This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

For most of his life, Sam Anderson didn't think about Oklahoma City much at all.

Sam is a journalist. He lived in New York City for a long time and Oklahoma City just wasn't on his radar.

But then in 2012 he was assigned to do a story about the Oklahoma City Thunder.

The city's new basketball team had just gone to the NBA finals.

And they had this amazing trio of young stars, Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook, and James Harden.

They were all really different players with really different temperaments and styles,

but there was something kind of magical and unstoppable about the way they played together.

Final second, Durrant got a good look at a three and they make you pay.

They set that up so beautifully.

So Sam got on a plane and as he was flying to Oklahoma City to meet the guys and to write about their team,

he was reading a book about the history of Oklahoma to get

more familiar with the place.

And it was talking about the origin of tornadoes, and it was saying that tornadoes are

caused by this collision of three separate very different

weather forces. You've got kind of dry air coming from the desert, you've got this

cold Arctic air coming down from Canada, and've got this warm heavy hot Gulf air coming from the south and they all collide over Oklahoma in a way that those forces don't collide really anywhere else in the world.

And at that moment Sam had a realization and he wrote it down in the margin of the book,

Hardin Durand, Westbrook, which was the three big basketball stars on the Thunder, who were a similar trio of

strangely clashing forces that basketball had never really seen before. So that little leap like I was noticing these

thematic echoes between things about the history of Oklahoma and things about the

basketball team and the kind of civics of the modern city.

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