By John Branston
For years now, Memphis has been trying to crash the NFL, the world’s most exclusive sports fraternity.You want rejection? We in Memphis have a tradition. We have lore. If there were a Hall of Fame of “would-be NFL cities,” Memphis would be the founding member. We have been, in fact, a “candidate for a new NFL team” more times than Bill Clinton has been a candidate for public office.
Memphis was in Herschel Walker’s first professional league and Larry Csonka’s last one. We played against the Super Bowl MVP Steve Young before he was a San Francisco Forty-Niner. We faced Heisman Trophy winner Doug Flutie this year. The immortal Reggie White played professional football for Memphis. So did the immortal Tweet Martin.
In the mid-’70s, Memphis was in the WFL (World Football League). In the mid-’80s, we were in the USFL (United States Football League). Now, Memphis is in the AFL (Arena Football League) and the CFL (Canadian Football League). We passed on the WLAF (World League of American Football), but don’t think we didn’t take a good look at them—and they at us.
We’ve been known by any number of team names, including the Grizzlies, the Southmen, the Showboats, the Pharaohs, the Hound Dogs and the Mad Dogs. In addition to all of our teams, we have hosted numbers of exhibition games between competing pro teams. In fact, over the last 10 years, crowds of over 60,000 have shown up to watch four such games. Crowds of only 10,000 have shown up too. They did that a few times this year.
Sometimes, we Memphis scribes think that scientists will one day prove that it is simply impossible to write a story about the history of any upstart football league without mentioning the name of Memphis. So why the hell ain’t Memphis in the NFL, while Nashville possibly soon will be?
Why the hell are we stuck with an arena football team (the Pharoahs) and a Canadian Football League team (the Mad Dogs), while we will probably some day never get the NFL team we had been yearning to get for years (the Hound Dogs)?
Why ask why?
Small game
For starters, there is a big difference between Memphis and Nashville, and there is a big difference between their competing desires to get in the professional sports business.
While Nashville has chosen to lure an existing team, Memphis has spent most of its efforts trying to land an expansion team. From commodities dealer Ned Cook to cotton magnate William B. Dunavant to Federal Express founder Frederick W. Smith, Memphis has never lacked for businessmen willing to put their time and money behind a home-owned professional football team. In their endeavors, the failure of Memphis to score with the NFL is a story of bad timing, bad luck and broken promises.
Memphis’ courtship of the NFL was, at the same time, too long and not long enough. When the city had both players and fans in 1975, it lacked solid ownership. When it had both ownership and political leadership in the late 1970s, the NFL decided not to expand. When it had political will, ownership, and an upgraded 60,000-seat stadium that was the envy of its expansion rivals in 1987, expansion was postponed. And when it had stellar ownership in 1993, it lacked the political will and leadership of a Phil Bredesen-type mayor to build a new stadium to keep pace with its expansion rivals.
Finally, after 30 years of frustration, Memphis’s pro-football backers decided that the prize was not worth pursuing at current prices. The backers cast their lot with a budget alternative, namely the CFL and the Arena Football League, only to be met with fan apathy and media criticism.
Memphis has a football-only stadium, the Liberty Bowl, which was built in 1965. Ever since, the stadium has been used by the University of Memphis and the Liberty Bowl holiday game. Once a second-tier bowl game, the Liberty Bowl has become a third-tier bowl game in recent years, featuring the likes of such relative no-names as East Carolina and Air Force and drawing barely 30,000 fans. If it hasn’t exactly had fans screaming from the rafters, this is still the same facility that is being mentioned as a possible temporary home for the Houston Oilers should they move to Nashville.
In the 1960s and ’70s, Memphis regularly hosted NFL preseason exhibition games in the Liberty Bowl, which, in that day and age, was a premiere football stadium, and one that would ultimately serve as the model for the home of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Despite these exhibition games, Memphis was left out in the cold when the NFL expanded in 1974 to Tampa and Seattle. Desperately seeking somebody to throw a ball around the field, the city then cast its lot with the WFL, a short-lived upstart that folded in 1976. (Earning a place in trivia history, the Memphis Grizzlies, later known as the Memphis Southmen, featured an offense that included past and future NFL stars Larry Csonka, Jim Kiick, Paul Warfield and Danny White.)
After passing over Memphis, the NFL adopted a resolution that promised that, in the next round of expansion, primary consideration would be given to also-rans Memphis and Birmingham. At the time, fans cheered, but nobody thought that it would take nearly 20 years for the NFL to expand. Nor did anyone stop to think that a flimsy promise of “primary consideration” would essentially be worthless.
The next time an upstart football league, the USFL, came along in 1983, Memphis initially declined to jump in, even though the league included college stars such as Steve Young and Herschel Walker. But after one season, Memphis took the plunge. Prominent local businessman Billy Dunavant was the owner. Former Georgia Tech, UCLA and Kansas head coach Pepper Rodgers was the coach. And the University of Tennessee’s Reggie White, whose statewide name recognition was on a par with leading blues musicians and assorted politicians, was the star player. But the USFL quickly folded after it lost an antitrust suit against the NFL in 1985. And once again, Memphis, a city without a team, set its sights on an expansion team in the NFL.
Fall back and punt
This time the lineup of backers included prospective team owner Fred Smith, whose company, Federal Express, is the biggest private employer in Tennessee. Smith was to work in tandem with Rodgers. In 1987, at Smith’s urging, the city spent $22 million to expand the Liberty Bowl to 62,000 seats and add 68 sky boxes in hopes of improving its chances of getting an NFL expansion team. At the time, the league was talking about a four-team expansion, and Memphis was given an excellent chance of making the cut.
To prove its NFL worthiness, Memphis played host to no fewer than four meaningless preseason exhibitions, one featuring Bud Adams’ Houston Oilers. Each game was billed as a test of the viability of the Memphis market. Fans, urged on by slogans such as “Fourth Game and Goal to Go,” faithfully filled, or nearly filled, the Liberty Bowl. An exhibition game around the same time in Nashville, it will be remembered, drew fewer than 20,000 fans.
But the preening was in vain. The NFL was mired in labor problems. Television revenues were down, making owners reluctant to cut a shrinking pie two more ways, much less four more ways. And player free-agency and eye-popping contracts were just around the corner.
In the changing world of NFL economics, shared revenue sources such as television were less important to owners than stadium revenue from tickets sales, sky boxes, parking and concessions. If a city would throw in relocation fees of, say, $50 million and build a new stadium to boot, it could become an instant contender for an NFL team.
Meanwhile, priorities changed in Memphis. In 1991, the city opened a new $60 million downtown arena, The Pyramid. Although it has recently proven successful, it was viewed at the time as a fiasco because the private developer, Sidney Shlenker, had put his company into bankruptcy. That same year, the city elected its first black mayor, W.V. Herenton. And a year after that, the casino explosion came to Tunica, Miss., just 25 miles south of Memphis. Several times during his first term, Herenton stated that legalized casino gambling in Memphis was his top legislative priority. He rarely, if ever, talked about professional football. In addition, his black constituency, as well as many whites, hardly seemed happy about the thought of coughing up additional public funds for a new football stadium.
So Memphis went to the NFL expansion meetings in Chicago in 1993 without any evidence of political muscle at the local or state level. All of the other expansion contenders—Baltimore, St. Louis, Charlotte and Jacksonville—were represented by both their prospective owners and various politicians. For its part, Memphis fielded a powerful ownership group that by then included Dunavant, Smith, Auto Zone founder J.R. Hyde III, NFL Hall of Famer Willie Davis, and commodities trader Paul Tudor Jones (all of them native Memphians, except for Davis). As for city and state political leaders, Herenton and former Gov. Ned McWherter were not even asked to attend.
The ownership group promised to pony up the $140 million expansion fee, including a $116 million up-front payment. The only state aid Memphis sought was a rebate of sales tax revenues.
The NFL chose not to expand immediately. And the delayed expansion worked in favor of Memphis’ four expansion rivals. (Nashville made a bid but did not make the final cut.) Charlotte had no stadium but, with the extra time, was prepared to build one, using the promotional model of the successful Charlotte Hornets NBA expansion team. Jacksonville began renovating the Gator Bowl. St. Louis started building a new indoor stadium. With the sudden activity in the other cities, the Liberty Bowl suddenly looked like a second-rate or third-rate stadium instead of the jewel it had been less than 20 years ago.
Sensing the city’s underdog status, Smith tried to turn lemons into lemonade. When it was his turn to make a pitch to the 28 NFL owners, he talked about the 1993 hit movies Rudy and . The movies were, respectively, about an overlooked, walk-on football player at Notre Dame and the much-ridiculed Jamaican bobsled team.
“Everybody loves them because they’re about underdogs and they win,” Smith said. “And Memphis should be a winner too.” Put a team in Memphis, Smith suggested, “and it would absolutely galvanize the country.”
It was no sale. The owners chose Charlotte and, after another month of delay, Jacksonville. In the final analysis, Jacksonville’s owner and City Council simply outspent Memphis by putting up the entire $140 million expansion fee at once and spending $121 million to renovate the Gator Bowl. Against such competition, Memphis’ hometown ownership, loyalty, and fairness resolution counted for very little.
A season of sharing
Memphis has been an utter failure in recruiting an NFL team, but, for a number of reasons, it remains a major player in Nashville’s current drive to snag the Oilers.
For one thing, Memphis controls the Liberty Bowl stadium and, more specifically, its lease. The Memphis Park Commission signed the lease for the stadium over to Dunavant in anticipation of Dunavant’s getting an NFL team. Dunavant subsequently signed the lease over to Smith, when Smith bought a Memphis franchise in the Canadian Football League. That team, the Mad Dogs, now plays in the stadium.
Thus, Smith gets to decide whether the Oilers will play in the Liberty Bowl for two years while they wait for Nashville to build its own stadium. “It’s too early to say,” Smith said last week when asked about the prospects. “They haven’t come to us with any proposals yet.”
But there have been informal discussions. Floyd Reese of the Oilers organization toured the stadium recently with Pepper Rodgers, and on Sunday Rodgers was Adams’ guest at the Astrodome for the Houston-Denver game.
If the Oilers make a proposition to Smith, he will probably listen closely. Much to Smith’s disappointment, the Memphis Mad Dogs have been a flop after one season. The strange rules, even stranger rivalries, no-name players and summer heat (the Canadian season begins in July) all added up to overwhelming fan apathy in Memphis. At mid-season, however, Smith publicly reiterated his belief that the concept of a fast-paced, affordable league is sound, and that the NFL is pricing itself into oblivion.
If the occasion arises, Smith would probably make a deal with Adams and Bredesen, despite his bitter feelings about the expansion failure. To do so, he may have to kiss his Mad Dogs good-bye, since the two teams couldn’t play in the same stadium. If Adams makes a generous offer to Memphis, Smith will probably do what he can to make the deal happen.
What kind of reception could Bud Adams and the “Nashville Whatevers” expect from Memphis football fans? A cool one, if recent events are any indication. Season ticket sales could be difficult without the leverage of media hype, corporate sponsorship, seat licenses, and a long-term commitment. Memphis has proven it will support an NFL team in Memphis, assuming that the team is a Memphis team, not someone else’s loaner. But, as the Memphis Mad Dogs learned this summer, the local fans are burned out on minor-league football. They are also sick of mediocre football, period, as the University of Memphis, Arkansas and Ole Miss discovered this fall when they visited the Liberty Bowl to play before small crowds. (Arkansas and Ole Miss drew only 29,104.)
David Williams, sports columnist for the Commercial Appeal, has already bet that the Oilers won’t even leave Houston. “But don’t hold me to that,” he added by way of mocking the demonstrated insincerity of the NFL. Other commentators say Memphis should shun Adams and Nashville as payback for a variety of perceived snubs.
But some Memphians, including Park Commission Chairman John Malmo, who was closely involved in efforts to land a Memphis NFL team, think the city would be stupid not to welcome Nashville’s team.
“I would take them in a second,” Malmo says. “As far as I’m concerned, that’s found money.”
David Staples, a Memphian who had season tickets for the Memphis Mad Dogs, seems to speak for a lot of people when he says, “Three or four games would probably be about the best I could do,” if the Oilers came to Memphis for two years.
“If they were really a Memphis team owned by Fred Smith, I would buy season tickets. But as for the Oilers, I’ve got to say I have better things to spend my money on.”
“If they were really a Memphis team owned by Fred Smith, I would buy season tickets. But as for the Oilers, I’ve got to say I have better things to spend my money on.”
John Branston writes for and the Memphis Flyer.
