FanPost

Our Game 6 Saga

A bit of background - my family has enough Spurs fans/Jimmy Buffett fans that we keep finding connections between the two. Just for example, Volcano is an easy playoff song because you can plug in whatever place names happen to apply. All that came together around Game 6 vs. OKC.


June 2, 2012, we were at a Buffett concert in Houston, the same day as Game 4 of the WCF. There wasn't a lot of Spurs gear around, but I did get a "Go Spurs!" from someone who recognized my GAME DAY BALA shirt. There were beach balls flying around everywhere, and one of them must have been a Manu pass - it had mustard on it.

The amphitheater had pretty terrible cell reception. We only got sporadic updates on the game, enough to see it was going the wrong way. Towards the end of the concert Jimmy played "Come Monday (It'll Be All Right)", so that felt kind of reassuring.

Except Monday was Game 5, and it was not all right.

May 3, 2013, we had tickets to the concert in Austin this time. Not a game day. Only, the concert was postponed due to high winds, and we couldn't make the reschedule date. Later that got lumped in with several other events (including, yep...) as The Year of Almost.

May 31, 2014, we had tickets to the Austin concert again. Same day as Game 6. (This year's Houston concert was the same day as Game 5.) Much more Spurs gear was in evidence - my favorite was the #20 jersey with a shark-fin hat. The concert started a little before halftime. I was following on Twitter and Gamecast, with much passing the phone around whenever anything significant happened. At one point "Southern Cross" started playing right as Gamecast said "Patty Mills enters game" - that seemed appropriate.

We were right at the front of the lawn; ahead of us was a ledge with maybe a 4-foot drop to the walkway. At some point a guy in a Westbrook t-shirt came up the walkway and sat on the ledge... One of our group mimed pouring a bottle of water over him; someone else mimed pushing him off the ledge. Someone else only wanted to start a Go Spurs Go chant. Fortunately he moved on at the end of the song (and never turned around).

My phone was in the red as regulation was ending, so whenever they went to timeout I tried not to check again until the end of the song. That didn't work since people kept asking what was happening. I had to keep signing "timeout" since no other answer would've been heard. The concert ended with less than a minute of OT left. One person wanted to stay put until the game ended, but the rest of our group was already moving with the crowd. Then up ahead we heard "They have the game on!" and there was a mad rush for (I think) the refreshment tent, where they had a bank of TVs.

There was no room by the time I got there, so I ended up answering "what's happening" questions outside the tent, with a borrowed phone now, and shushing people who wanted to call the game. Gamecast was a couple of seconds behind the TVs, so the crowd noise told some of what was going on. "Boris shooting FTs; ok, they're cheering, he made the first...groans, guess he missed the second...cheering again; what happened?" Finally someone popped out of the tent to say "Spurs won!"

On the way back to the car we realized that come Monday...there was no Game 7.

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