Calming the Storm, Seattle style

When Seattle works, it can really work.

Such was the message that came out of Friday morning's revival meeting on behalf of the Seattle Storm basketball team. Hands waved in the air, a rousing sermon was preached on the value of professional women's basketball, the introduction of four local, successful women who want to buy the franchise was met by hosannas — and, in the end, the tossing of T-shirts into the audience showed some business execs with great hands.

The intersection of pro sports and public policy in this town is usually about the price of land or the cost to the tax base. Let's face it, from the public-policy side of sports, we are a tough audience. The University of Washington asks for half the cost of a new stadium, and the Legislature yawns. NASCAR comes to the state panting after the fan base it knows is here, and we show it the door. Someone wants to get the city to fix up KeyArena, and we are in court, or passing an initiative, or saying sports doesn't count in a great city.

I'll leave the sports side to the experts. On the government side, we can be as mulish as they come.

Enter the people who calmed the Storm. The four female professionals who are keeping the franchise at KeyArena first know politics and they know what makes Seattle tick. Anne Levinson, a former deputy mayor and former judge, talks about the Storm but also about making Lower Queen Anne a more welcoming neighborhood. On Friday, Levinson was looking at basketball in the exact way that Seattle talks — about green neighborhoods and family businesses and keeping faith with the community.

"Most basketball games are about keeping people in a stadium," Levinson told me Friday. "I see good weather and people taking advantage of the public space in and around KeyArena."

Public space, welcoming family restaurants to the Key, keeping the neighborhood intact. Those are the code words that work in Seattle. The words that don't work are: "Give us more subsidies," "We're here to improve your city" and "We'll make you world-class."

WNBA President Donna Orender, who began by talking not about sports but about running into Sen. Barack Obama in the lobby of the Westin, is a charismatic speaker, but she talked only incidentally about the game of basketball. She talked more about the value of women's sports, of athletes who are very public citizens, of a family night out at lower prices.

Orender is enough of a salesperson to also wedge in some demographics. She reports that WNBA fans:

• Spent $242 million in total vehicle purchases last year;

• Drank 80 million beers in 30 days;

• Spent $5 billion on their most recent domestic trips.

But, we have seen these and larger numbers before. The beer crowd at Safeco is going to match its pours against any other venue on the Western Seaboard. NASCAR wolfs those numbers in a weekend.

Instead, the Storm is sports/public policy as if designed by a neighborhood community group.

The speeches were about schools, health care for women and children and sports as a way, not an end.

James F. Vesely's column appears Sunday on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is: jvesely@seattletimes.com; for a podcast Q&A with the author, go to Opinion at seattletimes.com