The Chaparrals, a lease deal and a name chosen before the first game.

The San Antonio Spurs started in another Texas city under another name. English Wikipedia records that the club began in 1967 as the Dallas Chaparrals, one of the teams in the inaugural season of the American Basketball Association. For the 1970–71 season it dropped “Dallas” for “Texas” and tried playing games in Fort Worth and Lubbock as a regional team, before returning to Dallas full-time.

The move came in 1973. Wikipedia says that with the club losing money, a group of San Antonio businessmen led by Angelo Drossos, John Schaefer and Red McCombs agreed a lease with the Dallas owners: they would run the team for three years with an option to buy it. After one season in San Antonio they exercised that option and bought the franchise outright. The team joined the NBA in 1976, when the ABA merged with the older league.

The new owners changed almost everything on arrival. Wikipedia says the team was first renamed the San Antonio Gunslingers, but the name was changed to the Spurs before it played a game. It gives two explanations for the choice: a winning entry in a local “Name That Team” contest, or the birthplace of one of the owners, the town of Spur, Texas. The colours changed too, from the Chaparrals’ red, white and blue to black, silver and white, with the new branding in place for the 1973–74 season at HemisFair Arena.

The early uniforms followed the new scheme with a few quirks. Wikipedia says the home uniform was silver in the ABA years and the first NBA season, that the road uniform carried “San Antonio” on the front until the 1988–89 season while the home set used the team name, and that from 1977 to 1981 the home shorts had saddle-like striping on the back.

From McCombs to the Holt family.

Wikipedia says local businessman Peter M. Holt and a group of investors bought the Spurs from Red McCombs in 1993, the year the team moved into the Alamodome. On 18 June 2021, KSAT in San Antonio reported that Peter M. Holt had served as chairman for two decades, that Julianna Hawn Holt was named chairwoman in March 2016, and that their son Peter J. Holt became chairman in March 2019. The same report said Peter J. Holt had that day been elevated to managing partner, with the NBA’s Board of Governors approving the change, and that the investment firm Sixth Street and Michael Dell had joined the investor group as strategic partners. According to the club’s release cited by KSAT, the Holt family remained the principal shareholder.

The arenas mark the eras. Wikipedia lists HemisFair Arena from 1973 to 1993, the Alamodome from 1993 to 2002, and from 2002 a new building first called the SBC Center, later the AT&T Center and now the Frost Bank Center.

The uniforms have stayed close to their 1989–90 form. Wikipedia says that since that season the Spurs have worn black on the road and white at home with the team name across the front, with small additions such as extra trim on the numbers in 2002–03. In September 2012 the club unveiled a silver alternate that broke with tradition by carrying only the stylised spur logo on the front, with the initials “SA” on the shorts. Since the 2006–07 season the team has also worn “Los Spurs” jerseys for the league’s Noches Latinas.

Nike’s arrival changed the lettering. The San Antonio Current reported on 11 August 2017 that the club had unveiled its white Association and black Icon uniforms for the 2017–18 season, that the new designs dropped the silver outline around the team name, and that they carried the franchise’s new basketball-shaped logo on the shorts. Wikipedia adds that the team name switched from Eurostile to custom block lettering at the same time.

Design and documentation.

A baseball or basketball team carries its identity in a small number of places, and each one has its own rules. On a baseball cap the mark is usually reduced to a monogram or a single letter, sized to sit on a front panel and to read from the stands. On a jersey the same team may switch to a script wordmark, a looping hand-lettered name stitched across the chest, or to straight block lettering for numbers and player names on the back.

Basketball adds a large printed surface: the court. Centre-circle logos, painted keys, baseline wordmarks and the colour of the wood stain all become part of how a club looks on a broadcast. Arena signage, scoreboards and seat colours follow the same palette.

Mascots turn a logo into a costumed character for families and for merchandise, and they are often redesigned more freely than the crest itself. In recent seasons, city-edition uniforms and alternate sets have given clubs room to borrow local colours, neighbourhood names and period lettering without changing the primary mark. The guides in this series look at how each team handles those layers.

A wordmark with a spur in it, a Fiesta interlude and a return to silver.

The Spurs’ central mark is a word. Wikipedia describes the logo as the name Spurs set in the Eurostile typeface, with a stylised spur standing in for the letter U, and says it has been part of the identity since the move to San Antonio.

For about a decade the logo took on colour. Wikipedia says the mark incorporated “Fiesta colors” of pink, orange and turquoise from 1989 to 2002, while the uniforms stayed black, silver and white. The change back came with the new arena. A Page 2 feature on ESPN, archived in February 2003, reported that the Spurs had updated their logo that off-season by dropping the pastels, which it said the team called its fiesta colours, and returning to the silver-and-black style the club had used in the 1970s and most of the 1980s. Wikipedia adds that the wordmark also changed from straight to arched from the 2002–03 season.

The Fiesta palette has since returned on special uniforms. Wikipedia says the club retired its camouflage-style City uniforms before the 2020–21 season in favour of a design influenced by the 1989–2002 Fiesta era, revisited it in later seasons, and in 2022 introduced a black Statement uniform with a “SATX” wordmark, a new “Texas spur” alternate logo and grey patterns drawn from serapes and saddle blankets. A 2023–24 City uniform paid homage to the HemisFair ’68 world’s fair, and a silver Statement set for 2025–26 put a block “San Antonio” back on the chest. The Coyote has been the club’s mascot since 1983; Wikipedia credits Tim Derk with creating the character.

For a design guide, the San Antonio Spurs show how a club can hold one wordmark, one piece of hardware and three neutral colours for decades, take a brighter palette for a spell, and then keep that palette in reserve for special uniforms. Compare it with the NBA, whose Nike uniform system brought the 2017 lettering change, and the Miami Heat, another NBA team whose city uniforms borrow colours from its past. For this guide we use Spurs black, silver and home white with an extended sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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