They left home 7,000 miles away — and found a new home in the Sacramento Kings
Talline Awabdeh made a deal with her husband in front of her whole family, with the Christmas tree glittering beside her. The Awabdehs of El Dorado Hills are a Kings-worshiping home, but the oldest daughter, Talline, moved to Portland and married outside the faith: A Trail Blazers fan.
In December, pregnant with their first child, Talline, 28, looked her husband in the eye and said that if the Kings won the championship this season, she would name their firstborn Domantas. She held out her hand. She would not back down.
He took her hand, and he shook it.
Sitting in the airy family home overlooking Folsom Lake, her parents and two of her siblings crowed about the baby who, fate permitting, will bear the name of the Lithuanian-American power forward. The matriarch, Sue, held up the tiny onesies they’ve already bought for the Kings fan–to-be.
“My sweet son-in-law had no other way but to shake,” Sue said, with a wide grin. “And so now we are looking forward (to) Baby Domantas.”
Sue and her husband, Joel, immigrated from Jordan and Syria, respectively, met in California, and eventually moved to the Sacramento region in 1996. Here, they raised four of the most zealous Kings fans imaginable.
And after 17 years of waiting for another winning season, the Awabdeh family is bursting with joy.
The family has reveled in the highs and mourned in the lows — and there were a lot of lows — every single season since the late ’90s.
Danielle was 9 the last time the Kings made the NBA playoffs, but the 26-year-old who now lives in Baltimore has believed in the team every year. “To be very honest, early on (in the season), I’ll always talk a very big talk, manifesting some positive vibes,” she said. “Some would say it’s maybe a little delusion.”
This year, she learned that a broken Kings fan is still right once a score: “I had strong faith that we would get there,” she said. “The addition of (coach) Mike Brown and then seeing how these guys gelled together over the summer, I was like, ‘OK, we totally got this.’ … Do I do that every year? Maybe. But this year especially.”
Kings fans, said Rachel, 23, take “every little thing — they treasure it, because we don’t know what we’re going to have. This season surprised all of the fans. I think we assumed play-in team, maybe? Being top three, and for a second top two, it was like, what happened? Overnight, we got bandwagon fans. We did not think we would ever get that.”
She was 6 for the last playoffs run. She and her siblings said they sometimes expected to grow old before the Kings were actually good again, imagining the enormous celebration they would have and the tales of loyalty they would one day tell their grandchildren.
Edward, just a toddler when the Kings made the playoffs in 2006, met head coach Mike Brown while working a shift at Target Jan. 22 and was so overwhelmed with emotion that he was barely able to blurt out a “thank you,” shaking as they clasped hands. Brown, he said, thanked him back for being a fan — ridiculous! Before pointing the coach to some eggs, Edward insisted, “No — thank you; you saved the city.”
Why the Kings?
Danielle has a theory about why the Awabdehs love the team. Her Arab family, she said, craved “that communal and collective aspect to life” that just isn’t the same in day-to-day American life.
“I feel like probably one of the hardest parts of being first generation is people don’t value collectivism the same,” she said. “But I think in sports, it’s a beautiful thing, especially being an underdog and especially not being a great team for the past 15 years. To see people still so passionate — the games, people are screaming, people are on their feet, the T-shirt cannon slams in — to see those things just throughout your childhood, being there consistently, I think really bonded the city.”
At least for her, the team drew her in to Sacramento. “Seeing a city really rally behind a sports team,” she said, “really got us engaged in the American culture.”
Rachel doesn’t see it that way, but she loves the energy of rallying together as the put-upon underdog team, and the sense of gratitude that years of loss fostered in the diehard fans.
“Kings fans are so unique in the way where they don’t need much to be happy,” Rachel said. “And also, they’re so happy.”
A beaming family
The two older Awabdeh children — Talline, 28, and Danielle, 26 — have moved to other states but plan visits home around Kings games. The two youngest – Rachel, 23, and Edward, 18 — drive downtown just to gaze up at the beam, standing in their favorite beam-gazing spot.
“I’m pretty sure on Google Maps it’s considered a place of worship,” Rachel said. “That’s a stretch, but when you’re there and just like, ‘Wow, look at the beam,’ I get where they came from.”
She added, in what for another family might have been a comical exaggeration, “Your first beam, you’ll never forget.”
But Rachel was not exaggerating. Edward jumped in to describe his first.
“It was raining,” he said. “Light sprinkling. It was the Spurs, and there were some drunk Spurs fans, like, ‘Oh, we have four rings,’ and I was like, ‘You don’t have a beam!’ You could see it going through the clouds — it looks beautiful.”
“It’s beautiful,” Joel echoed, but it can’t be seen from their home. He wrote an email to the team not long ago offering their backyard for a suburban beam. (No one replied, but the offer stands, he said, sweeping his arm across the horizon to point out how far and wide a hilltop beam would shine.)
Raised with the Kings lore
Sue and Joel started taking the children to games when they were toddlers and preached the gospel to them throughout their lives. And so Rachel and Edward spoke with anger and grief of the 2002 Western Conference finals Game 6 Kings fans forever remember as ruined by referees.
The kids remember it as if they were there, although Rachel was only 2 and Edward wasn’t even born.
“It was ours to take; it was our moment,” Rachel said. “However, the officiating — which has been called, quote, ‘the worst-officiated game in sports history’ — was off, oh my goodness, it was so bad. Mike Bibby gets fouled for getting punched in the face — like, they call it on him — and no one knew what was going on.”
Edward jumped in. They both held, he said, “resentments.”
“A lot of older fans,” Joel said, “have that event viscerally in their brain.” His children, of course, are too young to remember it personally, and yet, there they were, still mad about it. And, of course, the kids hate the Lakers.
Furies and joys
The Awabdehs love to go to games in person, but if they’re watching from afar, they can’t be around other people.
“It is such an intense moment for us,” Joel said. “Like if somebody’s passing drinks —” Rachel cut in and said, “Or being casual in any way, like — what are you doing?”
“We don’t want to hurt people’s feelings,” Joel said. “So we don’t watch the Kings casually.”
When the other team scores more, Edward paces around by the kitchen, watching the TV from a distance in horror.
“Years prior, I couldn’t watch the first three quarters because,” he said, “when I see them score on us, it physically hurt. I was like, ‘I can’t watch that.’ If we were close in the fourth, then I’d watch that.”
Rachel and Edward’s most recent trip inside Golden 1 Center was for the March 27 game against the Minnesota Timberwolves, which could have clinched the Kings’ playoff berth at home.
The Kings lost 119-115. When Sue and Joel got word that the kids were headed home from the arena, they scattered upstairs.
Laughing uproariously, Rachel said, “They texted us like, ‘Have fun; we’re in bed.’ They didn’t want to hear us.”
The same week, Rachel flew up to Portland to see the Kings clinch the playoffs in a 120-80 win against the Blazers. Talline met her there. She took photos holding the infant-size Kings gear.
“The baby was technically there when they clinched their playoff spot and broke the drought,” Talline said. “So maybe it’s a good luck baby.”
The family groupchat exploded in excitement at the win. As she walked around Moda Center, Rachel thought that even the Blazers fans seemed happy for them. She said, “It was a beautiful day.”
“I just got so used to supporting and advocating for this team that didn’t have a lot to back me up,” Danielle said. “It feels like a fever dream every time I wake up.”
Needless to say, though Talline lives in Portland, she plans to raise her child as a Kings fan.
