We headed down to Oklahoma from Tulsa early this afternoon, the final part of our piece of Route 66 on this trip. From here, the old road winds on to Amarillo (turns out pretty much everyone out here knows the way) and then New Mexico. Our plan instead is to head south to Dallas in a couple of days.
It’s been quite some day though.
First off, Oklahoma in late July is damn hot. At 2pm today it was 98 degrees, and no place for a pair of Scotsmen. After checking into the Isola Bella (which although meaning ‘beautiful island’ is a huge complex of self-catering apartments in the city), we hid in the shade for a few hours. (Cranking up the air conditioning in the Jeep, we then embarked on a ludicrous hunt for a same day dry cleaners to allow Ali to get a rucksack full of clobber he’d been carting around since mid-July laundered.)
Second, another new thing. Live baseball, a minor league game between the Oklahoma City Dodgers and the New Orleans Zephyrs. Until tonight, I’d never really ‘got’ baseball. It’s a peculiarly American thing, and unlike other US sports like Basketball and American Football, there’s no history of it even being meaningfully shown on TV in the UK. When I have seen it before, it seemed a bit slow, staccato, not especially exciting. The no promotion thing. And it goes on forever: the games themselves and the actual season (nearly 80 games a season).
I appreciate it more now though. It’s slow because – as I said earlier – it’s damn hot, even at 8pm. The games are actually pretty tactical: clipboards and iPads abound, serious old men cupping hands and whispering instructions in each others’ ears. And although a bit paunchier than other athletes, these guys can hit hard and run fast, albeit in a stop/starty kind of way.
The atmosphere was great too. The Chickasaw Bricktown Ballpark stadium isn’t massive – maybe a 15,000 seater capacity – but it has facilities that would put all but the biggest soccer teams in Scotland to shame. Even this game tonight – there couldn’t have been more than 5000 people there – was a spectacle: the national anthem (obviously), cheerleaders, competitions, music, stuff for kids to do during the game and in the (many) breaks in play. And it was $20 to get in, for what could have been four hours entertainment. Calling it a community team might be going a bit far, but they take seriously the need to attract and keep whole families coming along to these games – often 30 or 40 home ties a year. We in the UK have a lot to learn.
As it turns out, we didn’t get four hours of play tonight, Instead, we were treated to the most incredible thunderstorm and lightning I have ever seen and heard, which left the pitch waterlogged after just five minutes and play abandoned just after 9.30pm. Probably not surprising given the heat and that the city itself is in the middle of what is known as ‘Tornado Alley’ and its basketball team is the Oklahoma Thunder…
The final big event of the day happened just before the game. For the first time on this trip, I saw several, ordinary folk (baseball fans, paying punters in this case) openly carrying guns. On their hips, in holsters, tubby cowboys in business casual chinos. More than half of the states allow licensed open carry but – apart from seeing ‘No Guns’ signs in the Chicago Museum a week ago (see below) – the whole gun thing hadn’t really registered until today. Seeing guys walking into such a family-friendly environment, and with easy access to alcohol, is still a terrifying reminder that America is a really different place.
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