Baxter HolmesSep 30, 2025, 08:09 AM ETCloseBaxter Holmes (@Baxter) is a senior writer for ESPN Digital and Print, focusing on the NBA. He has covered the Lakers, the Celtics and previously worked for The Boston Globe and Los Angeles Times.Follow on X
ON A WEDNESDAY morning a little more than 30 years ago, before his mother left for work in downtown Oklahoma City, a boy named Kyle Genzer told her he loved her.
He tilts his head and looks toward the sky. She was in a hurry. He thought he’d see her later that day, after school. He wishes he’d hugged her, he says.
Minutes later, his uncle, a teacher there, knocked on the classroom door and told him there had been an explosion at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, where his mother worked as a loan officer for the Federal Employees Credit Union.
Jamie was a single mother who raised Kyle and his sister, Krista, and sang in the Sweet Adelines quartet. Her singing often woke the kids in the mornings.
At 14, after helping to pick out his mom’s casket and planning her funeral, Kyle learned to endure the quiet.
It’s May 26, and Genzer is standing on a sloping, grassy hill at the Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum. He’s 44 now, 12 years older than his mom was when she died.
Just in front of them, in the second row, there are 15 smaller chairs. Those honor the 15 children who were killed inside America’s Kids day care center, which was on the second floor of the building.
A small American flag is planted into the carefully manicured grass next to every chair, each one resembling an empty seat at a dinner table.
Six springs ago, Genzer stood on a small stage near this very spot, next to his son, Brendlee. They were joined by dignitaries and others who had lost someone in the bombing, and they were there to read the names of the 168, as part of an annual tradition known as the Remembrance Ceremony, which includes 168 seconds of silence, starting at 9:02 a.m.
When the Thunder arrived in Oklahoma City in 2008, Presti quickly established a tradition for his franchise as much as a mandate: that each Thunder player and staff member would, immediately after joining the team, tour the memorial.
He had his reasons. It was important, he told them, to understand that defining moment at 9:02 a.m. on April 19, 1995, to learn how the city banded together afterward in a collective recovery that became known nationally as the Oklahoma Standard. He wanted his team to be inspired by that effort, to be built in its image.
“The Thunder would not be in Oklahoma City without the response that took place on April 19, 1995,” Presti said during an event at the memorial last fall, “and without the sacrifices and the efforts that were made to rebuild this city.”
But for those who have spent three decades living in an endless fog of grief and trauma, the people who planned funerals before they could drive and who still carry glass from the blast beneath their skin, the Thunder’s efforts to keep their story alive means more than they can say.
Standing beside his mother’s chair, Genzer places his hand over his heart, near the Thunder logo on his shirt.
“It’s why we will always — win, lose or draw — be Thunder fans,” Genzer says, his voice catching in his throat, “because you can’t be part of this city without understanding what took place in 1995.”
THAT MORNING, PRESTI was an 18-year-old high school senior in Concord, Massachusetts. He had watched the images on cable television while soaking a turned ankle — from a basketball game earlier that day — in the bucket of ice water.
“It was probably the first real stark reality of the world that we were living in,” he would later say.
He arrived in Oklahoma City with the team in July 2008, after the Seattle Supersonics had been bought and relocated by Oklahoma City businessmen. He was 30 then, the second-youngest general manager in NBA history.
Presti stayed at the city’s oldest hotel — the Skirvin, a 13-floor, art deco three-tower complex built in 1945. He walked the city, trying to get a sense of the place, and he came to the memorial, which is framed by two five-story bronze gates: the 9:01 East Gate, signifying the moment before, and the 9:03 West Gate, when the healing began.
When Presti visited, he was moved by a quote on the second floor from network television journalist Tom Brokaw:
“Oklahoma has earned its place in American folklore as cowboy tough and proudly self-reliant. Oklahomans may feel more vulnerable now and a little disoriented by what’s happened to them, but in their response to this madness they have elevated us all with their essential sense of goodness, community, and compassion.”
For a team without a culture and an identity, Presti sought to establish one that embraced the city’s response and the ideals that Brokaw referenced, and he enlisted Watkins, who was the memorial museum’s first employee in 1996 and is now its president and CEO. He wanted the team to swing by before the Thunder’s first practice that fall.
Nick Collison was 14 years old when he watched the news in Iowa Falls, Iowa, and he heard the words “domestic terrorism.”
He was a 27-year-old Thunder forward when the team arrived at the memorial before training camp began in the fall of 2008.
In the years ahead, Watkins fielded calls from Presti late at night and early in the morning. She led tours before the museum opened and after it closed. There were tours on the memorial grounds for draft prospects and free agents, and if those players joined the Thunder, then they would also tour the museum.
Watkins has completed more than 550 tours with Thunder players, staff and their families since then. Presti remains a constant presence: He has never missed a player tour, as he and Watkins repeat the same message that they first started sharing 17 years ago:
INSIDE THE MUSEUM, the Thunder’s presence is immediate and omnipresent. In a framed display case on a near wall is a magazine cover of Thunder guard Shai Gilgeous-Alexander wearing the team’s 2019-20 City Edition jersey, a special uniform created in collaboration with the memorial.
When tours begin, visitors enter a room and hear a recording of a water board hearing that began at 9 a.m. that morning across the street. Then, they hear the explosion itself.
On a wall-length screen, the faces of the 168 appear, and Watkins says the players always fall silent. “It’s just so unfortunate,” Gilgeous-Alexander told ESPN. “To have a child of my own now makes it even more crazy.”
Watkins has often told Thunder players that they are the largest ambassadors for the city, and, after walking through the museum, Gilgeous-Alexander said he understood what that meant.
“The city was never the same,” he says, “but the way those families in the city have bounced back from it is so inspiring and so motivational. It gave me a little bit of a sense of purpose while I’m out there playing.”
He knows well that every night he’s there, everywhere he goes, he represents more than just the team. He represents them.
“Like, for me, playing for Canada gives me — it’s a natural sense of purpose being from there, but coming to Oklahoma City and seeing that and experiencing that, it gave me meaning behind the name on my chest, and a reason to go out there and play hard. It’s a connector to the community. I think that’s what the organization wants us to feel — connected to the community, and it’s sad that it’s a tragic way, but it is a connection nonetheless.”
He walked through with his wife, Kourtney, passing through exhibits describing the second-floor daycare, where, on that morning, 21 preschool children had gathered, including four babies who, from their cribs lined up against the window, were known to reach for the rays of sunlight and the passing clouds in the sky just outside. The youngest was 4 months old.
Sitting at the team’s practice facility, Hartenstein described his tour. “That was tough,” he says quietly. “Especially because I just had a kid.”
Hartenstein learned that the bombing registered seismic waves equivalent to a magnitude 3.2 earthquake and was felt as far as 55 miles away. That more than 330 buildings were damaged; another 15 were destroyed and needed to be torn down.
That of the nearly 1 million people in Oklahoma City at the time, one-third of the population knew someone among the 168 and the nearly 700 hurt or injured. Nearly 190,000 of the people in central Oklahoma attended at least one funeral. Some attended a dozen; some attended three in a single day.
That volunteer lines stretched outside blood banks. How after a call for boots, hundreds of pairs arrived, with one man donating the pair off his feet.
One police officer recalls what looked like a Wal-Mart-sized tent rising out of nowhere, with hundreds of coolers of food and drinks, tall stacks of jeans and gloves and shirts.
Rescue workers arrived from California, New York, Arizona — part of a recovery effort ultimately spanning 12,000 people — and they never saw a bill from restaurants, hotels or anywhere else.
As he prepared to leave after several days, one rescue worker opened his wallet and showed then-Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating a dollar bill that he had brought with him. No one would accept his money, he said. This was no ordinary dollar, he added: It was an Oklahoma dollar.
“You see how great of a community Oklahoma City is,” Hartenstein says. “I don’t think there’s a lot of cities out there that would leave whatever they got going on to go straight to the site to go help.”
The collective effort, many first responders from then say, was nothing new. But national media called the response the Oklahoma Standard, which Presti sometimes calls “The Standard.”
As she speaks, the Thunder are one win away from the NBA championship. “The Oklahoma Standard is not only ingrained in us as a group as Oklahomans, but it’s really ingrained in who we are as a brand,” she says, adding, “The best way that you can connect with your target audience … is for them to see themselves reflected in you.”
She says the team tries to reflect key values to Oklahomans, “certainly first and foremost being the Oklahoma Standard.”
