Baxter HolmesSep 30, 2025, 01:29 PM ET
- Baxter Holmes (@Baxter) is a senior writer for ESPN Digital and Print, focusing on the NBA. He has covered the Lakers, the Celtics and previously worked for The Boston Globe and Los Angeles Times.
ON A WEDNESDAY morning a little more than 30 years ago, before his mother left for work in downtown Oklahoma City, a boy named Kyle Genzer told her he loved her.
It was a sunny, cloudless day. “Like today,” he says.
He tilts his head and looks toward the sky. She was in a hurry. He thought he’d see her later that day, after school. He wishes he’d hugged her, he says.
At 9:02 a.m., as he sat in his eighth grade class at Wellston Middle School, about 40 miles east of Oklahoma City, Genzer felt the school shake and the windows rattle.
“We thought it was thunder,” he says.
Minutes later, his uncle, a teacher there, knocked on the classroom door and told him there had been an explosion at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, where his mother worked as a loan officer for the Federal Employees Credit Union.
It would be days before they learned her fate, that Jamie Genzer was killed along with 167 others in the most devastating act of homegrown terrorism in American history. She was 32 years old.
Jamie was a single mother who raised Kyle and his sister, Krista, and sang in the Sweet Adelines quartet. Her singing often woke the kids in the mornings.
At 14, after helping to pick out his mom’s casket and planning her funeral, Kyle learned to endure the quiet.
It’s May 26, and Genzer is standing on a sloping, grassy hill at the Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum. He’s 44 now, 12 years older than his mom was when she died.
In front of him is the Field of Empty Chairs, each one of the 168 made of glass, steel and bronze and bearing the names of those who never came home. Jamie worked on the third floor. Her chair is in the third row.
Just in front of them, in the second row, there are 15 smaller chairs. Those honor the 15 children who were killed inside America’s Kids day care center, which was on the second floor of the building.
A small American flag is planted into the carefully manicured grass next to every chair, each one resembling an empty seat at a dinner table.
Behind Genzer, the quiet is broken by water falling over the edges of a shallow reflecting pool.
“I can feel her presence here,” he says. ​​
Kyle Genzer was 14 when he lost his mom, Jamie, in the bombing. He often visits the memorial’s Field of Empty Chairs, where each of the 168 resemble an empty seat at a dinner table. Left: Baxter Holmes/ESPN. Right: Courtesy Genzer.T op: Joe Raedle/Getty Images.
Six springs ago, Genzer stood on a small stage near this very spot, next to his son, Brendlee. They were joined by dignitaries and others who had lost someone in the bombing, and they were there to read the names of the 168, as part of an annual tradition known as the Remembrance Ceremony, which includes 168 seconds of silence, starting at 9:02 a.m.
Seated on the small stage near them was Sam Presti, the Oklahoma City Thunder’s general manager.
Brendlee was 14, the same age his father was when Jamie died. They read about a dozen names each. After the ceremony, they met Presti for the first time. He posed for a photo with Brendlee next to Jamie’s chair. “That just meant everything,” Kyle says.
When the Thunder arrived in Oklahoma City in 2008, Presti quickly established a tradition for his franchise as much as a mandate: that each Thunder player and staff member would, immediately after joining the team, tour the memorial.
He had his reasons. It was important, he told them, to understand that defining moment at 9:02 a.m. on April 19, 1995, to learn how the city banded together afterward in a collective recovery that became known nationally as the Oklahoma Standard. He wanted his team to be inspired by that effort, to be built in its image.
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He also wanted them to understand that they would be playing in front of and interacting with people inside their arena who were directly affected — with the tragedy quite literally encircling the team during every home game.
For 17 years, the Thunder have maintained an intimate connection to the memorial — and to the “Oklahoma Standard.” That connection is led by Presti, who has embraced the Oklahoma Standard to the point that it now defines the culture of a championship team with dynastic aspirations. It is carried on by players who, behind the scenes, have formed bonds with first responders, survivors, family members who lost loved ones, memorial staff and city and state officials whose decisions in the wake of the bombing helped lead to the Thunder’s arrival.
“The Thunder would not be in Oklahoma City without the response that took place on April 19, 1995,” Presti said during an event at the memorial last fall, “and without the sacrifices and the efforts that were made to rebuild this city.”
Only two Thunder players were alive then — guard Alex Caruso, who was a 1-year-old, and forward Kenrich Williams, who was 4 months old. About half of the state’s population wasn’t alive when the bombing occurred. Time moves forward. People forget. Stories fade.
But for those who have spent three decades living in an endless fog of grief and trauma, the people who planned funerals before they could drive and who still carry glass from the blast beneath their skin, the Thunder’s efforts to keep their story alive means more than they can say.
Standing beside his mother’s chair, Genzer places his hand over his heart, near the Thunder logo on his shirt.
“It’s why we will always — win, lose or draw — be Thunder fans,” Genzer says, his voice catching in his throat, “because you can’t be part of this city without understanding what took place in 1995.”
Thunder GM Sam Presti requires all new employees, including players, to tour the Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum. For 17 years, it has been a rite of passage. Mary Ann Eckstein/OKC Thunder
THAT MORNING, PRESTIwas an 18-year-old high school senior in Concord, Massachusetts. He had watched the images on cable television while soaking a turned ankle — from a basketball game earlier that day — in the bucket of ice water.
“It was probably the first real stark reality of the world that we were living in,” he would later say.
He arrived in Oklahoma City with the team in July 2008, after the Seattle Supersonics had been bought and relocated by Oklahoma City businessmen. He was 30 then, the second-youngest general manager in NBA history.
Presti stayed at the city’s oldest hotel — the Skirvin, a 13-floor, art deco three-tower complex built in 1945. He walked the city, trying to get a sense of the place, and he came to the memorial, which is framed by two five-story bronze gates: the 9:01 East Gate, signifying the moment before, and the 9:03 West Gate, when the healing began.
The memorial museum is spread across three floors and 50,000 square feet, and it welcomes about 500,000 people a year. It guides visitors through the morning of April 19, 1995, minute by minute, and shows what unfolded in the days, weeks, months and years that followed: the explosion, the recovery, the manhunt, the trials, the 2001 execution of Timothy McVeigh, who drove the yellow Ryder truck that carried the bomb.
When Presti visited, he was moved by a quote on the second floor from network television journalist Tom Brokaw:
“Oklahoma has earned its place in American folklore as cowboy tough and proudly self-reliant. Oklahomans may feel more vulnerable now and a little disoriented by what’s happened to them, but in their response to this madness they have elevated us all with their essential sense of goodness, community, and compassion.”
The words stuck with him.
Soon after completing the tour, Presti called Kari Watkins.
For a team without a culture and an identity, Presti sought to establish one that embraced the city’s response and the ideals that Brokaw referenced, and he enlisted Watkins, who was the memorial museum’s first employee in 1996 and is now its president and CEO. He wanted the team to swing by before the Thunder’s first practice that fall.
Nick Collison was 14 years old when he watched the news in Iowa Falls, Iowa, and he heard the words “domestic terrorism.”
He was a 27-year-old Thunder forward when the team arrived at the memorial before training camp began in the fall of 2008.
“I remember the chairs,” Collison told ESPN. “That’s what hit home, because you hear the statistics. But then you think of all the people, the children.”
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Steven Taylor joined them on the tour, leading players past the wooden gavel he used in 2004 to sentence bombing co-conspirator Terry Nichols to 161 consecutive life sentences without parole in the largest murder trial in American history. Watkins was there too. They explained to Collison and the team that this marked a defining event in the city the team now called home.
And so began the education, and the partnership.
In the years ahead, Watkins fielded calls from Presti late at night and early in the morning. She led tours before the museum opened and after it closed. There were tours on the memorial grounds for draft prospects and free agents, and if those players joined the Thunder, then they would also tour the museum.
It quickly became a rite of passage.
Watkins has completed more than 550 tours with Thunder players, staff and their families since then. Presti remains a constant presence: He has never missed a player tour, as he and Watkins repeat the same message that they first started sharing 17 years ago:
“You need to know and understand this story.”
Kari Watkins, the president of the memorial, has completed more than 550 tours with Thunder players and officials. In 2024, for First Responders Day, guards Jalen Williams and Isaiah Joe attended. Mary Anne Eckstein/OKC Thunder
INSIDE THE MUSEUM, the Thunder’s presence is immediate and omnipresent. In a framed display case on a near wall is a magazine cover of Thunder guard Shai Gilgeous-Alexander wearing the team’s 2019-20 City Edition jersey, a special uniform created in collaboration with the memorial.
When tours begin, visitors enter a room and hear a recording of a water board hearing that began at 9 a.m. that morning across the street. Then, they hear the explosion itself.
On a wall-length screen, the faces of the 168 appear, and Watkins says the players always fall silent. “It’s just so unfortunate,” Gilgeous-Alexander told ESPN. “To have a child of my own now makes it even more crazy.”
Watkins has often told Thunder players that they are the largest ambassadors for the city, and, after walking through the museum, Gilgeous-Alexander said he understood what that meant.
“The city was never the same,” he says, “but the way those families in the city have bounced back from it is so inspiring and so motivational. It gave me a little bit of a sense of purpose while I’m out there playing.”
He knows well that every night he’s there, everywhere he goes, he represents more than just the team. He represents them.
“Like, for me, playing for Canada gives me — it’s a natural sense of purpose being from there, but coming to Oklahoma City and seeing that and experiencing that, it gave me meaning behind the name on my chest, and a reason to go out there and play hard. It’s a connector to the community. I think that’s what the organization wants us to feel — connected to the community, and it’s sad that it’s a tragic way, but it is a connection nonetheless.”
Thunder forward Isaiah Hartenstein, born three years after the bombing, visited the memorial within his first week of joining the Thunder last summer. He says he didn’t know much about it before.
He walked through with his wife, Kourtney, passing through exhibits describing the second-floor daycare, where, on that morning, 21 preschool children had gathered, including four babies who, from their cribs lined up against the window, were known to reach for the rays of sunlight and the passing clouds in the sky just outside. The youngest was 4 months old.
Sitting at the team’s practice facility, Hartenstein described his tour. “That was tough,” he says quietly. “Especially because I just had a kid.”
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Hartenstein learned that the bombing registered seismic waves equivalent to a magnitude 3.2 earthquake and was felt as far as 55 miles away. That more than 330 buildings were damaged; another 15 were destroyed and needed to be torn down.
That of the nearly 1 million people in Oklahoma City at the time, one-third of the population knew someone among the 168 and the nearly 700 hurt or injured. Nearly 190,000 of the people in central Oklahoma attended at least one funeral. Some attended a dozen; some attended three in a single day.
Then Hartenstein saw the city’s response. The passersby who rushed the injured to hospitals in the beds of pickup trucks. How five blocks away, at the Myriad Convention Center, the Oklahoma Restaurant Association canceled its trade show and rushed the food and equipment to feed the army of rescue workers and volunteers.
That volunteer lines stretched outside blood banks. How after a call for boots, hundreds of pairs arrived, with one man donating the pair off his feet.
One police officer recalls what looked like a Wal-Mart-sized tent rising out of nowhere, with hundreds of coolers of food and drinks, tall stacks of jeans and gloves and shirts.
Rescue workers arrived from California, New York, Arizona — part of a recovery effort ultimately spanning 12,000 people — and they never saw a bill from restaurants, hotels or anywhere else.
As he prepared to leave after several days, one rescue worker opened his wallet and showed then-Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating a dollar bill that he had brought with him. No one would accept his money, he said. This was no ordinary dollar, he added: It was an Oklahoma dollar.
“You see how great of a community Oklahoma City is,” Hartenstein says. “I don’t think there’s a lot of cities out there that would leave whatever they got going on to go straight to the site to go help.”
The collective effort, many first responders from then say, was nothing new. But national media called the response the Oklahoma Standard, which Presti sometimes calls “The Standard.”
And it became the foundation upon which the Oklahoma City Thunder would be built.
The “Oklahoma Standard,” a term the national media coined for the collective response to the bombing, symbolizes honor, kindness and acts of service. In 2008, after touring the memorial, Presti made it the foundation upon which his team would be built. Top: AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki. Left: Jim West/ZUMA Press Wire. Right: Mark Zimmerman/Getty Images.
THIRTY YEARS LATER, that foundation was laid bare.
During a midsummer event held inside the memorial museum about the civic role of sports in a community, Erin Lewis, the Thunder’s director of brand influence and identity, sits on a small stage and addresses a question about the Oklahoma Standard and its relationship to the team.
As she speaks, the Thunder are one win away from the NBA championship. “The Oklahoma Standard is not only ingrained in us as a group as Oklahomans, but it’s really ingrained in who we are as a brand,” she says, adding, “The best way that you can connect with your target audience … is for them to see themselves reflected in you.”
She says the team tries to reflect key values to Oklahomans, “certainly first and foremost being the Oklahoma Standard.”
In 2013, a 1.3-mile wide EF5 tornado that reached winds of 210 mph carved through Moore, a suburb of Oklahoma City, killing 24, including seven children at an elementary school, injuring more than 200 and causing $2 billion in damage.
Within days, the Thunder and their then-star Kevin Durant donated $1 million apiece to the American Red Cross to support recovery efforts. Presti and players walked among the rubble and visited the hospital where victims recovered. The team rebuilt basketball courts at schools destroyed by the tornado.
“The city will come together and support each other, as it has in the face of past adversity,” Presti told ESPN then. “It is the Oklahoma Standard, and it’s what makes this place what it is.”
In 2015, for the bombing’s 20th anniversary, Presti chaired the Oklahoma Standard Campaign, which encouraged Oklahomans to commit one act of service, honor and kindness in the month of April.
That same month, on April 19, Thunder staff and players placed flowers at all 168 chairs at the memorial.
“I think it’s important for us to realize that as much as it is recognizing the time elapsed,” Presti said at that ceremony, “it’s also a reminder to everybody that we all have a responsibility going forward to recognize and make sure that this stays top of mind for everybody in the community and the state that this is not something that can ever be forgotten.”
Last October, Thunder forward Jalen Williams and Thunder guard Isaiah Joe visited the memorial for First Responders Day, where firefighters, police officers and EMT officials — including those who were part of the recovery effort on April 19, 1995 — were honored. The players signed autographs, posed for photos, spoke with officials and heard the stories.
“You kind of feel that all throughout Oklahoma,” Williams said that day. “That’s something that our team tries to carry with us.”
A month later, in support of the museum’s mental health program, Hartenstein recorded a video for family members, survivors and first responders.
“We’re here for you guys,” he told them. “We’re cheering for you guys. We just want to make sure you guys get all the resources you guys need to keep shining and keep enjoying life.”
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Hartenstein has been involved in 29 charitable efforts since arriving in Oklahoma City last summer, from partnering with a group that supports homeless children to donating and distributing meals on Thanksgiving to hosting clinics at local Boys & Girls Clubs.
“Sam does a good job of instilling that in us,” Hartenstein said of the Oklahoma Standard. “I think Sam also does a good job of bringing in the right people. I think that’s the special thing about this organization. We’re talented, but I think everyone cares about the community. I don’t think you find that a lot, but you have to give a lot of respect for Sam doing his research on finding the right people too, and also just building a culture — that we’re part of the community.”
Collison spent his 15-year playing career with the organization. His nickname is “Mr. Thunder.” He is the only Thunder player to have his number retired.
Today, Collison is an amateur scout for the franchise. Of the Oklahoma Standard, and what it looks like inside the organization, Collison says, “I think the Oklahoma Standard is looking out for each other, taking care of people, being kind to people. I’ve definitely felt it. That’s just how they are.”
When asked how the ideals of the Oklahoma Standard are represented inside the Thunder organization, Presti answers carefully — a characteristic that has long been his trademark.
“Since we arrived in 2008, we’ve sought inspiration, education and purpose from our surrounding community and the history of it,” he wrote in an email to ESPN. “We’ve done this intentionally but also left room for it to happen organically. We never want it to be too instructed or prescribed.
“So it’s really not for us to determine if the Oklahoma Standard is represented within the organization. That’s for other people to determine. All we’re attempting to do is make the people here proud of their team. And, if we are doing it well at certain points in time, hopefully they will see some reflections of certain things close to them that make them proud to be from Oklahoma.”
In 2019, as the the 25th anniversary of the bombing approached, the Thunder hosted family members of the 168 victims and presented to them customized jerseys. An inscription below the collar read: “We remember those who were changed forever. Top: Zach Beeker/NBAE via Getty Images. Bottom row: Zach Beeker/OKC Thunder.
ON THE EVENING of Nov. 5, 2019, during Gilgeous-Alexander’s first season with the Thunder, Taylor, the judge in the 2004 Nichols trial, stepped on top of a folding chair in a room in the bowels of the Thunder’s arena before the team played the Orlando Magic.
He looked into the eyes of the family members of the 168.
They had gathered from all over the country, as young as 11 and as old as 90. It was 168 days before the 25th anniversary, and the holiday season was approaching, when losses and empty seats at the dinner table can feel even more pronounced.
Taylor, the chairman of the memorial that year, spoke for maybe three minutes.
“There are 18,000 people out there tonight,” he told them, “who are ready to join us in this feeling.”
At the arena on that November night in 2019, the Thunder had presented the family members of the 168 with a small box.
Inside of it was a charcoal gray 2019-20 City Edition jersey, which featured a number of poignant references to the memorial. On the shorts were bronze emblems representing the two gates of time. On the tag, the words “Service Honor Kindness” — the tenets of the Oklahoma Standard. An inscription below the collar read: “We remember those who were changed forever.”
The belt of the shorts features a depiction of the Survivor Tree, an American elm now nearly a century old that was embedded with shrapnel, metal and glass. It was the only tree in the surrounding area that survived the bombing.
Today its scars remain, its trunk and branches still charred from the blast. Saplings from it have been planted across the country.
For each of the families, the jerseys also carried the name of those lost. Before the national anthem and the lineup announcements, the family members walked with Taylor onto the court. The lights were down. Fans turned their attention to the videoboard above center court. The team played a tribute video. Photos of the 168 flashed across the screen.
Then, the family members standing at center court were illuminated in a spotlight while the rest of the arena remained shrouded in darkness, and those family members raised the jerseys, displaying the names of those lost.
The fans rose to their feet and broke into applause. So, too, did the players for both teams, standing off to the side. The pain and emotion and grief was still so raw that those involved struggle to recount it.
That night, before the families stepped onto the court and raised the jerseys bearing the names of the 168, a man named Richard Williams sat in that back room where Taylor spoke.
Williams was there because he had been asked by the family of Kimberly Clark, who was a 39-year-old legal assistant for the Housing and Urban Development Department who worked on the eighth floor of the Murrah Building and whose chair resides in the eighth row, if he could attend on their behalf. Williams, a close friend, said he’d be honored. He had worked for the General Services Administration in the same building.
At 9 a.m. that morning in 1995, Williams was in his first-floor office, speaking to a colleague. At that moment, about 75 feet away from him, McVeigh’s yellow Ryder truck was parked in front of the building, holding nearly 5,000 pounds of explosives.
Williams can’t remember exactly what happened next — only that he woke in a hospital bed later that day. His left ear had been nearly severed; he had a deep cut in one leg; his right hand had been crushed; there’d been a huge shard of glass lodged in his cheek; his body had been pierced with hundreds of smaller pieces of glass, concrete and metal.
Doctors had worked through the night. He received 150 stitches. They’d reattached his ear. They’d stitched his scalp together. His wife told him so many tiny shards of glass had been blasted into his head it looked as if glitter filled his hair. Williams didn’t learn about the bombing until two days later, when the medication wore off, and he saw pictures and the footage. He turned to his wife and asked about the children in the daycare, his co-workers, his friends. She told him.
“I lost, in an instant, 116 friends and co-workers,” he says.
Richard Williams, a survivor of the Oklahoma City bombing, attended the anniversary event in 2019. He still carries glass in his body from the blast. Mitsu Yasukawa-USA TODAY NETWORK
After the event, and after he returned home to Texas, Williams wanted to write Presti a letter, so he asked his wife, Lynne, to help him do it. She wrote about how much her husband appreciated the event to honor the families of the 168. She mentioned Carson, their grandson, whom Presti met and took a photo with during Russell Westbrook’s basketball camp in Oklahoma City in 2017. By the fall of 2019, Westbrook had been traded to Houston, but Carson still cheered him on, even though he still loved the Thunder, too.
Weeks later, Williams received a handwritten letter on the Thunder’s letterhead.
“Mr. Williams,” it began, “I want to write to extend my thanks for your recent letter. The relationship that is shared between the Thunder and the Memorial is unique and special. There are a thousand lessons to be studied and learned from the events of April 19, 1995.
Wearing the uniform inspired by the Memorial is one way the team can raise awareness of some of those lessons.
Please send my regards to Lynne and let Carson know it’s good to root for Russ so long as he roots just a little louder for the home team.
Thank you again. -Sam.”
Today, Williams lives about 50 miles north of Houston, in Montgomery. He quips that he’s one of four people in Texas who cheer for the Thunder. He watches with his wife, Lynne, his son, Justin, and Carson. “They’re part of home for us,” he says.
He says he thinks often about the police officer who pulled him from the rubble, a man named Terry Yeakey who died a year after the bombing.
Williams still carries glass in his body, and every so often, another shard rises to the surface. “I still have a piece by my right eye,” he says. He keeps the large shards in a bag in a bedroom closet. “A reminder,” he says.
He’s battling throat cancer. He has lost nearly 25 pounds and undergone six rounds of chemotherapy and 35 of radiation. He told people that he survived the 1960s, Vietnam and the Oklahoma City bombing, so he’ll beat cancer, too.
His cancer makes it tough to eat solid foods, or even talk. But on a recent summer afternoon during the playoffs, Williams takes some medication. He says he wants to talk. Before the painkillers subside, Williams has one more thing he wants to say, with all the strength he can muster:
“Go Thunder.”
At 9:02 a.m., on April 19, 1995, 5,000 pounds of explosives leveled nine floors of concrete, steel, glass and people into 7,000 square feet of rubble in the street. More than 12,000 people from across the nation helped with the recovery. From top: AP File Photo, Jim Argo/The Oklahoman and Steve Sisney/The Oklahoman-USA TODAY NETWORK.
TODAY, LOCAL LEADERS talk endlessly about how far Oklahoma City has come, but the city itself began in the most unusual of ways. “We’re one of the only cities with an actual birthday,” Mayor David Holt says. And not just an exact day, but a time: noon, April 22, 1889, when a bugle and cannon fire signaled the start of a land run.
In one day, Oklahoma City’s population soared from zero to 10,000. By the time statehood arrived in 1907, Oklahoma ranked first nationally in oil production. But, over time, the state has come to be defined by the Osage murders, the Tulsa Race Massacre, the Dust Bowl, the endless spate of devastating tornadoes, the bombing.
“It was a place where bad things happened,” says Keating, the former governor.
Even its main airport is named after someone who died in a plane crash: Will Rogers.
Then, in the early 1980s, the oil and gas industry went bust, leading to the failure of 47 local banks.
By the early 1990s, there wasn’t much to Oklahoma City. “It was dead,” says Russell Claus, the urban planner who helped rebuild downtown after the bombing.
But in December 1993, the city passed a one-cent sales tax to help fund nine major projects, including an arena, even though there was no major professional team to call it home. It opened in 2002, and a few years later, whenever Mick Cornett flew out of town and introduced himself as the mayor of Oklahoma City, all anyone wanted to talk to him about, still, was the bombing.
“Here I am trying to improve our economy, but all the emotions about us are sympathy, and you can’t build an economy around sympathy,” Cornett says. “People felt sorry for us, and they felt sorry for me. And that was a tremendous roadblock.”
Cornett, a former sportscaster in Oklahoma City, had always wanted to pursue a major league team for the city and made the case to then-NBA commissioner David Stern.
On a visit to NBA headquarters in New York in 2004, Stern had told Cornett that there wasn’t a team for him. When Cornett returned in 2005, as part of a national media tour in April for the 10th anniversary of the bombing, Stern repeated the message and told him he didn’t need to return.
A few months later, Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans.
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Almost immediately, phones rang throughout Oklahoma City, as conventions and events needed new homes. After a few days, when it became clear the waters wouldn’t recede, Cornett and Stern talked again.
Cornett said that Oklahoma City’s downtown arena had open dates for the New Orleans Hornets’ home games. Stern was interested.
Over the next few days, working with state leaders, Cornett sorted out logistics. He pushed for the team to carry the Oklahoma City name, too — a step toward searing a new identity into a city known before only for tragedy. The NBA agreed; the team name for the time being would be the New Orleans/Oklahoma City Hornets.
Season tickets sold out within hours. When Stern visited early in the season, he saw the packed crowd and pulled Cornett aside. He told him that Oklahoma City was on top of the NBA’s list.
Three years later, a group of Oklahoma City businessmen bought the Seattle SuperSonics, and moved the team to Oklahoma City. Cornett said the NBA initially wanted to name them the Oklahoma Thunder, because there was concern that the team needed statewide support because Oklahoma City wasn’t a large enough market.
Cornett said no. “I was insistent that it had to be Oklahoma City,” he says. The team had a name, he said, but no culture.
It was then that the 30-year-old transplant from Massachusetts began to build one.
“Sam immediately started using the bombing memorial and those experiences as part of what would make the culture of this franchise different from all of the others,” Cornett says. “I didn’t see that coming.”
One mile and seven blocks separate the events of 30 years ago and the Thunder’s arena, where Presti and the Thunder serve as a bridge between the past and present. Kirby Lee/Getty Images
THIS MAY, THEOklahoma Hall of Fame, which dates to 1927, announced its latest class of inductees, a group of seven, to be inducted at a ceremony in November.
Presti was among them.
“That’s a big deal,” Taylor says. “The Oklahoma Hall of Fame is kind of insular. It’s old. But it shows how the community and the state have wrapped their arms around Sam and said, ‘Thank you for what you’ve done.’
“The team has changed this city.”
Countless city officials say the same. In 1993, Oklahoma City featured two downtown hotels; now, there are 23, and a 24th is under construction. It has grown from the 37th-largest city in 1970 in the U.S. to the 20th as of the 2020 census. Numerous historic neighborhoods have been revitalized: Bricktown, Deep Deuce, Automobile Alley.
Seven events from two sports in the 2028 Summer Olympics will be held in Oklahoma City.
Last year, construction plans were announced for the tallest building in the U.S., a 1,907-foot Oklahoma City skyscraper — the figure a nod to Oklahoma’s statehood — called the Legends Tower.
In July, U.S. News and World Report ranked Oklahoma City the “Best Big City to Live” among 859 American cities with populations of 499,000 or more. And local voters continue to pass one-cent-sales-tax initiatives to fund new projects throughout the city, including, in December 2023 — and by a decisive 71% margin — one to help fund a new arena for the Thunder.
The state-of-the-art, 750,000-square foot arena, is slated to cost $900 million and be finished in 2028. It will be designed by the Kansas City-based architecture firm Manica, which designed new Wembley Stadium in West London, Chase Center in San Francisco, Reliant Stadium in Texas, Camp Nou in Spain and several others.
Last fall, Manica officials spent two hours with Oklahoma City and Thunder officials at the Thunder’s offices at the Paycom Center to discuss the design.
Sitting in a spacious conference room, facing officials that included Presti and Thunder owner Clay Bennett, David Manica, the firm’s owner, asked the group, “If this building is going to be a reflection of Oklahoma City, what would that look like? What’s important to Oklahoma City?”
“Resiliency,” they said. “Unity.” “Community.” All terms that harkened back to the bombing — and the recovery.
The Japanese art of Kintsugi repairs broken pottery by mending the pieces together with gold, making it stronger than it was before. As they strategize the design, Manica and his team thought often of Kintsugi. They thought about how the bombing shattered Oklahoma City, and about how the people — the gold — rebuilt it to be stronger than it was before.
The day after that meeting, the Thunder arranged for Manica and his team to tour the memorial museum for the first time. Watkins was there. So was Brian Byrnes, a Thunder executive.
When he exited onto the memorial grounds, seeing the chairs, the scarred Survivor Tree, Manica and his team knew they weren’t just designing an arena for the team or for concerts.
They were designing an arena for the entire city.
Top: The team visited the museum in 2014 with Justice Steven Taylor, who sentenced co-conspirator Terry Nichols to 161 consecutive life sentences. Bottom: Before Game 2 of the WCF, Genzer’s three kids got autographs from MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. Top: Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum. Bottom: Kyle Genzer
FORTY-FIVE MINUTES BEFORE every home game, Taylor rises from his seat and walks around the arena’s concourse. Taylor has missed very few playoff or regular-season games since the team’s arrival in 2008, and, often, people will recognize him and approach. Many are police officers, firemen, family members and survivors.
“They just want to connect,” Taylor says. “They just want fellowship.”
Five seconds into his walk, amid the crowd, he sees a woman, Kim Neese, and her daughter.
Neese was 28 when she worked in the Oklahoma Water Resources Board across the street, standing in the third-floor doorway of her boss’s office when the bomb hit. Ceiling tiles imploded onto her, walls caved in, windows blew in. She fell to the floor. The men around her were covered in concrete dust and blood. Lacerations split across her back and neck.
Two weeks before, she’d applied for her daughter to go to America’s Kids day care. They were full, they said.
“Justice Taylor!” she says.
“She’s a survivor,” Taylor says, wrapping his arm around her.
Taylor’s son Wilson was an intern for Presti in 2007 and is now the team’s director of logistics. The two talk in the stands before every home game, and, last year, Wilson was named the NBA’s 2023-2024 Equipment Manager of the Year.
Taylor and Presti talk often, and Presti has asked plenty about the bombing and the 2004 Nichols trial. But four years after the team arrived in Oklahoma City, Presti asked Taylor a different question.
Presti wanted to know if Taylor — then the Chief Justice of the Oklahoma Supreme Court — would be the one to marry Presti and his girlfriend, Shannon.
“Sam, of course,” Taylor replied. “I’d be honored.”
And so, on Aug. 18, 2012, in yet another bond between the Thunder and the defining event in the city in which they reside, Taylor presided over Presti’s wedding. It was a small affair — attended by immediate family, with roughly a dozen present — inside the Oklahoma Supreme Court located on the second floor inside the State Capitol in Oklahoma City.
After his walk around the arena, Taylor takes his seat atop section 120. He knows that across the way, in section 105, there’s Ron Norick, the mayor at the time of the bombing, the mayor when the sales tax was passed that built the arena, the mayor whose name is on the street in front of the Paycom Center.
That morning, police escorted Norick to the site, and officials showed him the 28-foot diameter hole in the pavement, about seven feet deep, having torn through 14 inches of asphalt and 7 inches of concrete.
Aven Almon crouches at the memorial chair of her daughter, Baylee, who was killed in the bombing. The photograph of firefighter Chris Fields carrying Baylee, who had just turned 1, out of the rubble won a Pulitzer Prize. Mark Peterson/Corbis via Getty Images
Over in section 117, there’s Keating, the governor at the time, who helped create a $6 million fund for victims. If a parent lost their child, the fund covered the burial and provided counseling. If a child lost a parent, then the fund covered college and graduate school, anywhere they wanted to go.
Up on the second level, popping into a suite to see friends, there’s Watkins, head of the memorial museum. Her father, Larry Ferguson, a publisher of Oklahoma newspapers and a state representative, had died less than a week earlier. He was 87. Among the first people to call her was Presti. He did the same in 2022, when her mother died. A few days after that, Presti drove 100 miles and 1½ hours to attend the funeral in Cleveland, Oklahoma.
Standing guard over sections 108 and 109 is Master Sergeant John Fiely, who has worked security at Thunder games for five seasons and worked with the Oklahoma City Police Department for 38 years. He was a first responder on April 19, 1995. When Fiely arrived at the site, he saw nine floors of concrete and steel and glass and people pancaked down into 7,000 square feet of rubble in the street.
Refrigerated semi-trucks arrived to serve as a temporary morgue. Over his six days, Fiely and a team set about trying to identify remains, looking for wallets, ID cards.
He was tasked with identifying 27 people who were inside, including two children from the daycare. It was a federal building, he says, so there were fingerprint records on the adults, but not on the children.
Fiely and a colleague needed to drive out to separate houses — one in north Oklahoma City and one in nearby Edmond, just outside the city — and go inside the homes of parents to gather DNA samples from a pacifier or anything that could help identify them.
By the time their cars arrived in those driveways, the parents already knew. They had known for days. “As soon as the bomb went off,” Fiely says, “those babies’ rooms became memorials.”
The parents didn’t want anyone inside, he says, especially the mothers.
“Here I am in a police uniform, going in, and the husband has to be holding the wife back, and they were screaming, ‘Get out of my baby’s room! Get out of my baby’s room!'”
He looks down onto the court.
“I can still remember the mothers’ screams.”
Sara Sweet’s father was killed in the bombing. She was a senior at Oklahoma State when it happened. She took her nephew, Eli, to the memorial before Game 7 of the NBA Finals and draped her dad’s chair in Thunder blue. Courtesy Sara Sweet
AT 4:30 P.M. ON June 22, about 2½ hours before Game 7 of the NBA Finals between the Thunder and the Pacers, with the Thunder on the cusp of a championship in a city on edge to celebrate, Sara Sweet and her 11-year-old nephew, Eli Moore, drive to the memorial.
The sun is shining, the city abuzz with nervous excitement. Sweet and her nephew walk to her father’s chair. W. Stephen Williams — known by his friends as Steve — worked on the first floor as an operations supervisor for the Social Security Administration. She was a 22-year-old senior at Oklahoma State University when it happened. It took 12 days for confirmation to arrive. He was 42.
Nine days earlier, on June 13, with the Thunder trailing the Pacers 2-1 in the Finals, she was thinking about the team, and about Presti, and decided to write him a note.
Sweet shared what sports meant to her father, and to her, and how they watched games together growing up, and how they were in the stands in 1993 when Oklahoma State star Bryant Reeves sank an improbable 45-foot buzzer-beater during an overtime win against Missouri, and about what a good dad her father was, and she mailed it.
Four days later, on June 17, with the Thunder now leading the Pacers 3-2, her doorbell rang. She saw a letter propped up on her mailbox. It was from Presti, a handwritten note.
Sara,
I’m beyond grateful for your note and deeply moved by what you chose to share with me. Although I’m not originally from Oklahoma, the values and essential goodness resonated with me as soon as I arrived.
It is my hope that when you watch the Thunder, what you see is a reflection of the values in sporting form.
Everyone is on the team here in a literal sense. Your father sounds like a wonderful person. I’m hopeful my daughters will feel as strongly and lovingly about our special times together as they reflect back.
Sincerely, Sam
She couldn’t believe it. She checked her Ring app, and there Presti was.
“I’ll keep that note forever,” she says.
She stands at her father’s chair. In a blue Thunder shirt, and her nephew, in a Gilgeous-Alexander jersey, she places a blue Thunder shirt over the back of it, along with a message she wrote in black sharpie on the front:
Dear Dad,
Thank you for teaching me to be a good fan — loyal and supportive.
I miss you each day. But today is hard. I wish we could cheer for the Thunder together. You would get so much joy from this team. Win or lose, they are the best team, and this is the best city.
Let’s Go Thunder!
Love, Sara and Eli
6-22-25
Over time, Oklahoma has come to be defined by the Osage murders, the Tulsa Race Massacre, the Dust Bowl, devastating tornadoes, the bombing. For the past 17 years, the Thunder have sought to honor that history — and add to it. Logan Riely and David L. Nemec//NBAE via Getty Images
BEFORE GAME 7 begins, and before Oklahoma native Kristin Chenoweth delivers a rousing rendition of the national anthem, Ronnie Fields steps into the spotlight at center court.
The Thunder are the only team in the league to have a prayer as part of its pregame ceremony, and, over the years, a common theme from those delivering it is to cite the Oklahoma Standard.
Fields, a pastor at the First Christian Church in Guthrie, 30 miles north of the city, knows those ideals well. He lost his mother, Carrol, in the bombing. She worked on the ninth floor. Her chair sits in the ninth row.
He was 21 then, a fourth-year student at the University of Oklahoma (OU). He had visited the Murrah building several times, including the day before.
After the Thunder lost Game 6 in Indianapolis, Fields received a text from Candace Coonrod, the Thunder’s manager for live production and game day experience. She wanted to know if he could deliver the invocation before Game 7. He immediately said yes.
He’d delivered invocations at Thunder games since 2011, he says, usually a few times each season. This time would be different.
Standing in the spotlight, in a blue polo, he holds a piece of paper in his left hand, a microphone in his right, takes a breath and reads:
Gracious God.
The crowd falls silent.
We thank You for the gift of this game, the unity it brings, and the joy of community.
Bless the athletes, coaches, and fans. And may this be a night of integrity, passion, and sportsmanship.
Amen.
The crowd repeats. Amen.
When Fields returns to his seat in section 213, his wife, Shana, turns to him and takes his hand. “Your mom,” she tells him, “would be really proud of you.”
In June, the Thunder hoisted their first championship in franchise history, led by Presti and his devotion to The Standard. Logan Riely and Joe Murphy/NBAE via Getty Images
AT 9:49 P.M. IT is official — the Thunder are NBA champions.
In a second-floor suite, Watkins pops a bottle of champagne and pours for friends and family. In section 220, Sweet takes in the celebration with her nephew, thinking of her father, tears welling in her eyes.
On the court, a man named Jack Thompson guides NBA commissioner Adam Silver to the quickly assembled stage. Thompson helps lead security for the Paycom Center, where he has worked since 2019.
Before that, he worked for the Oklahoma City Fire Department for more than 28 years. When people ask, and they always do, he will say, yes, he was there. He worked body recovery and search and rescue. He was 26.
He has driven by the memorial countless times since but has never visited. “I can’t do it,” he says. “I don’t think I’ll ever do it.”
One day, about two years ago, before the arena hosted a G-League game, Thompson arrived at the arena and saw a driverless U-Haul truck parked outside. “How long has that truck been there?” he asked. A staffer wasn’t sure. Thompson knew thousands would enter the arena later that day. “Get on the camera,” he said. “Find out how long they’ve been there.” A bomb squad arrived; they learned that it was a false alarm.
He told his staff it was unacceptable that they didn’t know. “I don’t think you guys understand,” he told them. “I’m going to lose my mind every time I come in here and there’s a truck parked outside this building. Do you remember what happened on April 19th, 1995? You read about it. I lived it.”
He implores his staff. “We’re the Oklahoma Standard,” he tells them. “We can’t drop the ball. We’ve come too far. We can’t let people down.”
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Sixteen days before the Thunder’s title-clinching win, Silver had looked out the window of his room at the Citizen, a mixed-use building that rises exactly 168 feet high in honor of the victims, and peered across the street at the memorial.
He was 32 when the bombing happened, living in New York City, working for the NBA, and he remembered the around-the-clock news coverage — the search and rescue, the manhunt, then-President Bill Clinton’s speech at the prayer service in Oklahoma City four days later.
Over the years, Silver had come to understand how deeply both Presti and Bennett cared about the memorial and the team’s bond to it. But Silver himself had never taken the tour.
Bennett recommended they take it together, which they did on the morning of June 6, hours after Game 1 between the Pacers and the Thunder. The two met inside the museum, where Watkins walked them through.
“As a New Yorker, I also saw many similarities with how the exhibits are structured at the 9/11 Memorial, which no doubt was inspired by how Oklahoma City dealt with their own tragedy,” Silver told ESPN.
When Silver left, he understood how the bombing and the recovery were core to the city’s identity, and to the team itself.
Standing in front of Gilgeous-Alexander, Williams and Presti, Silver addresses the team — and what they built.
He begins. “To the Oklahoma City Thunder, a team-first mentality, homegrown All-Stars, and a very special culture … “
Thunderous chants of “O-K-C” rain down onto them, along with a blizzard of orange and blue confetti, as players adjust shirts that say, “Won for the City.”
Later that night, after the arena and celebration empties into the streets, Thompson returns to the court.
He was born and raised in Oklahoma City. His nephew, Daniel Orton, played for the Thunder. He knows the state has, for 30 years, been known for the one thing he can’t leave behind.
He pulls a handful of confetti into a Ziploc bag. “Now,” he says to himself, “we’re world champions.”
As confetti rained down after the team’s championship win, Thunder players wore shirts that read, “Won for the City.” Channing Holloway and Garrett Ellwood/NBAE via Getty Images
TWO DAYS LATER, at about 10:40 a.m. on June 24, as Sweet finishes brunch with a friend across the street from the memorial, she walks across the street to get in position.
The parade is about to begin. People line the street in front of the memorial, a dozen rows deep on both sides, and Sweet stands near a fence next to the 9:03 West Gate — where visitors have long left tokens honoring those lost: crosses, teddy bears, children’s shoes, photos of the 168.
On both sides of the memorial, banners hang honoring the Thunder and Presti’s tradition of making it the first stop for players and staff: “We are honored your journey starts here!” the banners read.
Jimmy Do, the Thunder’s photographer, studied the parade route the night before, knowing there was one key photo he hoped to take.
He knew the area around the memorial, having lived nearby at the Regency, a 24-story residential building, where officials found the gnarled axle of the Ryder truck, which had flown 575 feet from the bomb’s crater and contained a partial VIN, making it the first piece of evidence in the sprawling manhunt that ultimately led to McVeigh.
As more buses near the memorial, players exit the vehicles and enter the streets, approaching the edges and interacting with the fans, spraying champagne, and Presti, whose own bus is one of the last in the parade, looks on from the back, watching his players come eye to eye with fans, the connection to them, and their history, steeled forever.
The parade is the largest gathering in the city’s history, with an estimated 500,000 in attendance in a city whose 2024 population is listed at nearly 713,000.
By midday, the sprawling celebration reaches the 70-acre Scissortail Park near the arena. There, Holt, the mayor, addresses a crowd of thousands in Thunder blue.
“Today is for the families who lost so much on April 19, 1995, who find solace in the joys of this journey.” He proclaims July 1 to be Sam Presti Day.
“Sam is the transplant, but he has really immersed himself in the culture and history of our city,” Holt told ESPN. “He’s really become an Oklahoman at this point.”
Thunder photographer Jimmy Do revealed a photograph of this year’s championship parade as part of an exhibit at the Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum. The team shared it on social media, with a caption: “In the heart of celebration, #WeRemember” Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum
After Holt finishes his speech, Do, the team’s photographer, returns to his desk at the Thunder’s corporate office at the arena, imports his photos into his computer, and he sees it, with a timestamp of 11:23:19.
In the foreground, there is the team bus, with “2025 Champions” written up high, and, fittingly with the No. 30 — the number of years it had been — in the window.
On top, there is Gilgeous-Alexander, his arms out wide, as if in homage and celebration to the mission statement inscribed on the 9:03 West Gate facing him:
“We come here to remember those who were killed, those who survived and those changed forever. May all who leave here know the impact of violence. May this memorial offer comfort, strength, peace, hope and serenity.”
All around the bus, a scene of celebration: cheering fans, confetti fluttering down.
In his office, Do studies the photo, everything in focus, and relief washes over him. At 8:30, the team posts it to its social media accounts with the caption: “In the heart of celebration, #WeRemember.”
It instantly goes viral — the city’s biggest tragedy and triumph captured in one frame.
“I’m just proud that I happened to be there,” Do says, “in the right place at the right time.”
Presti shares the photo, too. “That one is going to be around forever,” he later says.
The team donates the photo — and the license to reproduce and sell it — to the memorial.
Fifteen days later, the memorial museum holds a ceremony on its second floor. About 50 people attend, including survivors, first responders and family members of the 168, and they watch Watkins and Do pull a black curtain covering a 36-by-54-inch exhibit affixed to a column next to the window that looks out onto the memorial grounds.
It is titled “HOPE Wins!” and it features Do’s photo.
Beneath it are five smaller photos from the parade, one featuring Bennett pumping his fist atop a bus, one featuring Presti waving to fans atop a bus, and another of the shirt with the message that Sweet placed on her father’s chair on the afternoon of Game 7.
The museum includes the Gallery of Honor, where portraits of the 168 victims are displayed. Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum
INSIDE THE MUSEUM on a midsummer day, Watkins looks out the window and down Robinson Avenue, where one mile and seven blocks separates the Thunder’s arena from the events of 30 years ago, and where Presti and the Thunder serve as a bridge between past and present.
Presti’s annual postseason news conference, held eight days after the team’s championship win, lasts nearly two hours, but he brings up the bombing within the first five minutes.
He talks about the team’s journey, and how it didn’t have a team name when it arrived, or a logo, or a place to practice.
“What we did have immediately was a connection to the community that we represent, and that is something that hasn’t changed since we’ve arrived here,” he says. “But the city itself and the state itself are the reasons why we exist. They’re the reasons why we’re here. The ultimate rebuilding job was done by the city leadership many, many years ago. That’s Mayor Norick and Mayor Cornett. They’re the people that allowed the city to recover from 1995 and the tragedy that occurred here, and put in place the vision for the city to be able to have an NBA team one day in the future.”
When the team arrived in 2008, people in the city would talk to the players about the bombing, its connection to the team and how the team helped the city and the people living there heal. At times, it made Collison uncomfortable.
“It’s almost stolen valor,” he says. Years passed and the appreciation never stopped. “Over time, I really do feel like that’s how the city feels — that somehow this experience of Oklahoma City growing from this devastating thing that happened, this awful thing that happened, and the changes in the city and the team and the positivity that the team has brought over time — I do feel a lot more comfortable talking about that because I really do think that’s how a lot of people feel.”
He recognizes the team’s role in keeping the memory alive for so many who fear being left behind. “That’s a really great thing to help keep,” Collison says.
As Watkins looks out, a framed 2019-20 Thunder City Edition jersey is displayed in a case just a few feet away. The column that features Do’s photo from the parade is too.
By this point in the tour, players have passed by the pocket knife that one surgeon used to help complete an above-the-knee amputation of a survivor trapped in the rubble. They have passed by an exhibit sharing the story of a blind man who ran a snack bar and led several people to safety. They have passed by the yellow 1977 Mercury Marquis that McVeigh used as a getaway car. They have passed by a wall clock whose hands are forever frozen at 9:02.
And they have passed the Gallery of Honor, where portraits of the 168 are displayed, along with artifacts chosen by their families.
In the display case honoring Genzer’s mother, Jamie, is a butterfly brooch. She loved butterflies, and Genzer has often noticed them fluttering around him in random moments when he’s at the memorial. One year, on the anniversary, he and his wife visited his mother’s chair. As they stood there, a butterfly approached. His wife was pregnant with their second son, and the butterfly landed right on her stomach.
But before the players leave, before anyone leaves, there is a video that plays on a screen near the elevator that delivers everyone to the ground floor. It contains footage that they shot during the COVID-19 pandemic of speakers describing the Oklahoma Standard.
One of those speakers defines acts of service and honor. He said they are simple: an hour at a food bank, a visit to the memorial museum, closing your neighbor’s garage if it’s left open.
Sam Presti explains that these are things Oklahomans do every day.
The Survivor Tree, an elm nearly a century old that was embedded with shrapnel from the blast, was the only tree in the area that survived the bombing. Its trunk and branches are still charred. Saplings from it have been planted across the country. Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum
AFTER THE LAST parade bus recedes in the distance, Sweet turns and looks back at her father’s chair, still bearing the blue Thunder shirt with the message she had written on the day of Game 7.
A photo of it has since gone viral, and her phone hasn’t stopped buzzing.
As the sun beats down, she stands in the shade of a pine tree, maybe 10 feet away.
She watches as dozens of people approach her dad’s chair and read the message. One woman weeps as she leans in. No one seems to know that the person who wrote the message is standing right next to them.
As the parade crowd begins to disperse, the Field of Empty Chairs is full of people walking through. Many hustle home, seeking to escape the heat, but just as many take their time, lingering among the chairs, reading the names.
Sweet looks on as small children walk among the small chairs in the second row and look up to their parents and ask about this place.
She looks on as the parents lean down, in quiet, somber voices, and the story of what happened is born anew.
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