It’s hard to overstate how much University of Memphis basketball means to Memphians. To find a city as college basketball crazy as ours you’d have to look as far west as Los Angeles (UCLA), as far north as Lexington (UK), as far east as Chapel Hill (UNC), or as far south as ... well, nowhere.

Which is why it’s altogether fitting and proper — not to mention way cool — that our city museum, the Pink Palace, has just opened an exhibit covering more than a century of Memphis basketball.

The exhibit, which runs until Oct. 4, was guest-curated by University of Memphis historian Aram Goudsouzian, working primarily with the museum’s exhibits and graphic design supervisor Caroline Mitchell Carrico. It’s more than worth your time.

In addition to his much-celebrated books on Boston Celtics star Bill Russell and the 1965 James Meredith-inspired civil rights march through Mississippi, Goudsouzian is the author of a deeply insightful, wonderfully readable article in the online journal “Study the South” about the 1973 team that features so prominently in the Pink Palace exhibit.

The passionate regard Memphians hold for the Tigers is on most visible display in the exhibit’s wall of 84 T-shirts from over the years, all loaned to the museum by fans at the initiative of collections developer Jestein Gibson, an avid collector of Tiger-themed regalia herself. You can also see them and about 50 more, along with quotes from their donors, here. 

It’s fair to date the first year of the A.F. (After Finch, as in Larry) era of Memphis basketball as 1973. But as the exhibit shows, the B.F. era is worthy of attention as well. 

It started when men’s and women’s squads from what was then the West Tennessee State Normal School formed to play teams from other educational institutions. For 14 years they practiced in a second-floor classroom in the administration building and played their games at the YMCA. Soon after Zach Curlin arrived in 1924 to coach not just basketball but also football and baseball, the teams got their own gym.

With big T’s on their jerseys, it was easy to change the teams’ nickname from “Teachers” (or “Tutors”) to the somewhat more ferocious “Tigers” and “Tigresses” without having to buy a bunch of new uniforms. West Tennessee State Normal became Memphis State College in 1941, which also lent luster to the athletics program.

As a teachers’ college, Memphis attracted a large number of women students, and the Tigresses sometimes dominated the Mississippi Valley Conference in a way that the Tigers did not. Astonishingly, team member and Messick High grad Ellen Baird won the annual World Free Throw Contest every year from 1928 to 1930, once by sinking 60 of 60 shots from the line.

Alas, the higher ed authorities in Nashville big-footed their way into women’s basketball (too unfeminine—or something) and eliminated the Tigresses in 1938. 

Starting in the 1950s, however, the men’s team flourished, taking advantage of the university’s urban location to recruit excellent players from around town. 

The Tigers reached the NCAA tournament in 1955 and 1956. In 1957, playing in the then-almost-as-prestigious National Invitational Tournament (NIT) in New York’s Madison Square Garden, the team gained national renown as the “Dixie Darlings” by almost winning the whole thing.

The 1950s teams represented what remained an all-white university until the “Memphis State Eight” desegregated the recently renamed Memphis State University in 1959. Still slow to recruit black players, Tigers basketball under Coach Dean Ehlers descended into mediocrity. 

Even Ehlers’ replacement in 1966 by new coach Moe Iba, who dramatically diversified the roster, didn’t help much because Iba imposed a stodgy style of play on the team that was ill-suited to the run-and-gun talents his recruits had developed on city playgrounds and in high school.

Iba’s replacement by Gene Bartow in 1970 brought an end to the B.F. era. Iba recruited Melrose High stars Larry Finch and Ronnie Robinson, but Bartow freed them to play the kind of game at which they excelled. 

Before packed, multiracial crowds at the Mid-South Coliseum in the 1972-1973 season, the team rode its first-place finish in the Missouri Valley Conference championship to the NCAA’s Final Four in St. Louis. 

The Tigers won the semifinal game against Providence College. Playing in the final against UCLA, which had won the previous six national championships, they held the Bruins to a tie at the half before succumbing.

Meanwhile, forced to act by the passage of Title IX in 1972, the state reopened the door to women’s basketball at Memphis State. From then until 2005, led by coaches Mary Lou Johns and her successor, Joye Lee-McNeilis, the Lady Tigers compiled a record of 597 wins and 371 losses. 

Finch joined new men’s coach Dana Kirk as an assistant in 1979. Drawing from the deep well of local talent featuring William Bedford (Melrose High) and Keith Lee (West Memphis High), they led the team to the NCAA Sweet Sixteen in four consecutive years starting in 1982, reaching the Final Four in 1985. 

When Kirk was forced to resign a year later after being indicted for multiple charges related to massive gambling debts, Finch took his place, the first African American coach of a major college basketball program in the South.

Finch led the Tigers back to the NCAA tournament in 1987. In 1992, playing in the just-opened Pyramid (quickly dubbed, faux Egyptian-style, the “Tomb of Doom” for visiting squads), Treadwell High recruit Penny Hardaway helped the team reach the Elite Eight. 

“The kids from Memphis live and die to be here,” said Finch, whose four years as a player and 12 years as coach made him “the most important figure in Memphis sports history,” according to former university president W. Lane Rawlins.

As bridge builders across racial lines at a time when Memphis was undergoing extraordinary black-white tensions in the aftermath of the King assassination in 1968 and a federal judge’s order to mandate busing in 1973 to integrate the city’s schools, Finch and Robinson were unexcelled.

“If a city or a country were like an athletic team,” said Finch, “we wouldn’t have as many problems because everybody would be working toward that same goal.... Black people would try to understand whites better and whites would try to understand the blacks.”

As Goudsouzian observes in his article on the 1973 team, “The story of the Tigers’ season illuminates how sport can not only truly foster racial progress, but also obscure racial division.”

After a name-change to the University of Memphis in 1994 and several years of mediocre basketball, the athletic department reached what the Pink Palace exhibit describes as a “Faustian bargain” by hiring John Calipari as coach.

Calipari broke the mold, recruiting outstanding players from all across the country. His teams won seven Conference USA championships in nine years and the 2008 squad reached the NCAA title game against Kansas. Calipari was an enormously likable member of the community.

That’s what Memphis basketball got out of the bargain. What it paid in return was the forfeit of its national title run when the NCAA sanctioned the team for Calipari’s recruitment of an academically ineligible athlete, star player Derrick Rose. Eyes wide open, the university had hired Calipari knowing that he’d gotten his previous team, the University of Massachusetts Minutemen, disqualified as well.

Its luster diminished in different but equally dispiriting ways by both Calipari’s tenure and his departure for the University of Kentucky in 2009, Tiger hoops entered another decade-long miasma under his successors, the wet-behind-the-ears Josh Pastner and the well-past-his-sell-by-date Tubby Smith.

As for the current cycle of excitement raised by the 2018 hiring of Penny Hardaway as coach and his recruitment of James Wiseman as star player, soon followed by despair over Wiseman’s departure from the team, well, that’s Memphis basketball.

In fact, living in hope while halfway expecting the worst – “plucky, determined, together, grit ‘n grind,” as Goudsouzian summarizes “the story Memphians like to tell about ourselves” — is pretty much Memphis in a nutshell.