The Return of Rip City

I started this article a few weeks ago, at the onset of Spring, but I optimistically thought, “Why not wait until the lottery? Just in case…” It was intended to be a piece on fandom, and the role that losing plays in the truest of fans, but that didn’t really work out.

For 7-8 months, the city of Portland can be a very difficult place to live. I say this as someone who knows little else, who’s lived here his whole life with a few breaks here and there.

Times like this, though, when the buds unfold into flowers and leaves and the grapevines and climbers sprout new limbs and the rose bushes bloom at chest-level, we Portlanders realize why we live here: there is no better place to be in the Spring and Summer. No better. In Portland, it’s green until the August sun turns the grass brown. Even then, we have the leaves and trees.

Portland is a city of transplants at this point, a city growing on the backs of the young creative class blowing in from the American Southwest, the big sky of Montana - anywhere for that matter.

So here’s how you tell a Portlander: ask him what he thinks about the Blazers. The transplant, if they’re a minimal sports fan at best (the “creative class” doesn’t typically include those folks), will whine about the “Jail Blazers”, because that’s the cliche.

But when we were young, before we understood the beauty around us, before we knew that the months of rain should bring us down, before we knew about the bohemian pockets where we could sit with coffee or beer, before we knew about the music this city could produce (before the city actually produced great music), we had the Blazers.

Portlanders remember what it was like to watch Rip City in action, to see Kersey, Porter, Clyde the Glide…even Kevin Duckworth…scream down the floor and get this city on its feet. If they’re old enough, and I’m not, they’ll recall Bill Walton’s outlet passes. It seems everyone has an uncle who picked up a hitchhiking Walton on his way to Portland’s only championship parade in ‘77. My dad’s best friend claims he was the one.

Until last Tuesday at around 5:25 pm PST, the Kennedy moment for Blazer fans, that time and place where we remember exactly where we were, was the fourth quarter of the Blazer’s loss to the Lakers game seven of the Western Conference finals. Here’s some testimony from my friend Steve:

The night the Trail Blazers (or, if you’re local, just “Blazers”. You would
do well to remember that, Knickerbocker fans) fell apart, I was working at
Starbucks on 23rd, and I only remember 3 things:

I still have no idea how it happened, I refused to watch the highlights or
read the summaries. I know the (expletive deleted) Lakers were involved, and that made it so much worse. Just a miserable night all around.

Me, I got to see the game in army barracks in Arizona with one other Portlander and two Laker fans behind us. When the third quarter ended with Portland up big, we talked some trash and went to get a drink.

“I can’t believe we’re going to the NBA Finals and we’re stuck here,” I told my friend.

From there, it was all downhill, both for that game and for the seasons to follow. The Blazer hopeful dwindled as player after player was arrested. We drew a prison-themed moniker. We turned vehemently on our GM, who cared more about raw talent than Portland’s rabid fan base. Two seasons ago, we endured the worst record in the NBA.

That poor finish restarted our story. In some masterful strokes, Blazers management pulled in three of the top rookies in last year’s draft, including rookie of the year Brandon Roy, the flashy Spaniard Sergio Rodriguez, and the smooth-as-butter big man Lamarcus Aldridge. Things were looking up, the majority of troublemakers gone. I caught a preseason game at the Rose Garden, and there were brief spans in that spacious and cold building when it felt like the Memorial Coliseum again…a player diving on the floor for a loose ball, or Rodriguez hitting a couple threes and pumping his fist our way. There was an undercurrent there, and Steve and I left the game that night thinking, “This is starting to look up.”

And then last Tuesday happened.

It was like every great moment in every great sports movie, the point where the outstanding player joins the team and makes that team a legitimate contender: Jimmy Chitwood in “Hoosiers” or Kelly Leak in “Bad News Bears”.

We’re not there yet, of course. The Blazers still have to choose between the great big man (Greg Oden) and the electric small forward (Kevin Durant). If I’m making the pick, I go with Durant, because we’ve got the big men and we need a shooter, a Michael Jordan-esque star. Henry Abbott summed up all my beliefs here. Most pundits claim Oden is the automatic number one.

General Manager Kevin Pritchard will make the pick one month from today, and the city is behind him. Before the lottery, an annual poll of Blazers fans asked who should stay and who should go. Kevin Pritchard received a 98% approval rating, tying Lamarcus Aldridge for the top spot. We trust KP.

Rip City is on the rise, and we welcome the fair-weather fans and the national following back. We were here all along: my friends Steve and John, the commenters at Casey Holdahl’s marvelous Blazer Blog, TrueHoop guru Henry Abbott…for us the air has been sweeter and we’re ready for this city to be on its feet again, watching our Portland Trail Blazers.