Kevin Durant’s relationship with Thunder fans will never be the same

OKLAHOMA CITY — For eight years, a life-sized Kevin Durant Fathead greeted Curtis Fitzpatrick when he walked into work. It was plastered onto the glass wall just left of the elevators, making it impossible to miss upon entering the Sports Animal, the radio station where Fitzpatrick is a morning host.

That was until July 4, when Durant chose to sign with the Golden State Warriors. When Fitzpatrick came to work the next day, the Fathead had already been torn down.

This is the thorny relationship Oklahoma City fans feel towards Durant now. They can’t forget the remarkable eight seasons he played for the Thunder, but they can’t forgive the way he left them for the team’s biggest rival. Not yet, and maybe not ever.

“People are emotionally attached to the Thunder, and they were really emotionally attached to Kevin Durant,” Fitzpatrick told me in early October. “[Emotions are] really going to start flaring up when [the Warriors] start playing regular season games.”

Oklahoma City plays at Golden State on Thursday, meaning Thunder diehards who have done their best to ignore the sight of Durant in a Warriors jersey can’t hide any longer. No one in Oklahoma City will ever fully appreciate the decision he made, of course. But Thunder fans had a personal relationship with Durant. They watched him grow from a baby-faced youngster to a league MVP, enduring the same playoff disappointments and injury setbacks along the way. There was no way he could have left without affecting those fans in some way forever.

Just six months ago, the Thunder held a 3-1 lead on the Warriors in the Western Conference Finals. They lost the series, of course, including a now-famous collapse in Game 6, where they led by seven points with less than six minutes remaining.

Still, fans were hopeful once they swallowed the playoff disappointment. As long as Durant stayed, they’d have another chance in next year’s playoffs to beat the Warriors. And then, Durant joined Golden State instead.

“It’s who he went to, not that he left,” Fitzpatrick said. “Tim Duncan. Kobe. He wanted at one point to be that kind of guy. People don’t identify with that, especially when he had said that he loved being here. People had took that and said they felt betrayed.”

Oklahoma City fans can’t believe Russell Westbrook is the last man standing after having four stars — Durant, Westbrook, Serge Ibaka and James Harden — aligned together in 2011. Much of that disbelief stems directly from Durant. It might have been unfair, but fans felt that he would stay in Oklahoma City forever as long as the team was competitive.

Instead, Durant fraternized with the Warriors even while the teams were playing each other. He turned his free agency decision into a spectacle in the Hamptons. It was reported that Golden State had been recruiting Durant for more than a year, but Thunder fans are quick to point out that it’s a two-way street.

“I think the frustrating thing is, I’m going to chalk it up to his demeanor,” said Austin Brister, a local who has attended dozens of games since the franchise moved here in 2008. “Just the idea of him not telling Russ [in person], and this golf in the Hamptons, and this real closed door, it was bizarre and I think we were all shocked. You thought if Durant was going to do it, it was going to be, ‘This is where I’m going.’”

Still, Brister falls on one side of the spectrum. He’s a Thunder fan who can’t let go of the great memories associated with Durant, even if he’ll never view him the same way.

“No matter what happens, you cannot take away what the guy brought to the city,” said Brister, who added that wearing a Thunder shirt almost anywhere in the country would lead to someone praising Durant. “You can’t all of a sudden, no matter how traitorous it was, remove that.”

The other side is Rich Taylor, a bar manager in downtown Oklahoma City who made his way around the internet with this video.

Taylor filmed that video on the way to the gym as a “venting process,” never expecting it to catch on like it did. Instead, his bar’s main phone filled up with angry calls in the days following the stunt.

“(We) got almost like death threats. People were so angry at losing Kevin Durant, but they couldn’t voice that frustration at Kevin Durant, because he was the golden child. So what happened (was), I was the scapegoat,” Taylor said. “After a week, they realized, ‘Oh, this is what KD did.’ KD didn’t meet with his teammates, KD didn’t come forward when he really wanted to be gone months in advance. KD didn’t own up to any of it himself, and then they realized, maybe that crazy 6’9 tattooed guy was right.”

The Warriors don’t come to Oklahoma City until Feb. 11. Taylor has tickets right behind the Warriors’ bench, and he said he’s hoping Durant recognizes him as the guy who called him a coward.

“The same passion that we love the player is going to happen when he leaves the city, the same passion is going to come out,” Taylor said. “We’re going to now hate the player. There’s no in-between.”

Those are the facts about Durant. He did enough for Oklahoma’s first professional sports franchise by leading them to the playoffs annually that he was elected to the Oklahoma Sports Hall of Fame in 2015. He also left the Thunder for their bitterest rival just as the team around him was reaching its peak. For many here, he can’t be just one or the other.