Monthly Archives: May 2011
On Basketball, Tragedy and How I Became A Writer
| May 17, 2011 | Filled under Video |
In 2008 Oklahoma finally got a professional major league sports team. For years people said OKC could not support such a venture. Boy were they wrong.
I’ve always been a college basketball, never a pro fan, but that’s changing now that the Thunder are in the playoffs, against a Texas team even. Yesterday, on the even of the Western Conference Finals first game, my mom sent me this video.
In Oklahoma, basketball goes hand in hand with tragedy. But something else struck me about the story above.
I was 14 years old when the Murrah Building was bombed. I was in junior high, had not yet taken my first creative writing class, had not yet worked for a newspaper. But I loved to write, and I had been keeping journals every year. Watching the video now reminds me of my desperate need for info after the bombing. How voraciously I consumed every newspaper, magazine, news report and update. It never occurred to me before, but in no small way did the OKC bombing influence my later development into a news junkie and journalist.
