A story I learned today that, I promise, is eventually about sports. In the post-WW2 era, Western travel saw the use of jet engines developed in the war applied to commercial airlines. The growth in the area was massive, with engines rapidly growing more powerful leading to larger planes leading to a need for even bigger engines, etc. Very quickly, people began developing what appeared to be the next evolution of travel: the supersonic transport (SST). Countries across the globe began researching and developing SSTs, and the main company doing such R&D in the USA was Boeing, headquartered in Seattle. Boeing and its SST work was such a prominent part of Seattle culture in the 1960s that, when Seattle was awarded an NBA expansion team in 1966, they were named the SuperSonics in honor of Boeing's work.
For a variety of reasons, some obvious and some not, creating an SST was incredibly difficult, such that there were only ever two supersonic planes that saw regular commercial service, the Concorde and the Tupolev Tu-144. One of the big challenges of supersonic travel is that going faster than the speed of sound creates a sonic boom, and there was a lot of uncertainty in how the public would respond to the regular occurrence of sonic booms over cities. The US military, being what all-powerful dicks they were in the 1960s, decided to research the effects of sonic booms on civilian populations with Operation Bongo II, a program in which military supersonic planes created 1,253 sonic booms of increasing strength over Oklahoma City in a 6 month span, an average of 7 per day.
While government officials in OKC were initially happy to be chosen for the tests, public sentiment soon turned against it when the pressure waves began breaking windows and cracking plaster in the city's buildings. Complaints to the FAA were responded to with dismissals and bare acknowledgement, eventually leading to a class action lawsuit that, in a rare instance, the government lost. Eventually the testing program was ended early after significant public backlash. As a result of these tests, numerous countries, including the USA, passed legislation preventing airplanes from travelling at supersonic speeds above land. This led to SSTs being limited to trans-oceanic travel, and when combined with the fuel crisis of the 1970s, most SST development was shut down, leaving the Concorde as the last remaining SST until it had its final flight in Oct 24th, 2003.
With the Concorde gone and most SSTs relegated to museums, one of the only legacies of faster-than-sound era was the Seattle basketball team, the SuperSonics. However, the early 2000s were a time of struggle for them as well as the team failed to achieve success and popularity declined. When the Seattle government declined to finance a new stadium for the team, owner Howard Schulz began efforts to relocate the team, eventually getting approval from the NBA. So, following the 2007-08 season, just like the program that had inspired them, the SuperSonics went to Oklahoma City and created the Thunder.
