Getting to know Pounding the Rock’s writers: Bruno Passos
I’m not sure how I ended up here, either.
Welcome to “Getting to know Pounding the Rock’s writers”! During the All-Star break, we thought it we be fun to get to know a little bit more about our writers here at PtR.
A bit about myself
I’ve been at PtR since 2013 and covering this team as a credentialed writer since 2017. Outside of that I have a day job, wife, two children, and a small but growing collection of Kyle Anderson basketball cards, all life events that happened in between articles on Derrick White or David Lee. If you met me IRL you would probably not think I was 38 unless you got me started on The Adventures of Pete and Pete or saw an MRI of my back.
How I became a Spurs fan
While I wasn’t born in San Antonio, spent only a chunk of my formative years here, and have fairly imminent plans to move away, this city is and always will be ‘home’, and the Spurs are a big reason why.
We moved here from Houston in 1996, and I was originally a Rockets fan. I still remember staying up to watch Rudy T’s speech in 1994, and some of my favorite 90s players are still members of those title teams. While the team’s hideous rebrand and aging out helped me detach, I didn’t immediately click with the Spurs, either, even with Tim Duncan’s arrival. (I have vague memories of lining up for hours with my dad at a meet-and-greet for him at the then-newly inaugurated Alamo Quarry Market his rookie season, only to go home with nothing.) As a transplant, the ‘99 title didn’t resonate as much with me. I was probably still playing a lot of “Ocarina of Time”.
Fandom’s a silly thing, and mine only really cemented itself after I left town again in high school. Following along with the Spurs became one of my strongest ties to this city after moving away in 2001, then going to college in another state and making regular trips back during school breaks and, later, when I worked overseas. I still get a sick feeling from Derek Fisher’s shot in ‘04 and remember being literally sick after Dirk’s in ‘06, although the latter is probably because it was on the night of my 21st birthday when I was home for the summer. I suffered Ray Allen’s shot from a work computer in Auckland, New Zealand and followed the entirety of the 2014 run from various bars and casinos in downtown London in the middle of the night, because we had no internet in our flat and everywhere else was closed. I remember regularly finishing up a game and catching the next bus to work instead of home, with no regrets. Again, fandom is silly like that.
How I ended up at Pounding the Rock
In 2013, having just experienced our shared heartbreak, I mentioned to a friend of mine from San Antonio that I’d like to try blogging about basketball. He said his sister knew a guy (Fred Silva, for all the old heads here) who wrote for a website, she passed on his details to me, I emailed him, he forwarded my email onto J.R. Wilco, who was nice enough to let me try blogging about basketball. It took me a while to get comfortable writing in this space, and even longer to stop reading every comment for validation, but it’s been an awesome and rewarding experience every step of the way.
That includes getting the opportunity to cover the team as a beat writer, beginning in 2017 when my now-wife and I moved back to Texas. My tenure’s spanned the Kawhi Leonard saga, games inside an empty arena, and more Ls than anticipated — not the best timing considering the highs that preceded it, but I can’t say enough about and the relationships made within and around the organization, the chance to ask the greatest coach of all time the occasional question, and having people willing to read my observations, reactions and terrible jokes. I still consider myself lucky to have the access I do, even if real life has eaten into my bandwidth and ability to obsess about every detail as I did in years past. Luckily, Wemby’s arrival has brought a new lens to the team, and Spurs coverage should only get more extensive both here and in other outlets. But mostly here — don’t read the other guys.
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