The Bees Buzz On

By Sean Gregory / Oklahoma City

How do you rebuild a business wiped clean by Hurricane Katrina? Start by dodging the M16s. A week after the storm pummeled the Gulf Coast in late August, Tim Spero, the chief technology officer for the NBA's New Orleans Hornets, drove to the team's training facility in Westwego, La., with a fellow Hornets employee and two friends. Their mission: to retrieve the team's teal uniforms, a batch of video equipment and a few computers to ship to another city when--or if--the Hornets started their preseason training camp. Reports of violence and looting had spread to Westwego; the team's tech guy carried a shotgun for protection. The military had taken over the facility, so to grab the supplies, Spero's crew had to duck under the few hundred rifles stored in the player's lounge. Pistols were strewn on the Ping-Pong table the players had used to pass time. Fortunately, the guns weren't loaded. How did the men know? Says Spero: "There were boxes of ammo in the weight room."

An eerie season had begun. The Hornets tipped off their 2005-06 NBA campaign last week more than 700 miles from New Orleans, in Oklahoma City, Okla., where the team has relocated for at least a year. (To keep ties to Louisiana, the team will play six of its 41 "home" games in Baton Rouge.) NBA franchises usually get 18 months to establish themselves in a new market. From the time the Hornets finalized their move to Oklahoma City on Sept. 20 to their first regular season game on Nov. 1, the Hornets had 42 days. During that time, the team's 110 employees, many with homes damaged or destroyed and families left behind in New Orleans or diaspora cities from Atlanta to Washington, needed to secure new sponsorships, resell tickets and replace everything from the team's marketing director--too stressed to keep working, to the mascot's costume, soiled by flooding. The Hornets offer a glimpse into the cruel challenge many Gulf Coast businesses now face post-Katrina: trying to mend a brand while managing social trauma. Hornets president Paul Mott says, "This has been like one long, long, long day."

The dark morning arrived Sunday, Aug. 28, the day before Katrina's Gulf Coast landfall, when the last of the team's workers evacuated New Orleans. Hours before gale-force winds started picking up steam, Mott and the families of three Hornets workers boarded team owner George Shinn's private plane for San Antonio, Texas. Basketball administration chief Steve Martin, a New Orleans native, woke up that morning expecting to ride out the storm. He finally relented at 8 a.m., when he called Mott to ask whether there was any room on the plane for him, his wife and his son. "If we stayed in New Orleans, we could have been homeless," says Martin. "We could have been in a shelter." Mott had three extra seats.

Over the next five days, as other NBA teams prepped for the season, Katrina overwhelmed the Hornets' business plans. The team set up a Yahoo! site to ascertain if workers were alive. Martin's father, 78 years old and eight months past triple-bypass surgery, had refused to leave his home. He was now missing, and Martin feared the worst. By Friday, Sept. 2, Mott located everyone. Martin found his dad in an Austin, Texas, shelter; he had spent three days in the squalid Superdome.

Now the Hornets could start focusing on rebuilding. Eight senior team executives set up headquarters in a conference room at the Toyota Center, home of the Houston Rockets. First question: Was there any way the Hornets' New Orleans Arena could be salvaged for the season? Four days after the storm, Spero, who was running the team's Louisiana operation from his "30-by-20 metal shack" in Belle River, says he received word that the arena had not been flooded. A week later, while scoping out the facility, he discovered a problem: the city had pumped the floodwaters off the streets and into the Hornets' locker room. The bile oozed onto the court.

Even if their home had been habitable, who would stay in New Orleans to watch the Hornets? The team asked a few employees to explore other Louisiana cities to which the Hornets could relocate. But they soon found that it's difficult to know how an NBA team could play in Baton Rouge, Lafayette or near Shreveport when their arenas are being used as Red Cross shelters or infirmaries.

So the franchise was forced to move out of state. The team fielded offers from cities like Las Vegas; Kansas City, Mo.; and San Diego. But several factors gave Oklahoma City the edge. First, the NBA figured that since Oklahoma City residents had also endured a tragedy, the 1995 bombing of a federal office building, citizens would empathize with the Hornets and support the team. Second, the city has never fielded a big-league sports franchise. The Hornets are a chance for Oklahoma City to prove its mettle. And third, the city offered the team an attractive deal, agreeing to pay for the Hornets' housing and office-space costs. It also offered the team a maximum $10 million guarantee--to be funded evenly by the city, the state and a group of private investors--if the team's revenues, minus broadcast-rights fees and disbursements from the NBA, fell short of approximately $37 million.

Once in Oklahoma City, the Hornets employees, with the help of a SWAT team of NBA marketing specialists, needed a fast break to the finish. But the psychological aftereffects of Katrina slowed them down. "At moments, you can look in somebody's eyes and see they're not there," says Mott. Management styles changed. "If you messed up, I was going to let you know you messed up," says Hornets ticket-sales director David Burke of his pre-Katrina methods. "Now you see maybe you don't have to come down on people as hard." People responded to work in different ways. Some resigned, unable to lift the emotional fog. Others immersed themselves in their tasks. "From the first day after the storm, I started worrying about work," says Spero, whose house in New Orleans was looted, "so I didn't have to think about anything else."

The hours were brutal, and the compressed deadlines forced strapped senior managers to execute every type of task. At 3 one morning, just 41/2 hours before a pitch meeting with a key sponsor, Tim Hinchey, the team's corporate-development chief, munched on Denny's cheeseburgers with two NBA execs while waiting for a presentation to print at an Oklahoma City Kinko's. "Here we are, three fairly experienced guys in the league, wearing our sweatshirts, jeans and baseball hats," says Hinchey. "How did we get here? This was kind of crazy." Shorthanded, the Hornets asked members of their dance squad, dubbed the Honeybees, to help process refunds for New Orleans season-ticket holders. The bootstrapping paid off: the Hornets quickly wrapped up $7.5 million in sponsorship deals from three Oklahoma City--based energy companies, a local bank and the Oklahoman, the state's largest newspaper. Within their first month in Oklahoma City, the Hornets sold more than 10,000 season tickets, the eighth best mark in the NBA. "My expectations were not set at the highest end," says NBA commissioner David Stern, "but they've been well exceeded."

Though the team's financial prospects look promising, can the Hornets keep buzzing in Oklahoma after the new-team novelty wears off? In basketball, wins often write the bottom line. The Hornets were tied for the second worst record in the NBA last year and probably won't fare much better this season. It's one thing to pack the place on opening night, quite another to repeat the feat at the April game against the Golden State Warriors, with both teams playing for nothing but pride.

If the city embraces its guests despite the losses, the most contentious issue will arise. Why would the Hornets return to New Orleans, where the team ranked last in attendance even before Katrina's economic devastation? Critics have accused the owner of the NFL's Saints, Tom Benson, of trying to desert New Orleans for San Antonio or Los Angeles. "The goal is to go back," insists Hornets owner Shinn, who has already moved the franchise once, from Charlotte, N.C., to the Crescent City three years ago in search of better returns. Can he guarantee it? "Will you promise to me there will be no more hurricanes between now and then?" he asks. "Will you promise me that all our people will come back that can afford tickets and can buy tickets? You know, I don't have the tea leaves to determine all this. Our plan is to come back, period." Just by making it to tip-off, the Hornets took a big first step.