Hotel Emma, a repurposed 19th-century brewhouse in the Pearl district of midtown San Antonio, is used to accommodating high rollers. Past guests include Paul McCartney, Adam Sandler, and Cher, who has called it “one of the most unique, beautiful hotels ever.” But it has never played host to what is perhaps the wealthiest and most famous fan base in all of professional sports, staring down a chance to end a championship drought of over 50 years.
When New York Knicks fans arrive in Texas on Wednesday for Game 1 of the NBA finals against the San Antonio Spurs, a rematch of their team’s last losing finals appearance in 1999, they will enter what Hotel Emma CEO Jon Sakshaug described as a city “on fire.”
“This is as exciting as this city has been in a long, long time,” Sakshaug told Vanity Fair. “And that comes from the opponent being the Knicks, which is a world-class brand.”
The Knicks’ courtside fan contingent is a complex celebrity ecosystem, with Ben Stiller and Spike Lee among the most likely candidates to make the trip to San Antonio—and juice the star power in Frost Bank Center. “All of us Knicks fans are gonna show up in full force to San Antonio,” rapper and Madison Square Garden fixture Fat Joe told me. “When you come to a Knicks game, it’s like going to the Grammys or the Oscars, because all you see are superstars. You might see Timothée Chalamet or Dustin Hoffman, but you aren’t getting that in San Antonio.”
“We’re much more like a college-football fan base,” said Away executive chair and Knicks fan Jen Rubio. “Going to this finals game with the people I see at all of the regular-season games feels like going to a destination wedding.”
When we spoke on Tuesday, Sakshaug declined to name names or specify dollar amounts when it came to who had booked a suite this week at Hotel Emma, where rates can reach up to $10,000 per night. But he acknowledged that the priciest rooms—made even pricier by the current spike in interest—had mostly sold out.
“There’s a lot of people flying in from New York specifically, and they are definitely going for the higher-rated rooms,” Sakshaug said. A spokesperson for Flexjet, the luxury private-jet company, said that demand for flights between New York and San Antonio had not yet gone up as of Tuesday, which is “not uncommon given our fractional aircraft owners can book their flights with as little as 10-hour notice,” but they added that the Knicks’ schedule is on the business’s radar “given our largest concentration of fractional aircraft owners reside in the tristate region.”
For now, some of the rush is playing out in plain sight. “Need tickets for games 1 and 2 in San Antonio Spurs v Knicks,” angel investor and All-In podcast host Jason Calacanis wrote on X on Sunday, even including his email address. “First five rows or so.” (Calacanis didn’t respond to a request for comment on whether this approach worked.) It is perhaps a style different from the one to which Spurs fans are accustomed. “You see grandparents, parents, and kids all emotionally invested in the same franchise,” said Ariel Wengroff, CMO of Ledger, the French crypto security firm and Spurs sponsor, whose logo is emblazoned on the team’s jerseys. “That creates a very different atmosphere from a lot of larger markets where sports can feel more corporate or transient. San Antonio itself is part of the experience.”