! The Oklahoman caved and edited the final sentence of a column by their most popular and respected columnist because he wrote something controversial that irked the Thunder! What as strong, unbiased independent media we have in Oklahoma City.
Of course, after the Mr. Unreliable fiasco and Perkins / Mayberry fallout, I guess you can't blame them for caving in, but man, the Thunder Ministry of Propaganda is powerful. And it's not like Berry pulled a Jenni Carlson and observed that Russell's mom was hand-feeding him fried chicken while waiting in line to get on the team plane. Expect this post to go down with link problems sometime soon.
