In the absence of other subjects to base this description on, I decided to look up Shake Milton’s hometown of Owasso, Oklahoma. But first I’ll list out my preconceived notions of what Owasso might be like.
The name of the town makes it sound like it was hit by a tornado in the movie Twister (one of the few movies I have seen more than once and therefore remember the plot of). My guess was that it was in the western part of Oklahoma surrounded by miles and miles of nothing in every direction. Population? 400 and dwindling. The only restaurant in town would be a place called “Irma’s Cafe” that is the preferred hangout of all the town’s old people. Google Street View would reveal the “downtown” to be an insurance office, a post office, and a bunch of vacant buildings. Shake Milton, in this theoretical podunk town, probably averaged 50 PPG per game on the Owassa High basketball team playing against other schools that can barely field a five-man starting lineup, much less a full roster.
Well, I looked it up, and Owasso is actually just a suburb of Tulsa, population 28,000 and booming. And now that I think about it, that makes much more sense. I don’t think there are many black people out in the desolate parts of western Oklahoma. In fact, I looked up a representative western Oklahoma town (Leedey, pop. 435) and there are no black people there at all. Not a one. There’s like six black people in the whole county. Being near Tulsa, which is a real city, makes a lot more sense as the place that birthed an NBA-caliber basketball player.
I don’t know why I put that much effort into writing stuff that doesn’t even have anything directly to do with Shake Milton. It would have been much quicker to write a description based around the harvesting of Sixers fan tears or something. But now you know more about the demographics of Oklahoma so it wasn’t a total loss.