Welcome to Remember the Alamodome. My name’s Bruno Passos and I’ve written about the San Antonio Spurs since 2013, and as a credentialed media member since 2017, for SBNation’s Pounding the Rock.
If you’ve found your way here it’s likely that you do indeed remember the Alamodome. And why wouldn’t you—the Spurs called it home until as recently as 2002, and it was while playing there that the franchise won its first title and turned a symbolic corner in its history. The building also remains very much in use, hosting all manner of stadium-worthy events, from concerts and conventions to Wrestlemanias, Texas high school football games and the Final Four.
The Dome is an oversized curio in Spurs lore. For nine seasons it served as an unlikely bridge from the humble and raucous confines of HemisFair Arena to the AT&T Center of today, and from the David Robinson era to the early Tim Duncan years, providing a stage for highs like Sean Elliott’s rainbow triple over Rasheed Wallace and a season opener in which a rogue water cannon rained down on the court and fans. It’s also a standing tribute to the city’s still-unquenched thirst for an NFL team. Designed with football in mind, its capacity of 64,000 far exceeded the practical needs of an NBA venue, creating an in-person experience that was either awesome or cumbersome, maybe both. As basketball courts are considerably smaller than football fields, roughly half of the interior was sectioned off by a large blue curtain draped down the center—if you bought the wrong ticket off a scalper, you might have ended up with a partial backside view of the curtain and a peek at the vast empty space it sectioned off. And yet few in their position would complain given San Antonio’s record in the building (285-109, including the postseason) meant that the price of admission usually came with a W.
To be clear, Remember the Alamodome isn’t really about remembering the Alamodome—apologies if you clicked for 100% Dome content; Spurs puns are hard to come by. Furthermore, don’t expect it to rehash much from the key events in Spurs history, as there is plenty of well-written and well-reported coverage on all of them around the web. The focus here will be exclusively, hopelessly, more narrow in scope—on the minutiae, miscellanea and smaller moments that happened between or alongside those familiar events. Each email will feature stories or perspectives that are hopefully new to you, regardless of your investment in the team. Some of them aided or portended the Spurs’ successes to come; others highlight aspects of how the organization’s cast and culture came together; all comprise the unique patchwork that is the Spurs as we know them.
If that still sounds like your cup of tea, smash the link below to sign up now. Emails should go out every two weeks, provided my dayjob and newborn allow me the bandwidth.
In the meantime, if you have any thoughts or questions on the newsletter, you can find me on Twitter at @bouncepassos. Also feel free to share the newsletter with your dearest friends and worst enemies.