How do you remember the dearly departed?
While most people might honor their loved ones by hanging a portrait in the living room or curating a scrapbook, I tend to do my mourning on eBay.
When the Seattle SuperSonics left the Pacific Northwest for Oklahoma City in July 2008, it was, without question, the most painful loss of my life as a sports fan.
Seattle was, first and foremost, always a basketball town, with the Sonics becoming the city’s first professional sports franchise in 1967 and winning its first professional sports title in 1979.
I was a 9-year-old kid when the Sonics’ championship parade rolled down Fourth Avenue, and that team occupied a special place in my heart that not even the Legion of Boom Seahawks or 1995 Mariners could push aside.
In the 17 years since the franchise packed up and left town, the grief has come in waves: The first silent winter at an empty KeyArena, watching young Kevin Durant reach the NBA Finals in 2012, the 10- and 15-year anniversaries of the relocation, and now the potential of a Thunder championship this month that seems to be bordering on inevitable.
The thing about nostalgia is it helps us cope with loss by capturing the moments that made us smile. There’s a reason the roots of “memory” and “memorabilia" are the same.
So, rather than fill the last 17 years with vitriol toward OKC (although there has, admittedly, been some of that), I’ve instead filled my house with Sonics collectibles that range from the Gus-DJ title team to the Payton-Kemp years to that one season with the 19-year-old Durant.
With each passing year, I found myself chasing more and more Sonics memorabilia — but, hey, I was only funneling the money I used to spend on tickets into a more tangible investment.
Looking around my house today, I see more memorabilia than the team used to feature in that poorly lit corridor of KeyArena that led down to the team shop and tried to capture the squad’s history.
In my TV room, signed jerseys from Gus Williams and Durant hang next to two autographed Gary Payton prints and not far from a jersey signed by nine members of that ’79 team, including coach Lenny Wilkins.
My office features a signed Payton jersey, two autographed 1996 NBA Finals displays (complete with graded tickets) and two more signed prints from the 1979 team. Even the hallway to the bathroom features an expletive-signed photo from Payton during his confrontation with Michael Jordan in the ’96 Finals.
Tucked away in a closet are game-used jerseys from Kemp, Payton, Michael Cage, Nate McMillan, Sam Perkins and Wally Walker. There are even a few pairs of game-used shorts from the "short shorts" era.
My iPhone seems to light up every day with new eBay search hits for items such as “1979 Sonics,” “Sonics PSA ticket,” and “Gus Williams autographed.”
As the years have gone by, I’ve run out of wall space and my secured storage cases have filled with countless graded Sonics cards and tickets. (Although I’m still searching for my holy grail: The ticket to Game 5 of the ’79 Finals, when the Sonics won their only title in Washington on June 1, 1979.)
At cllct, we spend a lot of time delving into the minds of collectors. What motivates them to chase an item and then hold onto it for a lifetime.
For me, it has never been about investment. These items are valuable, but they’d pale in comparison to a similar collection for a Lakers, Celtics or Bulls fan.
And their value is a moot point, because I’d never consider selling them.
I collect them for how they make me feel. How they fill the void of the loss of a sports passion that consumed my childhood, carried me through college and continued into young adulthood.
They remind me of talking about the ’79 team with my grandfather, standing in line for tickets with my dad in the mid-1990s or how my good friend, Brandon Funston, got a head-rush and nearly passed out after a Kemp alley-oop dunk in the 1992 playoffs.
I took my wife to a Sonics game on one of our first dates (it was against the pre-LeBron Cavaliers, so it’s amazing she stuck with me). I brought my 7-year-old daughter to the final game at KeyArena in 2008 and will never forget how she asked me at the end, “Do we get to keep the Sonics since they won?”
These aren’t just sports moments. They’re milestones through time with friends and family.
A few weeks after the team officially left, the Seattle Times published a commemorative poster with the words “They took our team … They can't take our memories.”
Admittedly, I’ve taken that to extremes.
So, even as the Thunder build a potential dynasty down in the Dust Bowl, I’ll keep counting the days until an NBA expansion team arrives here and spend a good chunk of my disposable income trying to maintain my connection to the Supes.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, my phone is dinging with a new hit from eBay.
Kevin Jackson is the chief content officer for cllct. He spent 25 years at ESPN Digital Media, where he was the founding editor of Page 2, and nearly four years as the Executive Director for Digital Content at FOX Sports.