Many people called in sick at work to make it to the Oklahoma City Thunder’s championship parade Tuesday. Not a problem for me. I brought my office to the streets, planning to deliver Total Coverage of what it’s like to witness history.
I had a map, a water bottle and a dream. I intended to post up along the parade route at Scissortail Park, so I could have a quick getaway to the main stage by the time the team got there. I found a brilliant parking spot that I will never tell anyone about. I walked a short distance to the corner of Oklahoma City Boulevard and Robinson Avenue. Scissortail Park was in my sight. Everything was going to plan.
But you know what they say about the best-laid plans.
When I arrived downtown around 9 a.m., Scissortail Park was surrounded by metal barriers and a small army of police officers. I asked one how I could get into the park, and he told me of a pedestrian crossing at Hudson Avenue. By the time I got there, the crossing was closed, and I felt an instant kinship with the dozens of people who were already on the same mission as me, grumbling about accessing the park and feeling frustration instead of jubilation.
“They say it closed 10 minutes ago,” proclaimed a man with a long ponytail, wraparound shades and a big dog. “They say we have to go all the way around the Omni!”
Ponytail Man would never steer me wrong, I thought. I turned around and trudged back the way I came, pushing through legions of people trying to find a good spot, or perhaps seeking to cross like I once had. Five minutes later — or was it an hour? — I became one of many in a pack making our way around the back of the Omni Hotel. But off in the distance, something disturbing seemed to be occurring: People were turning around.
“I don’t think we can get through,” said my comrade for the day, my best friend since high school. She sounded at once both forlorn and resolved, like she’d accepted that we might just die there.
A voice cut through the crowd: “They say you can’t get into the park at all now!” I looked up to see Ponytail Man once more. His news from the frontier was disheartening, but a man next to him offered a bit of hope. The crossing at Hudson Avenue, he said, would reopen after the parade ended.
We pushed through the busy sidewalks to get back to Oklahoma City Boulevard, where we took up a spot next to a woman selling fans. She was one of many vendors roaming the streets. Some, like her, sold wares to combat the June heat. Others offered bootleg championship gear. Perhaps my personal favorite was a man monotonously hawking shirts that proclaimed, “BITCH WE THE THUNDER,” on their backs.
We found a spot on the boulevard where we could sit on a railing and get a few more inches to see over the crowd. Pulsing bass from the subwoofers in Scissortail Park called like a siren song from just across the street. I dreamed of the shade trees to be found on the other side. My weather app had said it would be overcast, but the sun proved relentless — the only respite an occasional breeze from the southwest. By the time we settled in at 10 a.m., the heat was oppressive. By the time the parade started a little after 10:30 a.m., we were cooked.
High humidity meets human ingenuity
Somewhere on Walker Avenue, Alex Caruso handed out T-shirts featuring a Mount Rushmore composed entirely of his face. But over on Oklahoma City Boulevard, we were focused on matters of survival. Grown men rolled their shirts into what I’m told is known across the world as a Beijing bikini. One woman wore an umbrella hat. Another walked by with a Gatorade balanced on top of her head. Children wailed. My comrade poured water on her shoes. The man next to us had not brought water at all. Instead, he hit a vape over and over, perhaps trying to distill the vapor back into liquid directly in his esophagus.
I watched with complete awe and respect as one woman took a pair of scissors to her jeans, hacking them off right above the knee. She declined to be named or interviewed for my report, but she did let me take a picture.
People did their best to take care of each other, as far as I could see. A boy about 5 years old waited patiently under his grandmother’s umbrella, but by 11 a.m., he was looking rough. A cyclist who had set his bike on the railing behind us offered the family a cold Sprite, which the boy’s father promptly dropped on the ground, resulting in a small lemon-lime explosion. The cyclist then poured some of his cold water down the boy’s shoulders, and like a wilted plant feeling the first rain after a drought, the boy perked up immediately.
Not every Good Samaritan was so altruistically motivated as the cyclist, though. I watched one man in his early 20s offer a water to someone in the crowd looking roasted, only to admit to his friends he simply wanted to get rid of the water to free his hand for the Miller Lite he pulled from his pocket.
Once it reached us, the parade itself lasted just a few minutes. Bus after bus of 30-somethings — perhaps Thunder employees — in cream-colored championship T-shirts led the charge, doing their best to hype up the crowd. OKC Mayor David Holt, Gov. Kevin Stitt and Thunder general manager Sam Presti followed, with Presti getting by far the loudest applause of the three.
When the players finally made their way through, they seemed … well, they seemed a bit tired. The team had held a gathering in Paycom Center before the parade, and along the route, players hopped out to interact with fans. Sideline reporter Nick Gallo took shots with center Isaiah Hartenstein. Head coach Mark Daigneault accepted a beer from fans. NBA MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander posed with a bubble gun hawked by the street vendors. By the time the procession reached us, there was no such revelry. Gilgeous-Alexander and Caruso, who dressed like he was looking for a beach, seemed the most engaged by the time the buses crawled down Oklahoma City Boulevard around 11:30 a.m. The others, while still interacting with the crowd, looked as eager to reach Scissortail Park as I had been after their gauntlet of a morning.
My spirits lifted when a dozen men on horseback — some standing on their saddles — rode down the sidewalk among spectators. The sight boosted my energy enough to balance my Thunder fandom with my parade-day reporting goals so I could scream, “That’s my GOAT” at Presti as he passed by atop one of the double-deckers.
The buses turned into the park. The crowds cleared out. I stared wistfully across the street, the Hudson Avenue crossing still closed. But just when I was beginning to think all hope had been lost, the last of the police’s seemingly infinite BearCats rumbled through, and the gates opened to the promised land.
I’ll see y’all out there on Branden Carlson Day
My comrade and I entered in time to see a performance by the OKC Native Dance Crew (which Hartenstein and forward Jaylin Williams apparently loved) and a speech from Holt, who did his best to put the team on his shoulders and wear out the microphone batteries all by himself.
With guard Jalen Williams, Jaylin Williams and Hartenstein standing stoically behind him, Holt spoke about the championship’s meaning to Oklahoma City, reflected on the city’s history and looked toward the future. Holt touched on every reason I love sports, and it probably would have moved me if every synapse and chemical in my body hadn’t been rededicated to the sole purpose of avoiding heat stroke.
Holt then dedicated June 30 as Clay Bennett Day, honoring the chairman of Professional Basketball Club, LLC, the mysterious entity that paid the big bucks to bring (or swindle, depending on who you ask in Seattle) a team to OKC. Annoyed by the mayor’s pontification, somebody next to me yelled, “Get off the stage!” Holt followed Clay Bennett Day by proclaiming Sam Presti Day on July 1, honoring the general manager who got his gig when he was a 29-year-old boy genius. Naturally, Mark Daigneault Day will follow Sam Presti Day on July 2.
Mentally, I was beginning to check out. My head hurt. I’d finished my lukewarm water half an hour before, and my dubious sunscreen strategies were coming home to roost. But then Holt did something that shocked me.
“This team is a winner, and all we do is win in OKC,” Holt said. “And that is why Monday, July 7, will be Branden Carlson Day in Oklahoma City.”
Center Branden Carlson, God bless him, averaged about 40 seconds of play per game in the 2024-2025 NBA season. At the news, Carlson did a double take before throwing his hands up into the air and leaping up and down.
Holt went on to make sure every player through the end of July got his day, each announcement punctuated with air horns. After naming July 30 the second Shai-Gilgeous Alexander Day of 2025, Holt passed the mic over to the players. Jalen Williams and guard Aaron Wiggins both thanked the fans gathered effusively before Jaylin Williams brought the house down and tested the reflexes of censor-button operators at every TV station in Oklahoma.
“They said we was too young,” Williams said.
The crowd cried, “What?”
“They said Oklahoma shouldn’t have a team,” Williams said.
The crowd cried, “What?”
“But guess what?” Williams asked.
The crowd replied, “What?”
“We the fuckin’ champs!” Williams screamed.
The crowd erupted as Holt took the mic back.
“That’s my bad, that’s my bad,” Holt said. “I should have seen that coming.”
Holt then ceded the mic to Gilgeous-Alexander, but not before calling him “the greatest player to ever put on the uniform.”
Gilgeous-Alexander kept his remarks short, clearing his throat before admitting he forgot what he wanted to say.
“Thank you guys so much. Don’t ever forget this. Moments like this, they don’t come around often. Make sure you enjoy this moment with your friends, your family, your loved ones,” he said. “We love you guys. If you guys aren’t — if you’re kids, get drunk off candy, and let the adults get drunk off of you-know-what tonight.”
Gilgeous-Alexander put his hands above his head in the shape of a heart before leaning back down to the mic one last time.
“Drive safely. Very safely. And if you drink, don’t drive,” he said, probably cementing himself as the greatest Thunder player ever, at least to the Oklahoma Highway Patrol.
With thousands in attendance, police presence high at Thunder parade
While I left the parade no more cynical than I had arrived, incidences of unrest occurred elsewhere along the route.
Just outside of Paycom Center, NonDoc’s Blake Douglas saw police officers swarm a young man, take him to the ground and pull a handgun out of his pocket. Blake said the man had been walking with a friend and that he did not see anything unusual that spurred the officers to act. As the man lie prone on the concrete, he told the officers, “I’m down, I’m down.” After the officers confiscated the handgun, Blake recalled the man saying he would have handed it over had they asked, but contrary to popular belief, state statute says “it shall be unlawful” to carry firearms in areas designated by a local government “for an event that is secured with minimum-security provisions.”
Whether that man had any nefarious intent, his gun could no longer pose a threat to the crowd, as Blake told me the first action of the officer who grabbed it was to unload it.
The police presence was massive after Sunday night’s Game 7 victory, and officers were dead set on preventing too much light pole climbing, fire starting or anything else Philadelphians might call “fun.” But the police presence for safety on Sunday at times felt overbearing. While I stood in a crowd of people waiting for the light to change at E.K. Gaylord Boulevard and Reno Avenue, an officer with a loudspeaker threatened to begin arrests if we didn’t disperse.
The police presence was massive again at Tuesday’s parade, although officers had since made their peace with people congregating. Finding that fine line between ensuring security and not dampening the championship mood must be difficult to manage in modern America.
A shooting at the Kansas City Chiefs’ Super Bowl parade last year that killed one and injured 21 others was a horrifying reminder that these events, supposed to be among the happiest days in a city’s history, can turn deadly. The parade security may have been high in light of that tragedy, or perhaps in light of a shooting at Scissortail Park that left one person injured Sunday night. A National Terrorism Advisory System bulletin proclaiming a “heightened threat environment” Sunday night surely didn’t help.
Luckily for all of us, the biggest danger Tuesday proved to be the heat. When I watched an officer holding the largest gun I’d ever seen climb out the top of Guthrie’s mine-resistant ambush protected vehicle, he looked bored. I took that as a good sign.
In the end, Oklahoma City’s first championship celebration featured a pervasive sense of chaos, but perhaps that is fitting to our rollercoaster history and persevering attitude. When this young Thunder squad runs it back for a repeat next season, I have no doubt we’ll have ironed out our parade-route kinks.
