Sara Sweet wanted her dad to know how much she missed him and wished he was here for the Thunder's run. Then, her note at the OKC Memorial went viral.
Sara Sweet can close her eyes almost four decades later and still see her dad working in the garden.
Still hear it, too.
She was 12 when her parents moved their family to a house near Cashion. They wanted land and space, as much as anything, to put in a huge garden. And whenever her dad tended to the plants, the soundtrack was the same.
“He would crank up the radio from inside with the windows open and be listening to games,” Sweet said.
He loved listening to Oklahoma State University games, mostly basketball and football, whenever his alma mater was playing. If he could manage to get the signal for a Chicago Cubs game, he loved that, too.
Sweet knows if her dad were still here, he’d have listened to a lot of Thunder games this season.
He’d have loved this team.
That’s what Sweet told him in a note she left on his chair at the Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum. W. Stephen Williams, known by family and friends as Steve, was killed in the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building where he worked as an operations supervisor for the Social Security Administration.
Sweet scrawled the note to her dad with a black Sharpie on a blue shirt with the Thunder logo.
DEAR DAD,
Thank you for teaching me to be a good fan — loyal and supportive. I miss you each day, but today is hard. I wish we could cheer on the Thunder together. You would get so much joy from this team. Win or lose, they are the best team, and this is the best city.
LET’S GO THUNDER!
Sweet took the shirt to the Field of Empty Chairs with her 11-year-old nephew, Eli Moore, a few hours before Game 7 of the NBA Finals. They placed it over the back of the chair, took a photo with it, then went to Paycom Center for the game.
She didn’t think much more of the shirt until she woke up the next morning to a string of unsolicited texts the likes of which she’d never gotten from her teenage son, who was on a trip abroad.
“Mom, the Draft Kings posted it,” he texted her. “ESPN posted it.”
“I don’t even know what Draft Kings is, sweetie,” she wrote back.
Sweet chuckled.
“Now I know how to get my kid to talk to me — just show up on ESPN,” she said in an interview with The Oklahoman.
The shirt left for her dad had been photographed and shared on social media.
It went viral.
That, of course, was never Sweet’s intention. But she marvels at the impact of the note left for her dad. The reaction it caused. The memories it stirred.
“I’m very thankful that it might make people pause and learn more about what happened here in ‘95 and visit the memorial and kind of put that on their list of something they need to do,” Sweet said. “From that standpoint, I’m very grateful that it’s gotten so much exposure.”
It helped make a bittersweet time more sweet than bitter.
Sweet found herself swept up in Thunder mania like so many Oklahomans. She loved the way Sam Presti built the team, the way Mark Daigneault coached the game, and the way the players acted on and off the court.
But the more she watched the Thunder play — and the more it won — the more Sweet thought about her dad.
Steve and Barbara Williams were OSU grads, and they had season tickets for football and basketball for many years. They took their three girls to games all the time.
On a February night in 1993, Sweet went to a men’s basketball game with her dad. OSU was playing Missouri, and down with only seconds left, the Cowboys threw a long inbounds pass to Bryant Reeves near midcourt. He popped it in the air, gathered it, turned and heaved a shot toward the basket.
Swish.
Steve Williams went nuts.
“You’re louder than the students!” Sweet told him.
The Reeves Heave was one of the great moments that Sweet remembers seeing in Stillwater. But there were some lean seasons, too, in basketball and football. That didn’t stop her folks from going to games.
It’s a lesson Sweet learned early.
“You support your team, and sometimes they win and sometimes they lose, and that’s OK,” she said. “If you are a good fan, then you support them win or lose.”
Sweet threw her support behind the Thunder. She and husband, Kyle, have season tickets, so they and their kids went to a lot of games. She watched others from home. And as the playoffs progressed, she found herself thinking about the Thunder at random times.
The team popped into her head while walking her dog with the Thunder and Pacers tied at two games each in the NBA Finals. There was no way to know what was going to happen in the series.
“But I got to thinking about how many games I’ve been to with my kids, with my husband, and how much joy the Thunder has brought to me,” she said.
She decided to write a thank-you note to Presti; Sweet has become acquainted with the Thunder general manager while serving together on the memorial’s Board of Trustees.
A few mornings later, Sweet was waiting for a repairman at the house when she noticed someone walking toward the front door. She figured it was the repairman and spent a minute getting her barking dogs sequestered before going to the door.
No one was there.
“Where did he go?” she thought.
As Sweet turned to go inside, she noticed an envelope on top of her mailbox.
The note inside was from Presti.
In her thank-you, Sweet had told him the story of being with her dad for the Reeves Heave.
“I hope I can be as wonderful a dad to my daughters as your dad,” she remembers Presti writing.
After Sweet finished reading and stopped crying, she pulled up the video from her doorbell camera to see who delivered Presti’s note.
“And it was him,” Sweet said. “He hand-delivered a note to me in the middle of the NBA Finals.
“It’s hard for me to put in words how incredible of a human being I think he is.”
A few days later, as Sweet and her nephew Eli prepared to go to Game 7, she decided to write another thank-you, this time to her dad. And she didn’t want to wait until after the game, until after a champion was crowned to deliver it.
She wanted to make sure he knew about this Thunder team and how much she loved it and how that would be the case regardless of the outcome.
“Win or lose,” she said, “I still love this team.”
It was a lesson she learned from her dad.
Sara Sweet has so many memories from this season that she wishes her dad were still around to hear about. She’d have called him after Game 7 to tell him about how cool it was to be at the game with Eli, who’d never even been to an NBA game before.
She’d tell him about the moment the Black Eyed Peas song “I Gotta Feeling” started playing in the final seconds of the game, signaling a Thunder win.
“I just started crying because it’s like, ‘Oh, I know we’re going to win now,’” she said.
Sweet felt that euphoria from everyone in the arena.
“It was just one of the best things to experience,” she said.
To have included her dad was important to Sweet.
That others came to know about him, too, was like Game 7 — one of the best things.
“For those of us who lost someone, I think one of the worst things to think about is that someday no one’s going to remember or we would go down this dark path where it could happen again,” Sweet said.
She can close her eyes and remember her dad.
Now, others can, too.
Jenni Carlson: Jenni can be reached at [email protected]. Like her at facebook.com/JenniCarlsonOK, follow her at @jennicarlsonok.bsky.social and twitter.com/jennicarlson_ok, and support her work and that of other Oklahoman journalists by purchasing a digital subscription today.
This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: Thunder brings joy, attention to OKC Memorial with shirt left on chair
Category: Basketball
