clock menu more-arrow no yes mobile

Filed under:

The Spurs of Tottenham & San Antonio should form an alliance

If towns can have twins, then why can't professional sports teams? If the Spurs had one, who would it be?

By Wes Thorne (Izee)
Jamie McDonald

This all begins with Wikipedia. Well, to be more specific, it begins with a Wikipedia wormhole.

For the uninitiated: a Wikipedia wormhole is the kind of night that begins with looking into the complete discography of Paul Revere and the Raiders and ends staring blurry eyed at an explanation of the Bernoulli process.

Ticket deal now live! Opening night tickets for Spurs vs. Grizzlies

 The ticket deal includes early entrance to watch pre-game warmups, and a post game free throw on the court.

This particular wormhole was a sneaky one. I sat down for breakfast and was looking at the town I currently reside in for some light reading over coffee and toast. I checked out the climate, infrastructure, and with the inauspicious name "twin towns". The last coherent thought I had was "What is a twin town?" When I next regained lucidness it was 7 in the evening, my coffee had acquired weird fuzzy bits, and on my screen was the Wikipedia page for the Cagliari Elmas Airport.

After retracing my steps, I now know that a twin town - also referred to as a sister city - is kind of like an alliance between two cities, towns, villages, oblasts (whatever that is) and counties with something in common. Sometimes the connection is obvious; for example, Seoul, South Korea and Washington D.C., USA are sister cities and are both capitals of their respective countries. Sometimes the connection is not all that clear. What do Long Beach and Phnom Penh have in common? I don't recall Snopp Dogg mentioning Cambodia in any of his songs.

The purpose of all this is to recognize a connection, and construct a mutually beneficial alliance. What if sports leagues did this? You can't link cities from the same country together, so obviously you couldn't link two NBA teams. But what about other leagues? If this system were in place, the LA Lakers and New York Yankees would automatically be linked due to their cash-first, strategy-second philosophies. The Washington Wizards and the St. Louis Blues would be linked together due to their "woe is me" fan base.

But what teams from other leagues are the San Antonio Spurs related to? This opens up a rather contentious discussion. It's tempting to link one's favorite teams together; I'm just itching to establish ties between the Tampa Bay Rays and the Spurs. However, this kind of thinking is narrow and ignores other choices which could be more organic.

Truth be told, the Oakland A's are a lot more like the Spurs but they could possibly meet the Rays in the postseason, so forget them. It is truly hard to go about this objectively. However there is one team that has a crystal clear and inarguable connection to the San Antonio Spurs.

That team plays soccer in the English Premier League. That team is the Tottenham Spurs. OK, the official name of the team is the Tottenham Hotspur. The team's name comes from an English nobleman who liked to bet money on cock fights. His roosters were the kind of chickens that grew up on the wrong side of town and drank tar for breakfast. They wore riding spurs on their ankles. I will say that again--chickens fought other chickens while wearing sharp pieces of steel originally designed to inflict pain on a 1,350 pound animal.

When one first sees Tottenham's logo some might think "ha-ha, the team's mascot is a chicken." However this is why knowledge is so important. That is not a chicken -- it's a breathing death machine that can fly. It is safe to assume that this is the only team in the world whose mascot is weaponized poultry. Sir Harry Percy, nicknamed Harry "Hotspur" for his deadly roosters, was clearly more insane than Marc "The Shark Tank" Cuban. The San Antonio Spurs are the only other team in major sports named after the same piece of metal. (There are also the Whitbank Spurs from South Africa but let's not quibble.)

So I think any rational Spurs fan from both sides of the pond can agree that this is an agreeable match. However for any naysayers, there are other parallels of the two franchises:

  • Both teams have exactly three active players from France and one active player from Argentina.
  • Both teams have zero active players from Greenland.
  • Paulinho looks awkward in this picture and Manu looks awkward in this one.
  • Both teams are "team-oriented" as opposed to "superstar-oriented".
  • Both teams have meaningless phrases like "team-oriented" attached to them by crank pundits.
  • Both teams previously played in awesomely named arenas. (The Marshes and The Alamodome)
  • Younes Kaboul and Tiago Splitter both look like they are about to murder somebody in this picture and this one.
  • Oh, and both teams are known as Spurs.

I propose that from now on the San Antonio Spurs should be twinned with The Tottenham Spurs. Spurs fans should henceforth refer to bathrooms as loos and should pronounce the word route like one pronounces the part of a plant that is underneath the soil. Meanwhile Tottenham fans should call their friends dudes instead of mates, and try dropping the u when spelling  "color".

I don't know if this means that any trades between the two teams are now permissible, but I assume that would totally be cool. For starters, Moussa Dembélé is widely considered an "excellent passer and dribbler", so he would be a natural guard and is certainly worth being included in trade conversations.

Finally, SBNation just happens to have team blogs for a number of clubs in the EPL, just like Pounding the Rock for the NBA. And if anyone has reservations about this proposed twinning, know that the final factiod to clench this deal for me was the name of the blog for Tottenham is Cartilage Free Captain -- is that cool or what? If that's still not enough for you, know that while we peruse the PtR Lexicon, they rely on The Cartilage Free Captain Glossary.

I rest my case.

More from Pounding The Rock:

More From Pounding The Rock