Conaway: Don’t play a game in Nashville. Don’t give Nashville a dime.
Dan Conaway
Dan Conaway was a freelance columnist with The Daily Memphian from 2018 to 2025.
Evidently, there was a shell game going on somewhere recently.
Somebody from Nashville was running it, and the two suckers playing were from Memphis and Louisville, Kentucky.
The stakes were two lucrative basketball games between the University of Memphis and the University of Louisville.
Neither university found the pea, and the Nashville hustler pocketed his shells, folded up his card table and walked away with both games.
You’ve got to give them credit.
If you’re a city, be very careful in Nashville. Keep your civic treasures zipped up and buttoned or Nashville will lift them like a pickpocket in a New York subway.
They’ve done it with barbecue.
A while back, The New York Times rated Nashville as a better barbecue town than Memphis — really. Signs around the city hail their “West Tennessee-style barbecue.” There used to be one on a barbecue stand in the Titans stadium that said “Memphis-style Barbecue.” It had the longest line.
Their barbecue is Memphis barbecue — and Texas barbecue, and Georgia barbecue and North Carolina barbecue.
There is no Nashville barbecue. There are imitations of everybody else’s barbecue, often in the same restaurant.
They’ve done it with a river.
Right here, America’s greatest river — one of the world’s greatest rivers — flows right by our doorstep, literally defining the country’s east and west.
About 130 miles east of here, Interstate 40 crosses the state’s eponymous river, the Tennessee. That broad crossing between the river’s tall green shoulders is one of the prettiest river passages anywhere and serves as the ersatz border between West and Middle Tennessee.
About 350 miles from here, the Tennessee River forms the border between Tennessee and Georgia at Chattanooga. The city cuddles up to it, and Lookout and Signal mountains overlook its impressive curves.
About 400 miles from here the Tennessee flows by Knoxville with the city and the University of Tennessee perched on its banks on one side and a soaring mossy cliff on the other.
All of the above are real river treasures in Tennessee.
Nashville has a big brown drainage ditch called the Cumberland River. Its banks are mud and exposed roots.
Nashville has put Mississippi-style riverboats on it, claimed a rich history of river traffic and sells booze-soaked cruises up and down the Cumberland’s stanky course.
If a cruise down storm runoff sounds romantic, well, there you go.
They’ve done it with music.
I’ll give them country music. It’s all theirs, and they should and do make the most of it.
I’ll give them a major recording center. They’ve done what we should have done and embraced the music industry — all of it — not just their indigenous country.
I’ll give them Bachelorette Party Capital. Vegas is probably steamed, but I’ll let that one go.
But when they stole Black music heritage from us, that ripped it for me.
The songs from the cotton fields that came to Memphis when the slaves fled slavery. The music that was already here on the cobblestones loading and unloading the bales and the cargo and the immigrants who built this city. The music from churches filled with hope. The music that was first pushed through a horn here, that originally turned strings into strands of magic here, that pulled things from deep inside and changed us.
The music that gave America a beat came from here. We made America dance.
And yet Nashville built the National Museum of African American Music.
Nashville, people.
Nashville’s music history is about as Black as Minnie Pearl. Take away the choir at Fisk and Charley Pride, and it’s whiter than Wonder Bread.
Yes, we have no one blame but us. Our shameful failure to embrace and celebrate our culture — or our own children of blues and rock and roll and soul and funk and rap and hip-hop — have caused them to be raised elsewhere.
They’ve been celebrated around the world, but not here. We watched while the Colonel stole Elvis and recorded him at Columbia in Nashville. We watched Stax die when we could have saved it. We sat on our complacent mentality and let Cleveland steal the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Meanwhile, Nashville has been watching and taken whatever they want from us we’ve left neglected and unguarded.
I’m fed up, and you should be, too. But evidently we’re happy to oblige.
Now Nashville is taking two of our basketball games. They’ve convinced Louisville to come along, too.
I applaud the six-game series between two eponymous universities, Memphis and Louisville, whose previous contests have become larger than life for their fan bases. Yes, those fans will travel. Yes, they’ll spend money on hotels and restaurants and watering holes.
Yes, they’ll help raise the COVID-stuck hospitality economies of Memphis and Louisville. Oh, and Nashville.
And Nashville? Nashville is getting two of those games?
Unless you want to pay $600 for a $200 room. Unless you want to fight with traffic jams that make Waze go dark. Unless you want to line dance in that cowboy hat and those boots you’ll wear once.
OK, you’ll wear them twice.
There are two games.
Unless you want to leave millions of your dollars, as much as $10 million of economic impact by some estimates, in Nashville that should be coming here.
Nashville, home to neither team, will benefit as much as either Memphis or Louisville.
Who thought this was a good idea?
OK, so travel time will be less for the two fan bases. And — there’s no “and” — that’s it. So you drive a little longer. Add another Cracker Barrel stop. Survey the chips aisle at a gas station. Try the brisket at Buc-ee’s. Check out the Loretta Lynn exit.
People, this should be a home and home series — Memphis and Louisville — three games in each city.
As for Nashville, the neutral game site in the six-game contract, the contract states, “The parties further acknowledge and agree that the financial and other arrangements for the neutral site games have not yet been determined and agreed upon by the parties,” so we can help with that.
There will no financial and other arrangements. There will be no neutral sites.
I’m a Memphian, and we should blow the whistle on this deal. Nashville is out of bounds.
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