Skip to footer

Spurs and Thunder star in NBA’s Western Conference Finals: 10 extra dimensions

The clash of the Spurs and Thunder in the NBA’s Western Conference finals may fly a bit under the national radar when it opens Sunday. Here are 10 factors that make this showdown intriguing.

5. Basketball heritage

  • By Ross Atkin Staff

While the memories have faded, both Oklahoma and Texas have contributed to basketball’s rich history. Few may now be aware that Oklahoma enjoyed a high basketball profile in the 1940s. That’s when Oklahoma A&M (now Oklahoma State) won back-to-back NCAA championships in 1945 and 1946 under coach Henry Iba, who led the US men’s Olympic teams in 1964, 1968, and 1972.

The Phillips 66ers, a corporately sponsored team based in Bartlesville, Okla., also was a powerhouse in the 1940s, winning six straight Amateur Athletic Union championships when AAU ball was a big deal nationally.

As for Texas, it can claim one of the most historic teams in all of basketball, the Texas Western (now UTEP) team that in 1966 broke the color barrier by starting five black players for the first time in an NCAA championship game. That team beat an all-white Kentucky squad, a development that helped to speed up integration of college teams throughout the South.

5 of 10
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.