An Open Letter to Michael Salk, 710ESPN Seattle

From hour 2 of the Brock & Salk show on 710AM:

Dear Mike,
I’ve been a listener of 710 for a long time—since the beginning! I’ve always enjoyed Brock’s takes with his history of being a UW quarterback and being in the NFL and your ability of always seeing the bigger picture—I remember listening to you on AllNight on ESPN as a teenager and really appreciating your ability to host a show by yourself—it was seldom I missed your show when you were filling in for Jason Smith. But I digress. I’ll admit Seattle sports fans do tend to get tunnel vision when it comes to our sports teams.

A huge part of being a Seattle sports fan was tied to the Sonics. As you know, KeyArena was one of the biggest reasons our city lost the Sonics. The NBA didn’t want to be housed there in its current state and nobody stepped up to make it better when the league demanded an upgrade. We didn’t know that Howard Schultz would actually sell the team to another ownership group who clearly only had intentions of moving the team to Oklahoma City. It blindsided us. In hindsight, if we could go back to that time, there’s no question that someone would have stepped up to renovate KeyArena (we now know two groups that would have). So that’s when Chris Hansen came in and led the charge in bringing a new arena to SODO in hopes of bringing the Sonics back to Seattle. With a new arena and a fresh start. Now, after the hurdles of being denied the vacation of Occidental Avenue by majority of the City Council while getting pushback from the Port of Seattle towards the SODO project since the beginning of this proposal (that’s another story), we are almost there. Almost! I know OVG and AEG have made proposals to make KeyArena a viable option for the NBA but the Hansen group is offering the city an opportunity for a fresh start in a brand new arena in a location that will only strengthen our civic pride and reputation as a city.

I know you’ve been in Seattle for a good amount of time now and I’ve heard you say on multiple occasions that you will never leave this city again (that’s great, we’re happy you’re one of us!) but you weren’t here and felt the pain when the Sonics couldn’t get over the hump to win a championship in the 90s. You weren’t here when Ken Griffey Jr. took this city over and how devastated we were when he took off to Cincinnati. You weren’t here during the peak of the Ichiro era and probably weren’t all that sad when he left. You weren’t here when the Seahawks lost against the Pittsburgh Steelers in Super Bowl 40. You weren’t even here when the Seahawks won their first Super Bowl.

I know the AEG group comes with the aura of Tim Leiweke and his relationships with the NHL and even the NBA (which is huge, I know!) but I believe one would be really naïve to think that because of one hiccup that Chris Hansen had trying to acquire the Sacramento Kings that he’s forever blackballed from the NBA—and as you mentioned in hour 2 of your Friday, April 14 show, maybe even the NHL. As big as that blunder in Sacramento looks now, I believe that Chris Hansen is just like one of us—a kid that grew up watching and loving the Sonics and being heartbroken when they were taken away. He was in a position of bringing them back to our city and overreached a little—for that I don’t think anyone can blame him. In a city as big as ours and with the support we have of our sports teams, surely you don’t really believe that the SODO arena would just sit there—like the Sprint Arena in Kansas City (owned by AEG, by the way)—just because Hansen’s name is on the project.

So this is why it makes us so passionate—even to the point of anger sometimes—when we hear you speak about the arena project on your airwave. It’s obvious you don’t really understand what the Sonics meant for us when they were here—it’s okay! You were in Boston! And also it’s not hard to figure out you’re not the biggest fan of professional basketball when we listen to your show. I mean it’s puzzling to me when someone from Boston rarely mentions the glory days of the Larry Bird era or never mentioning that Seattle’s own son Isaiah Thomas has become one of the top players in the NBA in his hometown! But for us, the Sonics leaving town is still the biggest sports tragedy that has happened here and it hurts when we see other cities getting to enjoy their NBA team in a league that is the best it has ever been. I remember the pain when I watched the Oklahoma City Thunder having the awesome run with Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook, and James Harden when they should have been in Seattle. What could have been! Many of us will still have that scar even when they eventually return. KeyArena may be the quickest way for a NHL franchise to get here and when we get a hockey team, I have no doubt whatsoever our city will get behind them. But Seattle is still a basketball town at heart and it is starving for its pro team to return. Not in the arena that was responsible for it’s demise but in a new arena with a fresh start.

Your voice carries a lot of weight with the platform you have so please when you quickly disregard everyone that is rooting for the SODO arena and say you don’t care where the new arena site is, try to look at the bigger picture! The statement you made on your show that the SODO project and KeyArena are equal is simply NOT TRUE. Hansen is offering pretty much everything OVG and AEG are offering and even you said yourself that the SODO site would logistically be a better option. You might not understand our loyalty for Hansen and the SODO project but we’ve been waiting for 10 years (and counting) for the Sonics to return to Seattle—a little more waiting is not going to kill us. I believe it’s not a matter of "if" but a matter of "when", when the Sonics will return to this city if the SODO project happens. As dire as the SODO project looks compared to the other two proposals right now, why can’t you get behind the Hansen group with the rest of us? As Dave Mahler said on his radio show this past week, "...with these three options in front of us, why can’t the beggar be the chooser?" Don’t you think SODO is ultimately the best option?

I know we all do.

Respectfully yours,
Rory and the Sonics fans