Becky Hammon on the Spurs, the WNBA, and the Mural of Her Face in San Antonio –

If Becky Hammon is disappointed when we get on a Zoom call on Wednesday afternoon, she doesn’t show it. Earlier that morning, the Oklahoma City Thunder announced the hiring of a new head coach—and despite being widely considered a top contender for the role, instead of announcing the first female head coach in the National Basketball Association, the organization named the zillionth man. Still, Hammon, who has been a top assistant coach for the Spurs since finishing her WNBA career with the San Antonio Stars in 2014, sits comfortably in a purple checked blazer with her collar popped, as swaggering a personality as any you’d find in the NBA.

OKC’s loss is San Antonio’s gain, though, and the city has embraced Hammon, both in her multiple All-Star seasons with the Stars and as she’s shattered any number of glass ceilings with the Spurs—as the first woman to win a Summer League title (which she did in 2015), the first woman to be part of an All-Star Game coaching staff (the following year), and the first woman to interview for an NBA head coaching job (in 2017, with the Milwaukee Bucks). To commemorate San Antonio’s bond with the 43-year-old star, there’s now also a mural of Hammon in the Lincoln Heights neighborhood, painted by Houston artist Sebastien Boileau and featured in a new short film from documentary platform 60 Second Docs. Texas Monthly caught up with Hammon to talk about the mural, her connection to San Antonio, and why she doesn’t just go around bashing hockey.

Texas Monthly: You’ve been in San Antonio for thirteen years. What’s your relationship like with the city?

Becky Hammon: I love the city. I you know, since I got traded here in 2007 from New York, I bought a house. I’ve taken a residency. It just felt like home immediately. Texas feels like a nice mix of where I came from, in the sense that I grew up in South Dakota, but then I lived in New York for about eight or nine years. Texas is like a nice middle ground to those two extremes. And then I love San Antonio and I love what it represents. It’s multicultural. The people are warm, they’re hardworking, and it kind of fits in with my personality. It’s a nice mix for me.

TM: San Antonio seems like it has a special relationship to the Spurs. Is that reflected in your relationship to the city as well? Do people stop you when you’re getting breakfast tacos?

BH: They are hard-core here about their Spurs. And yeah, people come up often. They’re always very polite and appreciative. I think they appreciate my body of work not only as as a coach for the Spurs, but when I was a player. I’ve kind of grown up in front of them in a sense. Even though I was thirty-one or thirty-two when I showed up, they’ve really embraced me and I think have a fondness for our relationship that we’ve been able to build over the last—has it really been thirteen years? It’s been fun and…