Tracy McGrady shares touching story about Spurs fans: 'it gave me goosebumps'

The San Antonio Spurs have long been the gold standard for how front-office executives should run a professional sports franchise, and their staunch team-first culture has been the infrastructure of their unprecedented success over the last five decades. Iconic figures like George Gervin, David Robinson, and Tim Duncan have passed the torch from one generation to the next, turning this organization into an inseparable piece of the city it calls home.

There is no doubt local fans love the Silver and Black, but sometimes it takes seeing that devotion up close and personal to fully understand how much this ball club means to the 2-1-0. In an interview on the latest episode of The Ring of the Rowel, Tracy McGrady shared a touching story from his first and only season in San Antonio, recounting how it felt seeing thousands of people gathered at the airport to welcome the team back from every road game.

Hearing about that magnitude of support may not be too surprising, especially since Tim Duncan and company went 58-24 during the regular season en route to an impressive trip to the 2013 NBA Finals. While the Spurs have fallen on tough times in recent seasons, fans have continued rallying around the team. Even with San Antonio sitting in second-to-last place in January, an absurd 68,323 fans flocked to the Alamodome to set a new single-game attendance record.

Despite missing the playoffs for a fourth straight season, the basketball gods rewarded the Spurs for their patience and answered their prayers with Victor Wembanyama. Fans showed up in droves at the outskirts of the airport to shower him with the kind of adoration befitting of a generational talent, and there will be plenty more of where that came from if the towering teenager can help lead San Antonio back to the promised land.