In San Antonio, as Spring turns into Summer, Honking is a joyous thing. No longer a tool of the annoyed motorist, but instead an instrument of celebration. Spurs win. You Honk.
You grab your family, your friends, and carless strangers from the bar, pile in, and head to one of the city’s hotspots to honk your horn, blast your music, and celebrate with fellow San Antonio Spurs fans.
The tradition dates back to the first time the San Antonio Spurs claimed an NBA championship, defeating the New York Knicks in 1999—the last time it lasted this late into summer was when the Spurs beat the Heat in 2014 for their fifth. Since then, a global pandemic and a six-year playoff drought have strengthened the community’s opportunity to celebrate.
San Antonio is the largest U.S. city with only one major sports franchise, so a lot rides on the Spurs. Following a six-year hiatus from playoff basketball, the town was ready to celebrate every win. To put it in perspective, the recent six-year streak of missing the playoffs amounts to more than half of the seasons missed by the 50-year-old franchise.
Maddy Mendoza, a reporter with Axios San Antonio, may not remember the 1999 Championship run, but she’s felt the connectedness of Spurs fandom throughout her childhood and into her career.
“As long as I can remember, honking has been part of the fandom and just something that we always do,” Mendoza told Road & Track. “For anybody who hasn’t experienced it, it is kind of this beautiful loving phenomenon because honking just happens all at once, and there’s no protocol. I call it a chorus of cars because it just happens all at once.”
Every city has its unique ways of celebrating big wins. In densely populated cities like Philadelphia or New York, fans go up, climbing street lamps and other scalable objects. In San Antonio, fans go wide. In a city so geographically spread out, it only makes sense that people would celebrate from their cars.
“In San Antonio, you might not see people gathering in mass the way you do in New York,” Mendoza said. “And I think that’s been kind of the scene that’s been captivating mainstream media as people gathering in mass. But honestly, San Antonio isn’t as walkable as New York, and it’s more of a car-centered city for better or worse. And that’s the way we gather.”
In past playoff runs, honking on Commerce and down on SW Military Drive was mostly reserved for series wins; now every game win is huge, with fans running to their decked-out vehicles shortly after the final buzzer.
Monday night, the Spurs recorded their first Finals win since 2014 at Madison Square Garden against the Knicks. The week before the Spurs’ Game 7 victory over the defending champions, the Oklahoma City Thunder drew the largest crowds across the city as the team won on the road. Two losses at home in between meant fans were hungry to get back to the streets.
Victoria Beaver
Cars lined up, honking on Market Street beside the Convention Center after looping off of Commerce Street.
Commerce was my first stop after the win on Monday night. Driving down, I hit the streets early enough to see the first wave of fans in black and silver pouring out of bars and watch parties, as the fire department drove its trucks through, honking along with the flag-baring cars and trucks. After five minutes, I was at a stoplight perpendicular to Commerce, a perfect place to car- and people-watch as I waited to turn onto the parade route. With windows down, the honks, the yells, the chants, my radio, and the radios of the cars closest to me all blended together. It’s thrilling.
There’s a lot of waiting; at the end of the day, you’re celebrating sitting in traffic, but it doesn’t feel like that in the moment. You’re yelling across the way at other cars, trying to sync up horns, praising others’ dance moves, and counting how many little green aliens are popping out of sunroofs.
From downtown, I drove south seven miles to find a larger collection of motorists and passengers on SW Military Drive. The roadway is six lanes across and stretches for miles, with police blocking off side streets to keep everyone heading in the same direction. This is where you’ll experience the burnouts, the fireworks, and the twerking.
Victoria Beaver
Pride of countries, heritage, community, and sports result in more flags than a tailgate should handle.
Every truck has flags ranging from small window flags to full government-size flags. For the majority of my time sitting on Military Drive, waiting for spurts of movement between red lights, I was behind a Ford F-250 Super Duty with four full-sized flags: one for the Spurs, one for America, one for Mexico, and a green alien flag for Victor Wembanyama. Each time the lights would change, a lowered white Chevy Silverado with ‘God is Good’ across its back window and a Spurs flag off its tailgate would do a burnout, leaving the air heavy with smoke. One firework came way too close to my Subaru for comfort.
The tapestry of automobiles at the honking sites is diverse, with an overwhelming number of pickup trucks and large SUVs as families and friend groups try to pile in as many as they can safely to enjoy it together. Thousands of people are celebrating the same thing, turning a place of rabid individualism, the road, into a community event.
While rehearsing for an upcoming residency at a local Honky Tonk, The Lonesome Rose, the San Antonio-based Cumbia band Volcán had the game playing in the background. When the buzzer sounded, they saw their opportunity. Volcán took to the back of one of the members’ pickup trucks, bringing the music to Commerce Street.
Volcan’s band leader, Jaime Mejia, spoke with Road & Track about how their impromptu performance came together and the importance of honking for the San Antonio community.
“We were meeting up to rehearse, and I decided to have the game on for everyone,” Meija said. “This is an idea that I have had for a while. But scheduling groups is kind of difficult, especially throughout the Spurs’ season. It just happened to be fortunate that we were together, rehearsing. So we went out there.”
Mejia, along with most of the 14-member band, grew up in San Antonio and holds nostalgia for past championship runs spent honking with family and friends.
“My uncle was a huge Spurs fan, and he would deck out his truck and get a bunch of flags and all the swag. We would go to the typical spots that everyone goes honking,” Mejia said. “This was in previous championships, so there’s something deeply nostalgic for us. Our families, we’re doing it together. I have my sisters filming; they’re the media department. My wife is playing in the band as well. And we have couples in the band, too, who separately grew up going honking with their families. For us to get to do it together with our new families, and it’s just something so special from honking to just sitting in the back of a truck with our closest friends, it’s so deeply nostalgic to just be driven around and sit back and chill with each other.”
Victoria Beaver
Wednesday night, the tide shifted again, and the Spurs lost following the largest comeback in NBA Finals history. The silence on my drive home from a watch party was deafening. On another side of town, Mendoza heard the premature honks of those who retreated to their cars before the Knicks’ comeback was complete.
“What’s so heartbreaking—after game Four, because we had such a lead—I was watching at a bar, and you could tell people were just ready to honk that they had already gotten in their cars and they could hear tiny little honks here and there,” Mendoza said. “People were motioning them to stop because we had lost. But even on the way home, we could hear people trying to get a honk going even after such a heartbreaking loss.”
This sets up a must-win Game Five for the Spurs, with their players returning to San Antonio. Fans, with their hearts on their sleeves and their hands on their horns, will be anxiously waiting.
Victoria Beaver is a nomadic sports writer who spends her time hopping between race tracks and hippie farms. She’s covered every corner of motorsports that will let her in from 410 Sprints to NASCAR to Supercross. Her daily driver is a 2010 Subaru that she refused to do the smallest amount of preventative maintenance on. Instead, she spends her free time and money building a 42-foot Skoolie to one day travel the country full time.