The Surreal Experience of Watching the Dallas Mavericks Without Fans
Things are different inside the American Airlines Center, but the Mavs are back. You ll just have to watch on your TV.
By
Doyle Rader
Published in
FrontBurner
December 21, 2020
1:44 pm
It has been nine months since Mark Cuban checked his phone and we watched his jaw go slack, learning in front of the world that the NBA season would be stopped immediately. On Thursday, basketball returned to the American Airlines Center, a preseason game between the Mavericks and the Minnesota Timberwolves.
Music from Migos, Gucci Mane, and Drake soundtracked pregame shooting routines. Members of the media buried themselves in the glow of laptops. It appeared all very routine except it wasn’t. For all the attempts to re-create a familiar game night atmosphere, the NBA’s new normal is a foreign experience. The arena is empty and there is no escaping that.
A lesson from Clark Griswold for 2020: focus on the light
This holiday, take a tour of lights and share your favorites on our Facebook page.
The Lake Highlands home belonging to Jim and Linda Shultz features 37,000 colored lights in Dallas. Jim said the front yard Christmas lights display takes 55 hours to install, and the pair started setting lights up in October. Perhaps the Shultzes or their neighbors will post a photo of their home on The Dallas Morning News members Facebook group this week.(Lynda M. González / Staff Photographer)
In the classic holiday movie
National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, Clark Griswold’s greatest moment of joy comes when he sees 25,000 Christmas lights blazing atop his house. The “Hallelujah” chorus plays and the audience knows that, despite the citywide power outage, the dead cat, the torched Christmas tree, the disappointing Christmas bonus, the abduction of Clark’s boss, and the SWAT team, there was joy, at least for a moment, in the
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Hockey is back just on the other side of the holidays.
A shade more than three weeks before puck drop, the NHL and NHL Players’ Association formally approved on Sunday a 56-game regular season slated to begin on Jan. 13.
It’s quite literally going to be a sprint to Lord Stanley. Training camps for all 31 teams open in two weeks, setting off a scramble for players to make their way back to their playing cities, contending with quarantines and holidays at home.
Once it arrives, a 56-game campaign will be crammed into just 116 days - nearly one game for every two days - in a baseball-style schedule with mini two- and three-game series dotting each team’s exclusively intra-division schedule designed to minimize travel and the spread of COVID-19.