Dater Avs Travel Memories: Dallas

Did I tell you of the time I played basketball with the Avs?

Photo by Adrian Dater

In an ongoing series, Adrian Dater revisits some memories from different cities over his 28 years of travel covering the Avalanche. The Avs play in Dallas tomorrow night, so here are some memories over the years from Big D:

Whew, Dallas. It’s probably in the top 5 of the cities I’ve visited the most in all the years of Avs travel. I have plenty of memories, so here goes:

• First off, having once lived on Cape Cod, in the town of Hyannis, I became a huge Kennedy buff. I knew where the Kennedy compound was and sometimes would drive by it, though it’s very walled off on the actual street where the driveway to the stately place is. So, I definitely remember one of the first things I did on my first trip to Dallas, in 1995, was walk around the grassy knoll and take a tour of the Sixth Floor Museum. The sixth floor of the former Texas School Book Depository, where Lee Harvey Oswald shot JFK on Nov. 22, 1963, is now a museum and it’s quite the place for history buffs. Obviously, it’s a place where a tragedy occurred, so it’s not like I was jumping for joy when I first walked around all over the place there.

• But it is really surreal to stand on the street and look up at that sixth floor window, especially at night when not many people are around. It’s very surreal to stand by the window inside (it’s been re-created to look exactly as it did when Oswald fired the rifle, and it’s encased in glass). It’s very surreal to see the actual camera Abraham Zapruder used to film the shooting. It’s surreal driving down the street over the exact spot where the first shot was fired. There’s an X marking the spot on the street, and I’ve driven over it many times. It’s so very surreal to walk on the sidewalk and on the grassy knoll itself, which looks exactly the same.

• I think it was during the Avs’ first season when this happened, but it might have been the second - can’t quite remember. The team stayed at this absolutely giant hotel called the Wyndham Anatole. When I say giant, I mean GIANT hotel. The hotel had a big (yeah, everything was big there) fitness facility, which included a basketball court. On an off day for the team, a bunch of Avs players were in that facility, as I was, and the idea of a pickup basketball game was floated. And so I joined in and played pickup basketball with guys such as Joe Sakic, Claude Lemieux, Adam Deadmarsh, Adam Foote and, I think, others such as Scott Young and Valeri Kamensky.