Sacramento fans take road trip to save Kings
Mar 20, 2013, 11:50 AM | Updated: 1:33 pm
By Josh Kerns/MyNorthwest.com
Some die-hard Sacramento Kings fans are taking their fight to save the NBA team on the road, and they plan to hit nearly every city in the league to win support.
Longtime Sacramento broadcaster Carmichael Dave set off on his “Playing to Win” tour Tuesday in a 32-foot RV from the California capitol. And he says he won’t stop until he’s hit upwards of two dozen cities, highlighted by an appearance in New York City when investors from Sacramento and Seattle make their case to NBA owners April 3.
“Sacramento has been sold on all this. They understand what we need to do. But everybody else doesn’t. It’s time we went to the cities, we went to the country to share all this.”
Dave says the idea came to him in recent weeks as the battle to keep the Kings from being sold and moved to Seattle intensified. He says no offense to the Emerald City – which he says absolutely “got screwed” by the NBA – but we’ve already got the Mariners, Seahawks, Sounders and Huskies, while Sacramento only has the Kings.
“For us we feel like we’re trying to protect all we’ve got,” he says.
“We’re fighting because this means so much to our downtown development, or economy and our civic pride. And it’s tough to feel that in New York City or Philadelphia or Charlotte unless you have somebody up in your face.”
The effort is being backed by Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson and a number of fans and sponsors from the city. Dave insists he’s just the voice, and since he got laid off last year and now hosts a podcast, he’s got the time to be gone for a month.
Dave says he has few plans and little sense of what he’ll do in each city, other than gain as much attention as he can. Having a big purple and blue wrapped RV emblazoned with “Playing to Win” and “Fighting for our city, our fans and our Sacramento Kings,” certainly will help.
Along with trying to garner media coverage, he’s also traveling with a video crew and posting mini-documentaries every day to help get the word out.
“We’re just trying to tell our story and make sure that other people know what happened either win or lose. We don’t want to go down and say we could have done more.”
The NBA Board of Governors is expected to decide April 18 or 19 whether to allow the Kings sale to the investment group led by Chris Hansen and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, or a rival group of investors seeking to keep the team in Sacramento.
