Bill Hardgrave got the basketball, measured the rim, went up and — oh, yes he did — threw one down.

The University of Memphis president can dunk.

OK, he could dunk more recently than you’d think.

“I was 39,” he said. “I was at the University of Arkansas as a faculty member. We had a noon basketball game. That was the last time for me.”

But still.

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Could the president of the University of Tennessee ever dunk? The president of Ole Miss or Vanderbilt or — to take this week’s football opponent — Mississippi State?

“That was one of my gifts,” said Hardgrave, 58. “I had hops back in the day.”

So can the new president elevate the University of Memphis’s athletic program?

It’s too soon to know.

And maybe it’s the wrong question, given the nature of the job. Hardgrave is president of a university, not a professional sports franchise.

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But as Memphis prepares to kick off another football season — and continues to wrangle with the challenges posed by conference realignment — it is led by a man who understands and cares about sports.

“A president’s role is not to run athletics,” Hardgrave told me in a recent interview. “We have seen that many times and it never ends well. But we all learn from our experiences. Whether we admit we have a bias or not, our experiences bias us, either positively or negatively. I think there’s a tremendous role for college athletics. For many, it’s their path to college. That was true for me. Even now, I can look back and say, ‘Gosh, if not for basketball, where would I be?’”

Hardgrave can point to the precise moment when sports began to change his life. He was in junior high. His family lived in a two-bedroom house in rural Arkansas that was seven miles from the nearest paved road.

“We were in the gym, just waiting for P.E. class to start,” he said. “The basketball coach was down there, running the junior high team and getting upset with them. He finally said, ‘I can pull guys out of the stands who would do better than you.’ And he pointed to me and said, ‘Get down here.’”

Turns out young Hardgrave could play a little.

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“The coach asked me why I wasn’t on the team,” Hardgrave said. “I told him I didn’t have a way to get back and forth to the games. And he said — remember, this is a small town — ‘Who’s boy are you?’ I said, ‘I’m Glenn’s boy.’ So he said, ‘I know Glenn.’ Then he took me home and told my father he would drive me back and forth if he’d let me play.”

Hardgrave went on to be the leading scorer and rebounder for the Hartman High School Hawks. He first dunked in ninth grade.

“I wasn’t that big,” he said. “Maybe 5-10, 135. But we pressed, and we ran. We ran, and we pressed. When I played basketball, I was all-out, all the time. I broke 10 bones playing basketball through the years.”

Once, Hardgrave got his legs cut out from under him dunking the ball.

“I tried to hang on the rim to get my balance, my feet hit the backboard and ‘bam!’” he said. “I broke my collarbone, dislocated my shoulder and broke my arm.”

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At the time, Hardgrave hadn’t given a thought to college. It wasn’t something anyone in his family had ever done. As high school graduation drew near, Hardgrave thought his best option might be to move to California to join a drag racing team.

Yes, drag racing.

“I liked to go fast,” he said. “You have to understand, I grew up dirt poor. We worked on each other’s cars. I would go to the junkyard and I would get pieces and kind of put them together. Every Sunday, there was a drag strip in Centerville. You’d take your car over there and there was bracket racing — you against another car, and if you won, you’d move on to the next guy.”

One year, Hardgrave got to working on a Chevy Vega.

“We put a 327 Corvette engine in it,” he said. “You put a 327 Corvette engine in a Vega, it will actually pull the wheels off the ground. I eventually wrecked it. Me and another car, we were nose-to-nose. We kind of drifted over and we touched front fenders. You touch fenders at 130 miles per hour and bad things happen. I went through an embankment and a barbed-wire fence and ended up in a field.”

Just another Sunday in rural Arkansas, evidently.

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But the race team from California was impressed!

“When they asked me to join them, I was thinking of doing it,” Hardgrave said. “But then I ran into the basketball coach at the College of the Ozarks. He told me they had a spot for me. I went there to play, but I never really played. I ended up at Arkansas Tech. Basketball opened my eyes to college. It got me there.”

So it shouldn’t be a surprise that Hardgrave has a keen appreciation for the value of sports to a university. How that will manifest itself — and the ultimate impact it will have at Memphis — is impossible to predict.

M. David Rudd, Hardgrave’s predecessor at Memphis, was deeply invested in the school’s athletic programs. He tried valiantly to get Memphis into one of the country’s elite athletic conferences. Through no fault of his own, he failed.

“My role is to clear the hurdles so people can get their jobs done and get the resources they need to get the jobs done,” Hardgrave said. “I’m not going to be the person who is texting the coach.”

Hardgrave gets emotionally involved in winning and losing, certainly. He can be an unbridled fan. But one of his primary interests is the impact sports could have on enrollment in the next decade.

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“Fewer and fewer students are going to universities,” he said. “There is going to be another 10%-15% decline starting in 2025. People stopped having kids during the recession, and now, 17-18 years later, we are seeing the impact of that.

“Students pick their university based on two primary factors. First, they ask, ‘When I choose this university, and I choose this major, what is going to happen? Will I get a return on my investment?’ The second thing they ask is, ‘What kind of experience am I going to have? I want to go to a place that gives me the opportunity to grow as a person, to develop a network of friends, to have fun.’ And college athletics is a huge part of that experience.”

Hardgrave would doubtless be delighted if that experience could include a move to the Big 12 or some other elite conference. He believes that, before long, 60 or 70 of the best college programs will essentially play sports among themselves.

“We just have to be the best that we can possibly be,” he said. “And we need to make sure that people know who we are. Our success, athletically, can have a great halo effect for the entire university. When our men’s basketball team made the NCAA Tournament and took Gonzaga to the limit, that opened the eyes of people. When we go to bowl games in football, when our soccer team has success, that opens eyes as well.

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“We also need to make sure that people know who we are academically. It’s presidents of these universities who make the decisions. And I think we are well-positioned to be a great school in the AAC or wherever the future should hold.”

As for his own hoops career, Hardgrave really doesn’t play any longer. He runs five or six miles a couple of times a week and plays golf when he can. He has traded his souped-up Vega in for a silver Ford-150 pickup truck. And he has a 1962 Corvette — one owner, all original equipment — that makes his heart beat fast.

“I decided, when I turned 40, that was it for basketball,” he said. “But when I watch, I still really get involved. I get caught up in what defense are they in, what are they doing, is this person switching, that kind of thing. In football, I probably cheer more, because I’m more of a pure fan.”

Which brings us to this season. What exactly does Hardgrave expect his first year at Memphis?

He has a funny story about that.

“Well, I went to the University of Arkansas in 1993, and they won the national championship in basketball,” he said. “I went to Auburn University in 2010, and they won a national championship in football. So I told (Memphis athletic director) Laird Veatch, ‘‘You don’t want to be the person to end my perfect streak.’”

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