Today is my fifty-first birthday. I'm sitting in Oklahoma City — the only place I've ever really lived, the only place I've ever really needed to — and I'm thinking about hawks.
A hawk doesn't announce itself. It doesn't hold press conferences or issue statements about its intentions. It climbs. It watches. It sees things from up high that nobody on the ground can see. And when the moment comes — when everything it's been watching finally converges — it moves with a precision that looks, from the outside, like instinct. It isn't instinct. It's altitude. It's patience. It's years of knowing exactly what you're looking at.
That's what I've been doing in this city for fifty-one years. I just didn't have a name for it until now.
"I've always believed in things before they were obvious. OKC. Soccer. Now AI. The hawk doesn't wait for consensus. It trusts what it sees from up high."
Chapter One
South OKC. A dirt field.
A stranger with a patch.
I grew up in South Oklahoma City at a time when nobody was writing features about this place. We weren't a destination. We weren't a story. We were a city that people drove through on their way to somewhere else, and most of us were fine with that.
I found soccer the way a lot of kids in this city found it — sideways, almost accidentally, on fields that were more ambition than infrastructure. But something about the game matched the way I was already wired. The space between the lines. The geometry of movement before the ball arrives. The way the best players in the world seemed to see two seconds ahead of everyone else on the pitch.
Vision. I didn't call it that then. I just knew I had it, and I knew it was valuable, and I spent the next three decades figuring out how to use it.
Goodison Park, Liverpool. Watching Neville Southall — one of the greatest goalkeepers the game has ever produced — train on the ground where Everton became Everton. Some education you can't get in a classroom.
The best players see the field differently. From the first time I watched elite soccer up close, I understood that what separated the good from the great wasn't speed or strength. It was altitude of mind. Seeing what others hadn't seen yet.
Chapter Two
The front office.
OKC before it was OKC.
Becoming General Manager of Oklahoma City's professional soccer club before this city was on the national map wasn't a calculated career move. It was a bet. A bet on a city I believed in before the evidence was visible to anyone standing at ground level.
The Thunder hadn't arrived yet. The Bricktown Canal was new. The Devon Tower was years away from breaking ground. Oklahoma City was, to most of the country, a place associated with tragedy and flyover country and not much else.
I knew that was wrong. Not because I had data. Because I had altitude. I'd been watching this city my whole life and I could see the shape of what it was becoming before the skyline changed to prove it.
"Every city has cheerleaders. OKC didn't need more cheerleaders. It needed people who could see the field — and were willing to act on what they saw before it was safe to do so."
Running a front office taught me precision in a way nothing else could. In sport, imprecision is expensive. The wrong player. The wrong timing. The wrong read on what a market wants. You feel it immediately and you feel it publicly. I learned to be deliberate. To move when the moment was right and not before. To trust the view from altitude.
Chapter Three
The Olympics.
And knowing you were right.
There are moments in a life where everything you believed, long before you had any right to believe it, gets confirmed. For me, one of those moments was standing at the Olympics and understanding — viscerally, not intellectually — that the world of sport I had given my career to was genuinely one of the most powerful forces in human connection that exists.
Oklahoma City is hosting events for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics. Read that sentence again. The city I grew up in. The city people drove through on their way somewhere else. Hosting the Olympics.
I saw that coming. Not the specific event — but the direction. The arc. The inevitability of a city that kept showing up, kept building, kept believing in itself when the evidence was thin.
The Olympics. Sport at its most elemental — and proof that the cities that bet on themselves early are the ones that end up on the world stage.
OKC is my territory. Its growth, its reputation, its future — I've watched over these things my entire life not because it was a job but because that's what you do when a place is genuinely yours.
Chapter Four
The next horizon.
AI and the view from up high.
A few years ago I started paying serious attention to artificial intelligence. Not because it was trendy — it wasn't yet. Because the pattern felt familiar. A technology that most people were either ignoring or misunderstanding. A moment of early altitude where the people who could see clearly were going to have an enormous advantage over the people waiting for consensus.
I've been through this before. With OKC. With soccer in this market. With every bet I've made on things before they were obvious. The hawk doesn't wait for everyone else to see what it sees from up high. It moves.
So I'm in it. Every day. Learning it, applying it, teaching it to people in Oklahoma City who are about to need it whether they know it yet or not. The cities that will lead the next decade are the ones building the playbook right now. I intend for OKC to be one of them.
A timeline
Fifty-one years.
The short version.
1975
Born in Oklahoma City. South OKC. Before the Thunder. Before Bricktown. Before anyone was writing about us.
Early days
Found soccer. On fields that were more aspiration than infrastructure. Learned to see the game before the ball arrived.
Goodison Park
Watched Neville Southall train at Everton. One of the greatest goalkeepers in the history of the game. Understood for the first time what elite really meant.
Front office
General Manager, OKC professional soccer. Before this city was on the map. A bet on a place I could see from altitude before the evidence was visible at ground level.
The Olympics
Stood at the Games and understood, viscerally, that sport is one of the most powerful connective forces in human experience. Came home with a clearer sense of purpose.
Coaching
Youth soccer. No cuts. Thirty kids who needed someone to believe they belonged on the field. They went undefeated. I thought I was helping them. I had it backwards.
Now
AI. OKC. This platform. Same bet, new arena. Seeing it early, acting before the consensus, trying to lift as many people as possible into what's coming.