For this week’s blog post, I chose to read and review “Spurs Fandom in San Antonio: The Baseline Bums and HemisFair Arena, 1973-1993” by David Galindo.
“This article explores the history of a cohort of San Antonio Spurs supporters and reveals the fan culture present for a time in a particular sporting space…contends these fans were not mere consumers of sport but agents who represented a place and produced meaningful experiences and relationships.” (Galindo 2022)
This quote is important because it perfectly captures the main idea of the article, as well as the main argument presented by the author. The quote explains the article’s analysis of the fan culture within San Antonio, focusing on how important the Spurs were to the fanbase. The author did well by placing this quote in the outline before the reading, as it gives the reader a chance to get context about the article that they are about to dive into.
“San Antonio sits on the southern periphery of the United States but has been claimed by five other countries over the last three hundred years.” (Galindo 2022)
This quote raised multiple questions for me. The first question seems obvious as any reader would ask “what countries were they?”, but the other question that was raised for me is “why not expand on this topic a bit?”. I know the article is focused on sports, but when including such an interesting fact, it is surprising to me that the author does not follow this up much. Galindo references the Spanish, and it is reasonable to assume that Mexico claimed the area at some point in history, but I can not imagine what three other countries would have laid claim to this area.
“In those rough-and-tumble ABA days, fans hit Brown with more than just fruit. He was also bumped and punched when he made his way to and from the court.” (Galindo 2022)
I absolutely believe that this quote deserves further exploration. Galindo casually mentioned that the visiting teams coach was punched by fans when inside the arena, with not much explanation besides just stating that the ABA era was “rough-and-tumble”. If fans even touched a coach in the sports world today they would be quickly thrown out, and likely banned from the arena and arrested. Coming from a young person who was not alive to experience sports long ago, It is amazing to imagine that this was deemed acceptable in the past. Was security non-existent at ABA games? Was this behavior encouraged in order to make the league more popular? As stated previously, questions and thoughts like these make me think that this topic needs to be further examined.
