As political races across Tennessee heat up, reporter Bill Dries helps us keep up, with a look at how Tigers basketball fits into the election scene, and news of the latest additions to various races.

About nine hours before the University of Memphis Tigers basketball team took the court in Portland against Gonzaga Saturday, March 19, a group of a dozen former Tigers players met in a ballroom at Ridgeway Country Club.

The fundraiser for Democratic contender for Shelby County Mayor Ken Moody, himself a former player, was set up before the Tigers made the NCAA tournament.

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Some of the ex-Tigers are involved in Moody’s challenge of incumbent county mayor Lee Harris in the May Democratic primary.

William Bedford manned a food truck he owns at the opening of Moody’s Whitehaven campaign headquarters a week earlier.

Rodney Douglas made the hardest political pitch of the four-hour event.

“Running a race to become mayor — it takes money. It takes votes. And it takes people,” Douglas said as he talked about how those who decide to vote decide who to vote for.

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“Sometimes it’s name recognition. Sometimes it’s political parties. Sometimes it’s race,” he said. “But in all honesty, if you really want the best candidate — The best candidate, just like if you apply for a job — it’s somebody with integrity. It’s somebody with experience. It’s somebody who knows the inside of what going on in the office.”

At first the gathering was mostly former Tigers players but later saw more politicos from other campaigns come in from other events as well as Tigers fans of the past and present teams already wearing their game day blues.

Moody himself, acknowledged at the outset, that he would not be pushing his platform and call for change as much as he usually does in his bid to upset incumbent Democratic County Mayor Lee Harris.

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“We have a brotherhood that is just strong and just goes far. There’s nothing like it,” he said of the group of former Tigers basketball players. “I don’t know if there’s another school in this country that has as many former players who are all from the same city and that are all still here.”

Moody hasn’t emphasized his status as a former Tiger player as much as he has his 20 years in city government — first during the Willie Herenton administration and currently as an assistant to Mayor Jim Strickland.

But he said Saturday it can be a political asset.

“Tigers basketball transcends race. It transcends it all,” he said. “It’s hard to fight.”

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Most of the dozen players present played together for the Tigers in the 1980s, sometimes after playing against each other in high school rivalries. But some were from other Tigers line-ups through the years.

One player from the 1990s-era Tigers was present in a less direct way.

A Moody campaign worker got autographs from the players present on a souvenir program from 1995 made in the shape and color of a penny with a profile of a younger Penny Hardaway in place of President Abraham Lincoln.

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Dueling legal memos

Moody’s fundraiser came at the end of a week that saw Moody move ahead with attacks on Harris’ handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Moody’s campaign has hinted for months that it was on the verge of turning up internal memos and letters showing Harris’ administration was rejecting help from the Strickland administration in handling the pandemic.

Through public records requests, the best his campaign could do was two July 2020 emails between county attorney Marlinee Iverson and city chief legal officer Jennifer Sink in which Iverson threatened litigation over the citywide mask mandate the city council passed.

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Iverson’s specific concern was a part of the ordinance that she thought could allow the city mayor to do contact tracing independent of the Shelby County Health Department.

To be sure, the move to beef up and rapidly escalate contact tracing in the absence of a vaccine had its share of glitches and legal tripwires.

But it doesn’t appear to have affected the overall coordinated effort countywide which had a much more public disagreement among the various elected mayors over the terms of a business shutdown.

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City chief operating officer Doug McGowen, who was a major part of the countywide task force that met daily and several times a day at the height of the pandemic, didn’t recall the dustup when asked about it last week by The Daily Memphian.

After reviewing the emails themselves, McGowen said he remembered some discussion of it.

But he was quick to add that it had “no material effect” on the cooperation between the city and the county in the pandemic response, which at that point was in its third month without a vaccine having been developed at that point.

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Harris’ campaign acknowledged the legal boundaries on the pandemic presented some challenges.

“When navigating the legal requirements in this new terrain, the lawyers always worked hard to resolve things amicably,” Harris senior campaign advisor Frankie Dakin said in an emailed response.

“These attempts to politicize the pandemic are sad and won’t work to undermine our record of regularly posting the lowest number of COVID cases per capita in the state and maintaining the most aggressive COVID response in the region,” he said.

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The winner of the one-on-one primary skirmish between Harris and Moody advances to the August county general election to face Republican nominee Worth Morgan.

The Memphis City Council member is unopposed in the companion Republican mayoral primary in May.

“The fact that Lee Harris has a significant challenge in his own party says a lot,” Morgan told a Young Republicans gathering March 15 in the Broad Avenue Arts District.

Speaking to a group of 30 at Wiseacre Brewing, Morgan continued to indicate Harris will face similar criticism from him in the general election campaign if Harris wins the Democratic primary.

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Morgan focused on economic development efforts that Harris, himself, has indicated are not a top priority of his compared to issues like a living wage and improving opportunities for “working class and middle-class families.”

Harris has said there are other political leaders focused on economic development incentives and high-profile projects with big corporate names attached like Ford Motor’s $5.6 billion Blue Oval City electric vehicle battery plant in Haywood County.

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Morgan asked where Harris has been in negotiations on the new funding formula for public education that Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee has been proposing or on making sure a share of the jobs at Blue Oval City go to Shelby Countians with infrastructure improvements to roads.

“It’s a rhetorical question because I know he’s not out there. I’ve been out there having conversations with people and for the most part we have a void,” Morgan said. “That has been one of the hallmarks of the Harris campaign is an absence of even showing up for the discussion… You pay for a Shelby County mayor. I believe you deserve to have one.”

Mulroy at Poplar Plaza

Harris, meanwhile, continued campaigning as a leader of Democratic candidates and issues in general along with his own re-election effort.

“I’m hoping that this August, if we make it past the primaries, make it through the general election, I’m hoping to have one other person in Shelby County government that can advance our work with youth and working families,” Harris said in introducing former county commissioner Steve Mulroy on St. Patrick’s Day.

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Mulroy opened his campaign headquarters in the Poplar Plaza shopping center in his bid to win the Democratic nomination for District Attorney General on the May primary ballot.

Mulroy is part of a three-candidate field that includes attorney Janika White and former federal prosecutor Linda Harris.

The winner among those three will face Republican incumbent Amy Weirich on the August county general election ballot.

Mulroy made no mention of his primary rivals but instead criticized Weirich.

Specifically her office’s push for a six-year prison sentence for activist Pamela Moses for registering to vote despite being convicted of a felony as the DA’s office negotiated a plea deal with a sheriff’s deputy who pleaded guilty to sexual assault of a teenager and was given probation.

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He also criticized Weirich’s record on requesting transfers of juvenile offenders for trial as adults.

“We live in a county where the district attorney doesn’t seem to be doing too good a job of getting crime under control — particularly violent crime under control,” Mulroy told a crowd of around 50. “But she seems to do a cracker jack job of taking young African-American men from juvenile court and shipping them off to adult prisons without rehabilitative services.”

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Moses has since been granted a new trial by the trial judge following the release of a Department of Corrections memo given to Moses that indicated her citizenship rights had been restored.

Weirich said the Department of Corrections made a mistake and not her office, calling those trying to criticize her for the mistake “political opportunists.”

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Mulroy, White and Harris have each said if elected they would make sweeping and significant changes to the District Attorney’s office.

Weirich has said she isn’t against reform of the office but won’t make changes “just for the sake of change.” She has also differentiated her office’s response to violent crime from its approach to nonviolent crime.