Memphians know well the meaning of Aug. 16, 1977.

It is a date that Allie and Barbara Prescott remember too, but for personal reasons. It was the day their life’s journey together began, the meeting having been arranged by a good friend of Barbara’s.

“It literally was a blind date. And it was literally August 16th, 1977, which is the day that Elvis died,” said Allie Prescott III, who on Tuesday, Oct. 10, will be one of the new inductees into the Memphis Sports Hall of Fame in a ceremony at AutoZone Park. “So, that was sort of the topic of conversation around the dinner table.”

Barbara, laughing at the memory, recalls something else, too: “He had on raggedy, old jeans with holes in them, so it’s a wonder I went out with him again.”

It’s an image almost impossible to fathom now — Allie Prescott, in ratty blue jeans?

Throughout Prescott’s career, he has been a man known for his consummate professionalism and steady graciousness — a man about his business whenever there was a challenge at hand.

Prescott, Brown headline 2023 Memphis Sports Hall of Fame class

Prescott, 76, grew up in Memphis as a St. Louis Cardinals fan, and turned into a pitcher with a fireball for a fastball back before radar guns replaced lore with metrics.

In 1965, Prescott even turned down an $8,000 signing bonus after the Baltimore Orioles drafted him out of Kingsbury High School. He had intended to play baseball at Memphis State, and despite the offer he did not deviate from that plan.

He couldn’t have known it at the time, but it was the first of many decisions showing uncommon loyalty to family, home and a university that he still holds dear even though at one point the president of the school broke his heart.

Had young Allie left to chase his big league dreams, he might never have met Barbara. He might never have become an attorney. And Barbara might never have received a phone call from her fiancé telling her that he had big news, news that would change everything.

“I know you got engaged to an attorney,” Allie said, “but how would you like to be married to the general manager of a minor league baseball team?’”

‘The practitioner’

That team was the Memphis Chicks. They played in old Tim McCarver Stadium, long before AutoZone Park was a twinkle in Dean Jernigan’s eye.

Barbara was game for the adventure, saying, “Sounds like fun.”

It was the start of Prescott’s professional sports career here. And everywhere he has gone he has left his fingerprints:

On the Memphis Redbirds, as GM, and also a key part of making the seemingly impossible dream that was AutoZone Park a city-changing reality.

On the Memphis Grizzlies, who in all likelihood never would’ve moved here had that jewel of a ballpark not been built Downtown and just a baseball’s throw away from The Peabody.

A quarter-century ago, AutoZone Park gave Downtown a jump-start

On the University of Memphis, and especially in its time of need in 2019; Prescott answered then-President M. David Rudd’s call and became interim athletic director after the school parted ways with Tom Bowen amid messy circumstances.

But even before his stint as interim Memphis AD, Prescott’s place in Memphis sports resonated statewide. In 2014, he was inducted into the Tennessee Sports Hall of Fame.

As Ray Pohlman, then an AutoZone executive and president of the Redbirds Foundation, said at the time, referring to Prescott’s role with the team and the ballpark:

“Allie was the practitioner when others were the dreamers.”

It was, and has continued to be, true.

And it wasn’t just that he had the ability to sell season tickets or suites, something he helped the Grizzlies with after they arrived from Vancouver. It was that he so easily formed relationships and instilled belief in people.

“Allie takes the awkward out of awkward,” Willie Gregory, a senior director at Nike, once told The Daily Memphian.

As Gaylen Pitts, who managed the Redbirds when Prescott was GM, said: “Everybody likes him. He knows how to treat people and get things done.”

She’s cheering (silently) for the ref

Prescott says when he awakens each morning he often discovers new body parts that “creak.” Aging stalks everyone, of course, and maybe old athletes most of all.

He still keeps an office as a senior vice president at Waddell & Associates Inc., where his job duties are, as one might expect, all about relationships, or “trying to open a few doors.”

It is what he has always done, so he keeps doing it.

Along the way, from 1979-1996, he also moonlighted officiating college basketball games, many of them in the SEC. Five times, Prescott was assigned to work the NCAA Tournament.

‘RoboUmp?’ Not exactly

When he recalls his zebra-shirt days, he goes out of his way to give credit to coaches whom he believes might have been misunderstood. His fellow Memphis alumni and friends won’t like this, but he remembers old Louisville coach Denny Crum with fondness.

“I loved Denny Crum,” Prescott said. “He was a gentleman.”

He also has kind words for Alabama coach Wimp Sanderson, he of the horse blanket sportscoats, saying Wimp never used profanity, and would accept a technical and then just resume coaching.

“He was not a vicious guy.”

And for Kentucky’s Rick Pitino. Though quite the little sideline foot-stomper, Pitino knew the game better than anyone.

“I told Barbara: ‘If he starts yelling at me, I probably missed it.’”

Even when he mentions a coach that was, well, less than a pleasure — Florida State’s Pat Kennedy — Prescott tries to be diplomatic, saying, “He was just a pain in the rear end.”

And then there was what, in the Prescott household, is remembered as the Don DeVoe Incident. Prescott was officiating DeVoe’s Tennessee Volunteers at Vanderbilt. Barbara just so happened to be in Nashville with her consulting business, so she went to the game — sitting there quietly and inconspicuously, never cheering for either team. At one point, she explained to a curious fan that she was there for that guy with a whistle around his neck.

Come game’s end, Vandy trailing by a point, Prescott called a charge on a Tennessee player as he slammed into a Vanderbilt player who owned a free-throw percentage north of 90%. The Commodores player hit both free throws, the Vols lost, and Barbara saw DeVoe making a charge of his own.

“Chased me off the floor and down the steps,” said Allie, now able to laugh about it. “I’ve never seen a coach madder than he was on that call.”

Then Prescott drops the rest of the story.

“They analyzed it later,” he said, “and my supervisor said I had made the correct call.”

A ‘missed opportunity’

The wrong call gets made in life all the time. Prescott says he missed many charge/block calls, adding, “It’s the toughest call to make.”

None of them, however, gnawed at him.

No, the call that for years ate away at both Allie and Barbara is the one that came from then-Memphis President V. Lane Rawlins.

Today, both Allie and Barbara call it his “missed opportunity.”

It was 1996 and he had been one of three finalists for the Memphis AD job. Someone on the search committee had even broken protocol and told him that the job was going to be his. Then Rawlins called Allie as he and Barbara were having lunch by the pool, and Rawlins said they were going to take a different direction. Rawlins instead hired R.C. Johnson, who stayed for almost 16 years.

Full circle: Tim McCarver back home after living a life full of dreams

“A big disappointment,” Barbara said. “But probably the only one. It has been a pretty charmed life, but that was a hard one.”

Which made Rudd’s request in 2019, to step into the AD void, so special. Rudd told The Daily Memphian: “Allie was my first and only thought. I hope it’s a good thing for him.

“Undeniably, it’s a great thing for us. When Allie calls, people take his call. When they’re not available, they return the call.”

The gig only lasted six months. It was enough to inspire some healing.

“It was really a dream come true,” Allie said, noting he was also part of the search committee that selected current AD Laird Veatch, and that he believes Memphis got the right person for the job.

Answering the Call

Funny, but that’s also what Barbara says about Rudd making Allie the interim AD.

“It diffused that whole (Bowen) situation,” she said. “And it was kind of sweet. I thought Allie should have had that job before.

“But there’s nothing that happened after that we didn’t want to have happen. One door closes, another door opens.”

A grand opening

In 1965, Prescott closed the door on playing professional baseball to keep his commitment to play at Memphis State, where as a kid his parents had taken him to many basketball and football games.

In truth, he already felt like a Tiger. Still, getting drafted by an MLB team and being offered $8,000 in 1965?

“It was a princely sum,” he said. “It was hard to turn down, but I was going to be the first person in my family to go to college.”

So, he played for his beloved Tigers — earned all-Missouri Valley Conference honors as a senior — and moved forward, going to law school and passing the bar.

And then came that call from Chicks owner Avron Fogelman. Suddenly, Allie was in pro baseball. He would leave for a time but would return for an encore with the Redbirds.

Bowen departs from U of M athletic director post; Allie Prescott named interim AD

In fact, other than April 16, 1977 — that first date with Barbara— and also the day of their wedding and their son Allie’s and daughter Allison’s births, probably no day is as significant as April 1, 2000: the opening of AutoZone Park with Mark McGwire, Tony LaRussa, Jack Buck and the Cardinals in the house.

“When everybody walked in, in my heart of hearts, I really don’t believe anybody thought it was going to be that magnificent,” Prescott said.

But it was.

The oft-told story from Grizzlies executives is that the Redbirds’ success with the new ballpark — they outdrew MLB’s Montreal Expos in the second season — gave then-Grizzlies owner Michael Heisley confidence to choose Memphis and to believe that with a new arena this could be a viable NBA market.

“It was really a dream come true.”

Allie Prescott
About serving as interim athletic director at U of M 

At the point Rudd called Prescott, however, he had taken a step back from the local sports landscape. Which was one more reason he was perfect as interim AD at his alma mater, where he had played baseball and even had done a little coaching while in law school.

Truth is, his time as interim AD was six months of unbridled joy: Bringing harmony where there had been disharmony. Learning the names of all the players. Getting to know the coaches, including Penny Hardaway and then-football coach Mike Norvell, whom Prescott singles out for being especially welcoming.

“He let me talk to the team a couple of times,” Prescott said. “I don’t want to overstate this, but we developed a bond that continues to this day.”

The last one

Allie and Barbara Prescott, both proud University of Memphis alumni, have been married 44 years. They’re enjoying what they call “semi-retirement,” and they live a quieter and slower life now in a zero-lot home in Germantown.

They are also resolved to make the most out of every singular moment that is left.

One of those moments comes on Tuesday, Oct. 10, at the ballpark Allie helped to build. They will celebrate another Hall of Fame ceremony.

There have many such honors: The university’s M Club Hall of Fame; the school’s Athletic Hall of Fame for his pitching career; the Memphis Park Commission Hall of Fame for his baseball; Memphis City Schools’ Alumni Hall of Fame; and the Tennessee Sports Hall of Fame.

“I promised our friends,” Barbara said, “that this is going to be the last Hall of Fame banquet they’re going to have to go to.”

U of M names Laird Veatch as new athletic director

She laughs, and while it’s true they don’t take themselves too seriously, they also know how special the coming honor is. Not that anything that has happened professionally is of greater consequence than raising their children, but, as Barbara said, “They don’t put you in the Hall of Fame for coaching your child’s little league team, even though it was important to us.”

No, they put you in the Memphis Sports Hall of Fame for being a “practitioner” of the highest order, for “taking the awkward out of awkward,” and for answering when your alma mater’s president calls and asks if you would walk through that once closed door and lend a hand.

So, yeah, this one feels different than going into the Tennessee Sports Hall of Fame. 

“It means more to me,” Allie said. “My friends, my family, everybody is here, and it’s where I’ve lived every minute of my life.”

2023 Memphis Sports Hall Of Fame Inductees

• Allie Prescott III
• Elma Roane
• Hubie Brown
• Jack Eaton
• Sheila Echols-Gross
• Tamika Whitmore
• Richard Mulrooney

Prep Coach Honorees

• Marion Brewer
• Phil Clark
• Sharon Watson
• Sylvester Ford Sr.