MOLI VIEW™

Until early in Sunday's a.m., the issues in Seattle seemed trivial, simply the stuff of pro athletics and a book I'd hoped to hype.

Upon arriving in the beautiful shipping-turned-tech town on Friday afternoon, I was reminded that obsession with sports can dominate the Great Northwest. The Seattle Times' front page that day carried great forecasts of doom. The Seattle SuperSonics, stuck with a bad arena deal, a bad team, and a hankering to follow the money to Oklahoma City, were about to skip out on Key Arena. The Mariners had gotten off to a slow start, allowing the local sports talk personalities to work Seattle baseball fans into a frothy lather. And then there was that pair of skateboarding trannies over in Capitol Hill. They were oddly inspirational.

Independent of any weirdness, my crew of jock characters was nothing if not upbeat. My Rollin' with Dre co-author Bruce Williams, who counts among his close friends Sonics legend Gary "The Glove" Payton, went with KUBE "Street Beat" host Tony B to see the Dalai Lama at Key Arena. It was after this event let out that I met up with them at the Clear Channel building, near the Space Needle. Jay Richardson, the former Ohio State defensive end and Oakland Raiders rookie starter, joined us. I can't recall whether I ruminated about the differences between baseball and football, but I do know that for most of the remaining Friday I split time between Mercer Island, where "The People's Station" 104.5 gave us drive-time hip-hop exposure, and a friend's crib on Bainbridge Island, and thought, "This is a paradoxically bucolic setting to be promoting such an urban book." It made me laugh.

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