The Annual NBA Outdoors Game
The Suns hold an annual basketball exhibition game, the NBA Outdoors, every first weekend of October in Indian Wells Tennis Garden in Indian Wells, California near the city of Palm Springs, California. The team owner Richard Heckmann has a home in Rancho Mirage, California also one of two homes by Lakers' coach Phil Jackson and the two teams share the market of the American Southwest, but the Suns agreed to participate in the last three games (2008, 2009 and 2010).
As a result of a recommendation by the Coachella Valley Recreation and Park District's Superintendent of Operations, Craig DeWitt, the NBA held its first outdoor exhibition basketball game on October 11, 2008. That stadium facility was built primarily for tennis tournaments and music concerts, and it can hold up to 15,000 fans. The Phoenix Suns lost the game to the Denver Nuggets. A second annual outdoor exhibition game was played on October 10, 2009, this time the Suns lost to the Golden State Warriors. On October 9, 2010, the Suns beat the Dallas Mavericks in the third annual outdoor exhibition.
In 2008 and 2009 pre-seasons, the Suns held training camp in the Auditorium in La Quinta, California and the College of the Desert Gymnasium in Palm Desert, California along side with the Portland Trail Blazers. But in 2010, the Suns began their training in San Diego and the Trail Blazers in Tucson, Arizona as well held exhibition games in Seattle, Washington.
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Famous quotes containing the words annual, outdoors and/or game:
“No annual training or muster of soldiery, no celebration with its scarfs and banners, could import into the town a hundredth part of the annual splendor of our October. We have only to set the trees, or let them stand, and Nature will find the colored drapery,—flags of all her nations, some of whose private signals hardly the botanist can read,—while we walk under the triumphal arches of the elms.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The neo-hippie-dips, the sentimentality-crazed iguana anthropomorphizers, the Chicken Littles, the three-bong-hit William Blakes—thank God these people don’t actually go outdoors much, or the environment would be even worse than it is already.”
—P.J. (Patrick Jake)
“I have a notion that gamblers are as happy as most people, being always excited; women, wine, fame, the table, even ambition, sate now & then, but every turn of the card & cast of the dice keeps the gambler alive—besides one can game ten times longer than one can do any thing else.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)