Larry Finch with Frank Murtaugh, 1992
My grandmother loved the Little General. Ida Louise Murtaugh — we knew her as Idie and she called Midtown home — followed exactly two sports enterprises: the St. Louis Cardinals and Memphis State basketball. During a mid-March visit to my family’s home in Northfield, Vermont, in 1985, Idie took the prime seat in our living room for the Tigers’ NCAA tournament game against the UAB Blazers. It was St. Patrick’s Day (my dad’s birthday, her son’s birthday) and the Tigers were favored, but they were playing a team in green uniforms. Uh oh.
The Tigers won the game, 67-66, in overtime to advance to the Sweet 16. Keith Lee scored 28 points, but the Tigers’ big forward was an All-America. He was supposed to score 28 points. But point guard Andre Turner, the team’s “Little General” from Mitchell High School, scored the game-winning bucket, the final two points of his 23 (no other Tiger scored as many as 10). My grandmother enjoyed my father’s 43rd birthday more than he did.
That’s Tiger basketball for you. How does a college basketball team in the Mid-South reshape a birthday celebration in New England? The devotion between Memphians and their Tigers is visceral, the kind of attachment that travels with a fan, one that cares not if it’s March and madness is in the air. Ask a Tiger basketball fan in July about the upcoming team’s chances and you’re likely to hear details on the next recruiting class that only a registered scout should know. It’s year-round, Memphis Tiger basketball, and it blends one generation — both teams and fans — into another.
I moved to Memphis in the summer of 1991, just in time to catch Anfernee Hardaway’s debut with the Tigers that fall. Having cheered the likes of Lee and Elliot Perry from afar, I welcomed the chance to hear and somewhat touch the phenomenon of Tiger hoops, and not just at the Pyramid, their new home at the time. The following March, of course, Penny and the Tigers reached the NCAA tournament’s Midwest Regional final — the “Elite Eight” — and you could say I had blue-and-gray in my veins for good.
Fast forward a decade and you’d find me reporting on the Tigers for the Memphis Flyer. John Calipari’s remarkable run as head coach (topped by the team’s trip to the 2008 Final Four); a latter-day Little General in the form of Joe Jackson (White Station High School) leading the team to the Big Dance four straight years; two turbulent seasons under Tubby Smith; and the river-shaking hire of Penny Hardaway — yes, that one — to lead his alma mater to new heights as a head coach. It’s been fun covering the Tigers, not always happy, but always interesting and, in this town, always newsworthy. Memphis may be the only program in the country where a player can cement his legend in merely three games. (Ask James Wiseman.)
I recall thinking that night: Larry Finch clearly loves being Larry Finch. And why wouldn’t he? He loved his city, loved his alma mater, loved the basketball program he shaped more than any other man (before or since).
Devotion brings heartache, of course. The greatest Tiger of them all, Larry Finch, was dismissed in 1997 after 11 years as head coach. Following a series of debilitating strokes, the star of the 1973 Final Four Tigers — and one of this city’s great unifiers in the aftermath of Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination — died in 2011, not quite two months after his 60th birthday and almost precisely 20 years after Idie passed away. How do we cheer with tears in our eyes?
We cheer by remembering. I had my picture taken with Coach Finch on Halloween night in 1992 during a meet-and-greet with the Tiger team on the U of M campus. The longest line of autograph-seekers was at Hardaway’s table. But Finch “worked the room” as they say, making a large fieldhouse his personal greeting parlor. I recall thinking that night: Larry Finch clearly loves being Larry Finch. And why wouldn’t he? He loved his city, loved his alma mater, loved the basketball program he shaped more than any other man (before or since). A stranger took a picture of us when I managed to get close enough for a handshake. It’s blurry, but there’s nothing vague about Coach Finch’s gesture as he posed. Even with pen in hand, he held up his right index finger, the universal sign for Number One.
Larry Finch had been places by the time we crossed paths, but he wanted to make sure I knew we were heading toward new places, and together, arm in arm, attached by blue-and-gray heartstrings. Sure, I bring a reporter’s objective bent to stories on the Tigers’ latest game, win or lose. But I’m a Memphian, for crying out loud. I sweat. I bleed. I laugh and cry. The next time I stand next to Larry Finch, it will be his bronze statue in the picture. There will be sunshine, perhaps my wife (a U of M alum) in the picture with me this time. And I’ll raise my right index finger. For number 21 and Number One.
