Not an Austintatious performance
The Frank Erwin Center hadn’t even been built when I was at Texas. For that matter, Frank Erwin himself was still there, in an incident I probably shouldn’t admit to remembering:
In October 1969 the [UT] board of regents decided to bulldoze several hundred feet of a local creek so they could expand the football stadium. In an attempt to stop the bulldozing, student protesters chained themselves to trees, and Erwin, complete with hard hat and bullhorn, personally oversaw their arrests.
This was, incidentally, before Erwin fired John Silber, then dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.
You’ll note that I’m avoiding talk of the actual basketball game, since it was another loss — the Spurs, who led the Thunder by one point after the first quarter, wound up winning 119-102 — and once again, OKC seems to have no answer for the trey. (San Antonio put up 19 of them, and 14 fell.) I concede, though, that UT alum Kevin Durant, who had 23 points, manifestly knows his way around the Erwin Center.
There’s one more preseason game left: Thursday at the Ford, against the Kings. The first regular-season game is the following Wednesday, against the Kings.
Dick Stanley »
21 October 2009 · 2:27 pm
Maybe it’s their name. The Thunder? Was tornadoes taken?
CGHill »
21 October 2009 · 2:31 pm
I have no idea what they were thinking. Evidently there are some people who think “Miami Heat” and “Orlando Magic” are defensible team names. (Or, for that matter, the WNBA’s Detroit Shock, which is moving to Tulsa.) I have this weird idea that team names should be plural, but no one consults me on these matters.