As one March day turned into another 50 years ago, a city torn by lingering racial discord came together to greet a collection of kids who pulled off the improbable.

Memphis State had just beaten Kansas State in Houston to win the 1973 NCAA Tournament’s Midwest Regional. The Tigers would soon head to St. Louis for their first Final Four appearance.

But before that happened, the team returned to Memphis and a spontaneous welcome-home party for the ages.

Final Four Memories: Gene Bartow ‘loved being the head coach’

“That was pretty wild, yeah,” said Kenny Andrews, one of the team’s reserve forwards.

Two of the Tigers’ biggest stars, Larry Finch and Ronnie Robinson, were locals, a pair of Melrose High products talked into leaving the city’s poverty-stricken Orange Mound neighborhood and going a few blocks away to a university hounded by accusations of racial inequity.

Memphis State was not integrated until 1959, when eight Black students — Eleanor Gandy, Sammie Burnett Johnson, Marvis Kneeland Jones, Bertha Rogers Looney, Rose Blakney Love, Luther McClellan, Ralph Prater and John Simpson — were escorted onto campus.

Finch, who later would coach the Tigers, and Robinson were Black too.

So was Larry Kenon, an Alabama-born big man who transferred in from a Texas junior college before embarking on a 10-season ABA and NBA career that included five All-Star selections.

Final Four Memories: Lee Hunt left his mark on the 1972-73 Tigers

One of the starting guards, Bill Laurie, was among several white players on the roster. With humble Missouri roots, Laurie would marry into the Walmart fortune.

It was a curious collection of characters, many of whom reunited in Memphis to celebrate their run to the ’73 championship game — a loss to undefeated UCLA. With the golden anniversary of their Final Four trip as a backdrop, program insiders reflected on a transformative time.

Common among their responses were vivid recalls of a city that stood unified when the Tigers arrived at Memphis International Airport on Sunday, March 18, 1973, shortly after the stroke of midnight, sweat from their win over the Wildcats hours earlier barely dry.

Most brought up the remarkable moment unprompted.

“The biggest thrill was when we came back from Houston, the airport was jampacked,” said 88-year-old Lee Hunt, an assistant to Tigers head coach Gene Bartow for 12 seasons at various programs, including 1972-73 in Memphis. “People were everywhere. They were just all over the place. That was so memorable.

“The city, they were overjoyed.”

Final Four Memories: The Tigers experienced March Madness before it was a thing

Challenging times

Many Memphis days were not so joyful. One stained American history.

Roughly five years earlier, on April 4, 1968, Black civil rights activist and clergyman Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel in the city’s South Main district.

King was in town to support Memphis’ sanitation workers, who went on strike after two of their own, Robert Walker and Echol Cole, died two months earlier in an accident involving a garbage truck compactor.

King had stepped onto the balcony of the motel, now preserved and home of the city’s renowned National Civil Rights Museum, to smoke a cigarette. He was shot by sniper James Earl Ray, a white man who had escaped the prior year from the Missouri State Penitentiary.

King’s death came three years after civil right activist Malcolm X was assassinated in New York City.

Elliot Perry, 26 more Memphis Sports Hall of Fame inductees pay homage to Bluff City

Even after the tumultuous 1960s flipped to Tom Wolfe’s “Me Decade” of the 1970s, racial relations remained fractured in Memphis and much of the country.

“The city was so messed up at that time,” said Verties Sails, who coached Finch and Robinson at Melrose High.

Then the ’72-73 Tigers came along.

At least in the minds of those closest to them, they bridged the divide. 

“Memphis had had racial problems over the years,” said Hunt, a white man who, after following Bartow from Memphis to three other stops, became head coach at Ole Miss and Missouri-Kansas City. “But that team really brought the city together. That team became very much beloved.”

Calkins: Larry O. Finch — a statue Memphians can celebrate

It was one of two most loved by Gene Bartow, who, in addition to Memphis, coached Central Missouri State, Valparaiso, Illinois, UCLA and UAB. The other: Bartow’s 1957 charmed St. Charles team that won a Missouri high state championship.

“Obviously at that time, there was a lot of tension in the city with race relations,” said Bartow’s son Murry, who was 11 years old when Memphis State reached the Final Four. “And I think he felt, and a lot of people felt, that that Tiger team brought a lot of people together in the city.”

The words are so similar. The thought is the same. The Tigers brought the city together, they all felt, when Memphis really needed it.

‘I just loved Memphis at that time’

Doug McKinney, a white guard from the Cincinnati area of Ohio, sensed it late in his time with the Tigers.

McKinney joined Memphis State before coach Moe Iba was fired and replaced by Gene Bartow. He played two seasons with Don Holcomb and Fred Horton, who laid the groundwork for the Final Four run but were done before it began.

When his own playing career finished after the 1972-73 season, McKinney faced an uncertain future.

Memphis Tigers legend Lorenzen Wright will be ‘smiling down’ as his jersey is retired

He was not NBA material. He didn’t want to return to his home state then. He did have an offer to take a high school coaching job in Jacksonville, Florida. But McKinney also had an affinity for his home away from home, Memphis.

“Coach (Bartow) called me in and said, ‘Doug, you’ve got it if you want it. They want you,’” McKinney said of the out-of-state job offer. “He said, ‘Decide tomorrow.’

“I thought about it one day, and I thought, man, I just loved Memphis at that time. It couldn’t have been any better. If it had an ocean down there, that would have been the No. 1 place in the whole world.

“I mean, everything was good. Beale Street was hoppin’. The racial problems were tuned down. That brought the whole city together, that team did.”

The whole city. Together.

Or was it?

Wyeth Chandler, Memphis’ mayor then, even handed keys to the city to Memphis State’s ’72-73 Tigers, white and Black alike.

“He said that team did more for the city of Memphis than anybody has done for ’em,” McKinney said.

Sails, however, remembers speaking in front of an audience of 500 or so during Finch’s and Robinson’s senior year at Memphis State, a time he also sat on the board of the Memphis Park Commission.

“One of the things I said was, here’s the impact Ronnie and Larry had: They’ve got all of us coming to the Mid-South Coliseum to see them play, to see the Tigers play. … Black, white, green, whatever,” said Sails, a Black man, now 80 years old. “And we are all in there together.”

Until they weren’t.

Nelson: Pink Palace’s Tiger hoops exhibit is Memphis in a nutshell

“But as soon as the final horn would go off, all those people would walk out of the Mid-South Coliseum, everyone went their separate ways,” Sails said.

“We still haven’t gotten together as a people. We cheer for the same team, but we still haven’t gotten together as people. And we still haven’t done it to this day.”

The great debate

Academics still examine and debate how long the ’72-73 Memphis accord truly lasted, and how real it was, especially considering all that was going on then, including student-led racial discrimination-related protests on the university’s campus and one of the nation’s most-controversial courtroom battles.

“Basketball did provide common ground across lines of race and class, and Finch and Robinson did inspire sincere admiration,” Aram Goudsouzian, a University of Memphis history professor, wrote in a 2016 piece for Ole Miss’ Center for the Study of Southern Culture. “Memphians, Black and white, paint the moment with great cultural importance. Yet, as with many myths, it hides as much as it reveals.

Former Memphis coach Mary Lou Johns chosen for Tennessee Sports Hall of Fame

“The success of the basketball team smoothed over Memphians’ anxieties about the status of the university, the prestige of their city, and the future of race relations.

“The language of racial healing inspired by Finch and Robinson occurred amidst political disillusion and a controversial court-ordered busing plan to integrate schools. The story of the Tigers’ season thus illuminates how sports can not only foster racial progress, but also obscure racial divisions.”

Fifty years after the Tigers went to the Final Four, racial tension in Memphis remains thick.

“But as soon as the final horn would go off, all those people would walk out of the Mid-South Coliseum, everyone went their separate ways.”

Verties Sails
Larry Finch and Ronnie Robinson’s coach at Melrose High

“My philosophy is we ought to have the best city in America. I really believe that,” said Sails, who after leaving Melrose was a Tigers assistant coach and the longtime head coach at Shelby State, now Southwest Tennessee Community College.

“We have talented people everywhere, but somehow we won’t let go of some things we need to let go of so that everybody can be a factor (in Memphis’ growth and development). We just won’t do it.

“But the impact is (Tigers basketball in the early 1970s) did get a lot of us coming to events and games. It changed a little bit of the attitude, but it should have changed a whole lot more.”

Goudsouzian: The 1973 Memphis State Tigers prove the power of sports

That the unification felt by many around the ’72-73 program, however fleetingly, will someday be fully revived arguably is a far-fetched notion in trying times.

“Because most of the athletes are Black and because Memphis is a majority-Black city with a complicated and tortured history, we also use basketball to process conversations about race,” Goudsouzian wrote last month in a guest column for The Daily Memphian. “This was on recent display amid the rage, grief and despair following the death of Tyre Nichols at the hands of police officers.”

Nichols was a young Black man allegedly beaten to death in January 2023 at the hands of five now-fired Memphis Black law enforcement officers who have been indicted on multiple charges including second-degree murder and two counts of aggravated kidnapping.

“It might be a cliché to say basketball creates some of the most racially integrated spaces in Memphis. It is also true,” Goudsouzian also wrote in 2023. “Still, Memphis never stops suffering from poverty, crime, police brutality and political polarization, all shaped by legacies of racial exploitation.”

“We still haven’t gotten together as a people. We cheer for the same team, but we still haven’t gotten together as people. And we still haven’t done it to this day.”

Verties Sails

Whether Gene Bartow thought the harmony his team created in ’72-73 was long-lasting or more of an in-the-moment experience is something Murry Bartow will never know.

The two never discussed it before Gene Bartow lost a bout with cancer in 2012.

The political past of Tigers basketball

“But, you know,” said Murry Bartow, now 61 and a scout for the NBA’s Charlotte Hornets, “my dad was one to always deflect praise.”

To his players, that is.

“He didn’t want the praise to come his way. But I think he had a sense that that Tiger team brought a lot of people together,” the younger Bartow said. “Old, young. White, Black. Rich, poor. It didn’t matter. Memphis people loved Tiger basketball, and I do think he had a sense that that ’73 team did a lot of good for a lot of people.”

The impact of Larry Finch, Ronnie Robinson

For McKinney, the sense of racial unity in the moment was no myth either.

His sadness is that it’s not that way now.

“That’s a shame. You needed people like Finch and Robinson like that. I mean, everybody loves ’em,” he said. “It don’t matter Black, not Black.”

Calkins: Larry Finch and Ronnie Robinson together in the Memphis Sports Hall of Fame

Finch and Robinson, both now deceased, received heavy backlash in Orange Mound and from other Black Memphians for choosing Memphis State.

That didn’t scare them away from being Tigers, though. And, eventually, their stardom inspired Black and white youth alike.

Black kids from Memphis had someone to aspire to be like, and white children, for the first time, had role models who didn’t look like them.

By the time the Tigers were in the thick of their NCAA Tournament title chase, Memphians of all backgrounds bonded perhaps more than they ever had.

“Finch and Robinson did a whole lot for that city,” said McKinney, now semi-retired and living back in Ohio. “And so did other players from there. Billy Cook, they loved him.”

Cook, a white sharp-shooting guard from White Station High, was a freshman on the team.

“This basketball team, with Larry (Finch) and Ronnie (Robinson) being hometown guys and others being good guys, it did so much to bring the community together,” said retired sports writer Bob Jones, who covered the Tigers for The Commercial Appeal 50 years ago. “Everyone was pulling for Memphis State.”

Madness at the airport in March of 1973 is proof.

Newspaper reporters were there. Television cameras were there. So were 5,000 or so of the Tigers’ closest friends, fans and family members. Some were Black. Some were white. Most didn’t care which color was which.

Davis and Williams are the country’s ‘best one-two punch.’ How far can they carry the Tigers?

“There was just people hanging off everything,” Murry Bartow said.

Former Commercial Appeal sports writer Zack McMillin painted the picture in his exhaustive 2003 series on the team:

“Photographs of the scene show a diverse mix — young and old, Black and white, male and female. It looked like some kind of strange airport music festival.

“Some fans arrived four hours early to gain prime spots from which to see their heroes. Those who arrived later stood atop garbage cans or climbed on the roof of (a) 1973 Ford Galaxy on display in front of the American Airlines counter. The Galaxy’s white vinyl roof eventually collapsed, and a bass boat on display in another terminal was also damaged.”

Kenny Andrews, recruited to Memphis State from his home state of Missouri, remembers it well.

“I mean, the whole place was just a zoo. You couldn’t even walk,” Andrews said. “We had a hard time even walking through there and getting our bags and getting out to the parking lot. It was just a mass of humanity there.”

One city. One mass. Together, for at least one moment. 

Contributing: Parth Upadhyaya, The Daily Memphian’s Tigers basketball beat writer, and Phil Stukenborg, a longtime Memphis sports writer and public relations director

Sources include: Associated Press, Bloomberg Finance News, The Commercial Appeal, WHBQ-TV, University of Memphis Magazine, southernstudies.olemiss.edu, sports-reference.com