You remember the old Three Stooges routine. Moe, momentarily irate over some fresh imbecility, turns and dope-slaps Larry. Larry turns and slaps Curly, the next available target down the dope chain. Curly turns and, finding no one left to slap, begins rolfing his face with both hands and emitting that high-pitched whine that sounds like a lion on helium.

Not that we should read too much into the comparison, but this hoary old slap-shtick could soon be revived, after a fashion, now that Nashville has become a big-league city.

Reprising the role of Moe could be your Tennessee Oilers, and filling in for Larry Fine will be your Nashville Predators. Or maybe it will be the other way round. And maybe several others will join the line.

It doesn’t especially matter who whaps whom first. What matters is that the part of the ultimate slap-ee is already cast. Now playing Curly: Your Vanderbilt Commodores.

In just one year, Nashville’s sports landscape has heaved and shifted as if the New Madrid fault had suddenly up and gone postal.

After what seems like years of shuffling and dilly-dallying, the Oilers are finally settling down and going through with the wedding to Music City.

In October—a little unreal though it still may sound—the NHL’s newest team will be skating around in the Arena.

A few blocks farther downtown, in Municipal Auditorium, the newly named women’s professional basketball team, the Nashville Noise, will debut—with crowds, if other ABL franchises are a reliable guide, of 5,000 or more each night.

Fighting for fans in the middle of this lengthening food chain are the Kats, the Sounds, the Metros, and whatever other professional athletes blow into town.

All of which raises the perfectly legitimate question: Can Nashville support so much professional sports so soon? Will we become like some indulged kid who’s lavished with so many toys that he can’t even play with them all? Is this town big enough to hold all the big leaguers?

Maybe there’s a more relevant and troublesome question: What will happen to the little leaguers—the Belmonts, the Tennessee States, and, especially, the Vanderbilts—who soon may feel like they’re all surrounded by very tall folks in the middle of a mosh pit.

Thus far, Moe and Larry appear to be doing just fine.

The Oilers have sold far fewer season tickets than they would have liked for their games at Vanderbilt. (Perhaps Nashville fans are still punishing the team for last year’s lack of attention to community relations.) Nevertheless, the team has put a whuppin’ on PSL purchases for the East Bank stadium.

They’ve put more oomph into their lineup. They’re now in their hometown, if not on their home field. And past blunders notwithstanding, unfulfilled name-change promises not counted, Nashville fans will warm to the team—especially if they manage another eye-opening win like the decisive smacking they laid on the Cowboys last Thanksgiving.

And though the Predators barely achieved their season-ticket sales goal before the NHL’s March 31 deadline, here’s a more revealing indicator of the team’s prospects: Individual fans bought more seats than expected, and they got them early, suggesting that demand will be strong.

If nothing else, the novelty of having a team, and seeing hockey played at this level, will probably lure fat crowds during this first season. The Predators’ sure-footed management can handle things from there. (Having undertaken the effort to teach the subtleties of hockey to local sports media, imagine the kind of attention they’ll devote to fans.)

As the Oilers and Predators solidify their fan bases, Nashville’s NCAA members will feel the ticket squeeze most acutely.

In what may prove to be a case of importune timing, Belmont chose to join the NCAA—and to accept the responsibilities of swimming in a bigger pond just as several bigger fish were knifing into the neighborhood.

TSU, ironically, may actually benefit from the arrival of professional sports. But that’s only because its football team will share the new downtown stadium with the Oilers, enabling the Tigers to reach a wider audience.

If anyone stands to become a landslide loser in this new competition for ticket dollars, it’s Vanderbilt.

Right now, Vanderbilt athletics needs all the friends it can muster. And the school needs even more than the buttoned-down alums who shell out for the catbird seats at Vanderbilt Stadium. It needs the people who sit down below the 20-yard line—Nashvillians who have no particular ties to Vanderbilt but who loyally bought tickets, year after year, to attend what until now has been the biggest game in town. They’re the audience that’s most likely to defect to the Oilers; to keep them as paying customers, Vandy will have to cultivate them as never before—and in a big, fat hurry.

Precedent is not on Vandy’s side. In the great majority of markets where professional sports competes with college athletics, the latter loses—especially when the collegians are from small, private schools like Vanderbilt.

The interstates in major markets are littered with roadkill flattened by the pros. In Houston, some high-school teams can almost draw bigger crowds than Rice or the University of Houston. In the Dallas/Ft. Worth area, the Cowboys long ago steamrolled SMU and TCU.

The Maryland Terrapins can’t escape the orbit of the neighboring Washington Redskins. In New Orleans, Tulane football barely registers a blip on the screen. In L.A.—which no longer even has an NFL team—mighty UCLA is fortunate to play before a half-full Rose Bowl.

You’ll find a few exceptions. The Washington Huskies hold their own against the Seattle Seahawks. Even when they shared the Orange Bowl with the Dolphins, the Miami Hurricanes attracted crowds (at least as long as they were competing each year for national titles). And even in the shadow of the Bulls, the Bears, the Cubs, the White Sox, and the Blackhawks, support for Northwestern football has never been better.

But there’s one crucial difference between those football programs and Vanderbilt’s. All the others are winning.

In the end, Vandy’s best defense against professional sports is to follow the succinctly stated formula of the Oakland Raiders’ Al Davis: “Just win, baby.”

That’s why, of Vandy’s three most visible sports teams, women’s basketball is probably least vulnerable to inroads by professional sports. In their sport, Jim Foster’s Commodores are a perennial powerhouse, and they boast a strong following that isn’t likely to forsake them for the ABL noise.

The imperative to win is also why this may be the watershed season for men’s basketball coach Jan van Breda Kolff. Vandy athletics director Todd Turner has served notice that he expects VBK’s squad to uphold a consistently higher standard than they’ve achieved over the past several years—and with good reason: Men’s basketball is the only sport at the school capable of drawing capacity crowds every night.

Football, though, is the revenue engine of every big collegiate athletic program. Unfortunately for the school, Vandy’s engine always seems to be in the shop.

And that leaves Turner between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, Woody Widenhofer appears to be on the right track with Vandy’s program. On the other, building a winning football team takes time—one luxury that the Oilers’ and Predators’ arrival robs from Turner.

There’s still time for Vanderbilt to find its way. But now, just when it needed it least, the school’s athletic marketing task became infinitely more complicated.

Without some extremely dexterous helmsmanship, the school that Mayor Build-Us-One once denounced as “an 800-pound gorilla” could finally shed that image—and instead become, ironically, something even less flattering: a local lightweight.