Bob Funk Sr. didn't bring the Thunder or Olympics to OKC. But without him, here's why our sports scene might never have reached these heights.
Bob Funk Sr. wasn't a hockey guy.
Didn't grow up playing it. Ditto for watching it. Just wasn't his thing.
But a quarter of a century ago, when his friend and Oklahoma City Blazers coach Doug Sauter shared that a rival league was trying to move one of its minor league teams to town and push out the Blazers, Funk wanted to know how he could help. One meeting and about an hour later, he owned the Blazers.
So, why did the non-hockey guy buy a minor league hockey team?
“He didn’t like the little guy being picked on,” said Brad Lund, who became chief executive officer of Express Sports, Funk’s ownership group. “And at that time, we were the little guy.”
The same could be said of Oklahoma City in those days.
Its status as a big-league city was still 15 years away but probably felt more like light-years. The notion of claiming an NBA championship? Building a billion-dollar downtown arena? Preparing to host Summer Olympic events? Suggest such things back then, and you deserved whatever chastisement came your way.
But as family and friends gather Monday afternoon at Crossings Community Church for Funk's memorial — the 85-year-old died on July 15 — the truth is that all of Oklahoma should remember him. Yes, many benefited from his employment and staffing firm, Express Employment International. But the sports landscape in our state and particularly in our city has been transformed in ways that wouldn’t have been possible without Funk.
Oklahoma City mayor David Holt lauded Funk for helping build a foundation for sports in the city.
“As we celebrate an NBA championship and the 2028 Olympics,” Holt wrote in a social media post after Funk’s passing, “it’s important to remember that people like Bob kept those fires burning for a long time.”
Oklahoma City wouldn’t have the inferno of sports that we have today if not for Funk stoking the embers and fanning the flames.
Much of his legacy is that he kept Oklahoma City from losing things, from moving backward, from falling farther away from the big-league status we now enjoy.
Take his first big foray into local sports: the Blazers.
The Double-A hockey team from the 1960s and 70s was brought back to life in 1992. It built an extremely loyal and passionate following, regularly playing to sold-out crowds at the Myriad. But the crowds were so good, the market so promising that the International Hockey League, a Triple-A bunch, wanted to move its Kansas City franchise to town.
“The Blazers would not have stayed,” said Lund, who at the time co-owned the franchise with Horn Chen. “We would have lost that. There’s no doubt about it.”
Blazer enthusiasts were incensed.
That prompted Sauter to take a proposal to Funk, who had become a close friend through their love of horses. Buy the team, put it into local ownership and strengthen its chances of staying in Oklahoma City.
“I took the owners of the Blazers to Bob’s house,” Sauter said, “and half an hour later, they cut a deal and Bob was the new owner of the Blazers.”
The Blazers were better for it, but Sauter believes Funk was too.
“He had so much fun with it,” Sauter said.
One of his favorite memories of Funk was nights that he’d ride shotgun on the Zamboni while it smoothed the ice between periods. He’d smile and wave.
“He had a real sense of humor and enjoyed the people,” Sauter said. “He never met a stranger, sort of like the old Will Rogers thing.”
Lund said, “He had a suite at the games, but he didn’t really like sitting there. That intermission would come and he’d get right in the middle of it with all of the fans. He just wanted to know what was up in their lives and what they liked or didn’t like.”
A year after buying the Blazers, Funk turned his attention to tennis.
Oklahoma City had a regular stop on the women’s tour in those days, drawing the likes of Venus Williams, Anna Kournikova and Lindsay Davenport. But a sponsorship change jeopardized the tournament’s future in OKC.
Funk stepped up and kept the tournament here.
A year after that, he brought the Davis Cup to town, a first-round matchup between the United States and Slovenia.
“You just don’t get the chance very often to host something like that,” Lund said. “We had Andy Roddick and Pete Sampras right here.”
Tennis was more of a passion project for Funk, who played tennis all the way into high school when he was growing up in Washington. He played No. 1 singles at Seattle Pacific as a junior and senior.
Lund was a tennis guy, too, having gone undefeated in high school singles during his high school days at Tulsa Metro Christian.
But as much as they both loved the sport, landing the Davis Cup was fraught with peril. Funk had to ante up $200,000, a requirement from the U.S. Tennis Association.
“That was a major financial commitment and a major risk,” Lund said. “And he was in really without knowing the details.”
Next up for Funk: baseball.
The RedHawks, then the Triple-A affiliate of the Texas Rangers, had been in Oklahoma City for three decades. But in 2003, a potential out-of-state buyer made a play for the franchise. The prospective owner lived in New York, so there was a strong possibility the team might get moved.
OKC had been home to Triple-A baseball since 1962.
Losing that status didn’t sit well with Funk, so he partnered with a group of fellow Oklahomans to buy the franchise. Even though it has changed owners and big-league affiliations since, Oklahoma City remains a Triple-A franchise to this day.
“I got involved with the hockey team to support the community,” Funk said at the time, “and it is the same issue here.
“We really did not want to see an outside entity that may not have as much interest in the future of our community here in Oklahoma City and the state of Oklahoma.”
Less than four years passed from the time Funk bought the Blazers to the time he partnered to buy the RedHawks. But what he did in that short amount of time with hockey, tennis and baseball, not to mention heavy involvement locally in horse shows, bull riding events and rodeos, elevated the sports scene in Oklahoma City.
Maybe you couldn’t see an NBA championship or the Olympics from there, but lose all of those things, and Oklahoma City might not have looked as appealing to the NBA when the Hornets needed a temporary nest.
And we all know what a catalyst that was.
“It was a long journey to get where we are today,” Holt said, “and Bob was one of the important civic leaders along the way who very much believed that our city could be what it is now.”
Sauter knows that Funk was proud of the growth of sports in Oklahoma City, the heights it has reached, the glories it is promised and the path it has ahead.
Here’s hoping Bob Funk knew how important he was in all of that.
Jenni Carlson: Jenni can be reached at [email protected]. Like her at facebook.com/JenniCarlsonOK, follow her at @jennicarlsonok.bsky.social and twitter.com/jennicarlson_ok, and support her work and that of other Oklahoman journalists by purchasing a digital subscription today.
This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: Bob Funk Sr. created foundation for OKC to welcome Thunder, Olympics
Category: General Sports
