I don t care what anyone says, I had a great time at the Isaac Hayes concert a few weeks ago. The whiners among you who wrote letters to the CA dissecting every possible imperfection can just stay home. And tonight s Live at the Garden concert at Memphis Botanic Garden should be equally great, as one of Memphis most beloved singers, Kallen Esperian, performs with the Memphis Symphony Orchestra.
Tired of looking at all that predictable Internet porn? Maybe you should visit a certain Memphis City Government site located at http://www.co.shelby.tn.us/cccamera/index.htm for some hot realtime camera action that is truly bizarre. There you will be able to watch in full, lifelike color the construction of the new downtown convention center. It s a $79 million blockbuster featuring a 2,000-seat performing arts center, a 35,000-square-foot exhibition hall, a 30,000-square-foot ballroom and, best of all, a 60-foot truck elevator fit for all your rooftop driving needs. We suspect that the acclaimed Mystery Train director Jim Jarmusch may be involved with this documentary project since we ve watched the construction picture for several days and have noticed no changes whatsoever.
So you don’t like the straight up trade of Jason Williams for Mike Bibby? Neither do I. You question whether the trade of Shareef Abdur-Rahim for Lorenzen Wright, Brevin Knight, Pau Gasol was worth it? So do I. Do you think that picking Shane Batter was a major coup in Memphis sports? I do as well. But you know what? Here’s a theory: Our opinions just don’t matter.
This is nothing new. The Babe went from Boston to New York and Shaquille O’Neal left Orlando for Los Angeles. I can’t imagine too many fans of Beantown or Magic City that are happy with those deals. The reality of professional sports is that players are mere commodities. They can be bought and paid by the pound.
The men doing the deals are sometimes the players themselves, yes. But mostly it’s the coaches, GM’s, and owners that wheel and deal like they’re trading baseball cards. This does make some sense. They know the players better than anyone. Even the most religious of fans don’t go to every workout, have every tape, give or watch every one-on-one practice session. The fans don’t have to deal with player attitudes or poor off-season work-out habits. And the fans also do not have access to the players’ frustrations of being under-paid, under-appreciated, or part of a team disinterested in winning.
And so fans of all teams must sweat each summer when no one is untouchable. In this year’s free-agency alone, names like Utah’s John Stockton or San Antonio’s David Robinson are up for grabs. Though they will likely stay where they are, the fans must still deal with the reality that their good thing isn’t necessarily a sure thing.
In some cases, it’s not even that. The Sacramento Kings became a powerhouse this year while its star, Chris Webber, finally realized some of his potential. And now, after that success, the fans of Sacramento basketball must watch as Webber decides if more high profile teams like New York, Orlando, and Houston can woo him over.
What will it be like in three years when Memphis’ own Shane Battier is on the market? How will the streets cry when he is, hypothetically, shipped over to the Clippers for yet another point guard of questionable worth? Didn’t you feel your shoulders bunch and your throat go dry? Did you give a helpless sage-like shrug that says, hey, what can you do? So did I.
Worse, a game played on the world’s stage — such as the NBA — is up to a world-wide scrutiny. Jump onto the myriad of sports web sites and you will find multiple critiques for every deal and every team. People scoff and scorn Grizzlies fans for the team move to Memphis, its draft day decisions and trades. They act as if Grizzlies fans were personally responsible for any of it, as if they — we — had the power to act.
But they don’t. That power lies with coaches and players, agents and owners. In the same way we must wait for rain, we must also wait for that one blockbuster trade that will turn Memphis’ team into a contender. When the rains fall, we rejoice. When the land is dry, we curse the powers that be.
But this is American sports and along with some of its frustrations comes its appeal. Since we can’t control the game, we certainly cannot predict the game. A sports fan’s lot in life is to wait and to hope — to arm-chair point-guard and to shake a collective fists at bad trades gone worse.
In some ways, this is no different from the rest of our life. We all face uncertainties from how to pay the bills to when our lives will end. Why then do we enjoy sports so much? It seems as if we would enjoy those things that we can control when we take a break from the real world. Then again, maybe it’s the acknowledgement of no control that makes all the difference. Like a roller-coaster ride, all you can do it sit back and enjoy it. The lack of control is a release that lets all the feelings — good and bad — flow through us in a way that could be called therapeutic.
Eh? Did the silly sports writer call free-agency and the draft therapeutic? Well, yeah, in the sense that it can be peaceful by going with the flow of events and accepting what happens as it happens. That’s some Zen talk for all you hopeless Westerns. And if you don’t think Zen is a good basketball tool, ask Lakers’ coach Phil Jackson who just earned championship ring number eight. He knows as well as anyone that it’s easier to go downstream than up.
So as we all watch with some trepidation this coming season unfold, most likely in a way that is very bad in terms of wins and losses, remember that there’s nothing you can do about it so you might as well just sit back and enjoy it. You’ll have more fun and you won’t have a heart-attack at the age of 32. Though you will feel the sweet pain of a favorite team making moves for the worse or a favorite player being benched, at the very least you will be able to accept it the way it is. That’s the theory, at least.
Tonight s two big pre-July 4th parties are the Red, White and Blues Celebration at Tom Lee Park on the river, with live music, an antique car show, and fireworks, and the WMC Stations Star Spangled Celebration at Shelby Farms, with live music, wrestling, and fireworks.
Vacant (Facing the Tower) , a joint effort between Project: Motion and Loop Productions, played to a full house Saturday night. The theater was so full, in fact, that patrons crowded together, curling up on the stairs and squatting near the stage. At the showÕs start, the lights came up to reveal the entire cast quietly holding eggs. One dancer violently threw her egg to the ground, strongly suggesting we were in for an evening of angry, feminist propaganda. It was a fantastic sleight of hand by choreographer Louisa Koeppel as nothing could have been further from the truth. The piece ended with the exact same image, only the eggs had been replaced with white rubber balls which, much to the audienceÕs surprise, bounced into the crowd en masse. This kind of whimsy infused an otherwise predictable meditation on the nature of beauty with liberating lightness. 
Using music ranging from recordings of Johnny Rotten to a live a cappella version of the gospel standard ÒIÕll Fly Away,Ó Vacant (Facing the Tower) told the story of a nightingale that fell asleep and became entangled in vines. After freeing herself the terrified bird never allowed herself to sleep again. Instead she kept awake by singing through the night. Koeppel, a dancer who, when she errs, tends to err on the side of beauty, made a star turn as the besieged nightingale. With the innocence of a child performing a magic show for doting parents, she flapped her wings and spun gracefully about the set, while the chorus questioned our collective ideas about what it means to be beautiful. The set, designed by Su Harruff, was a dazzling copper cage.
Some of That Jazz
Sadly enough, Warren LeightÕs award-winning play Sideman, a show deserving a much longer run, closed this past weekend at Playhouse on the Square. The show chronicles the lives of four jazz players after Elvis Presley arrived on the scene with his rock-and-roll song-bag and robbed them all of their livelihood. But Sideman is not about the decline of jazz. Sideman is a tragedy along the lines of Arthur MillerÕs Death of a Salesman. It is a tragedy of obscurity and neglect about a musician, who, obsessed with his music to the exclusion of all else, somnambulates through life leaving random bits of useless beauty here and there along the way.
Michael Detroit, in his strongest performance to date, was an ideal choice for Gene Glimmer, a trumpet player of tremendous sensitivity and total obliviousness. He blunders through his characterÕs rocky life unaware that his family is disintegrating. Guy Olivieri was equally effective as the narrator, Clifford Glimmer, and captured both the humor and frustration of a child forced by circumstance to raise his own parents. Lisa McCormick and Carla McDonald turned in a pair of noteworthy performances as, respectively, CliffordÕs alcoholic wife and a sassy-but-wise waitress who canÕt say no. Jonathon Lamer, Kyle W. Barnette, and Jason Craig brought to life a trio of brass players caught up in the midnight world of booze, dope, and groove. Craig, a performer who too easily sails over the top, was the portrait of restraint this time around, and his depiction of a gentle, world-wise junky was, without doubt, the eveningÕs high point.
Robots and Rhyme
The single most maddening thing about Memphis theater is its sick determination to play by the rules at every level. Generally speaking, and with a handful of notable exceptions, local fringe groups make low-budget versions of what could easily be main-stage productions. Where are the angry artists? Where are the eager youngsters determined to inform, enlighten, and entertain us in ways we have not yet imagined? Where is the spirit of reckless innovation that a youthful Tennessee Williams once described as Òsomething wildÓ? IÕll tell you where it is. ItÕs buried somewhere in the FlyerÕs After Dark listings. ItÕs masquerading as a band called AUTOMUSIC.
Taking their musical cues from German groups like Kraftwerk, the band responsible for songs like ÒPocket CalculatorÓ and ÒAutobahn,Ó AUTOMUSIC wants to make us all aware of our robot nature. They want us to see that all humans are robots but not all robots are human. Their immensely fun and eminently portable show is the most purely theatrical and visually exciting performance you are likely to encounter this side of Berlin, and if you donÕt go see them you have only yourself to blame.
Except for some occasional synthesizer pecking, all of AUTOMUSICÕs music is prerecorded on video, and the digital sound is fantastic. Wonderful animations, with imagery that would make any Soviet propagandist worth his salt mine burst with pride, enhance this trioÕs brilliantly stiff and mathematically precise choreography. They don old-fashioned hardhats, brandish tools, and chant, ÒMy hammer goes tink, tink, tink when I work, my hammer goes tink tink tink.Ó That particular song, appropriately titled ÒThe Industrial Worksong,Ó conjures images of old-school agitprop and concludes, ÒIf you have a hammer and you work very hard you will get very far like me, youÕll help to make a productive state and a strong economy.Ó And how can anyone resist songs like ÒEverything Is For the Baby,Ó where the group declares, ÒWhat a stupid stupid baby it cannot do math at all its politics do not impress me inane, banal, obtuse babyÓ?
AUTOMUSIC may think they are just a band, but allow me to be the first critic to rave theyÕre the best theater in town.
Remembering Rexall
Dear Vance: I was enjoying dinner at Houston’s Restaurant on Poplar, and the manager wondered what had been there originally. He thought it was a lumber yard. Maybe you can get a free dinner if you bring in the answer to the manager. — K.P., Memphis.
Dear K.P.: Oh, I’ve been tempted before with offers like these — back massages, complimentary dinners, free BMW roadsters — in exchange for my valuable services, but usually turn them down, because my high sense of journalistic ethics (two words rarely mentioned in connection with this column) forbid the acceptance of bribes. Or at least that’s what the publisher wants me to say. Besides, your own query was interesting enough — to me, anyway — that I decided I would try to solve it for free. And so I did.
The manager is wrong about the lumberyard, but not by much. White Station Supply Company, as it was called in the late 1950s and early 1960s, actually stood next door, just about where the parking lot is located today between Houston’s and Wild Oats. No, the building that houses Houston’s was originally built as a drugstore, the White Station Pharmacy Number 1, which opened in that building in 1960.
That whole area was quite different many years ago, as you might imagine. It was actually known as White — or more accurately, White’s — Station, after the little train station that once stood at Poplar and Mendenhall. (The street known today as White Station was built later, several blocks to the east.) Even as late as the 1950s, Poplar was a two-lane road, and Mendenhall actually dead-ended on the north side of Poplar.
Anyway, in the early 1950s, a cluster of little mom-and-pop businesses stood at the northeast corner of Poplar and Mendenhall, including the Town & Country Barber Shop, Modern Shoe Rebuilders, Hamkirk’s Drive-In Grocery, Hamilton’s Variety Store, Brouse Drugstore, and a few others.
In the late 1950s, a fellow by the name of Herbert Peek Jr. bought the old Brouse drug store, and when Poplar was widened and those little businesses had to vamoose, he and some business partners formed a corporation called the 6 Ds (there were two doctors, two dentists, and two druggists, you see) and built a two-story physicians building adjoining the White Station Pharmacy, which was a Rexall Drugs franchise.
Herbert and his wife, Marie, are now retired and living in East Memphis, and they remember when the new store opened. “We moved everything to the new place in one night,” says Herbert. “We got six big Memphis State football players, and they hauled everything over there, and we were ready for business at 7:30 the next morning.”
The Peeks couldn’t find any interior photos of that particular store, but they furnished some great shots of White Station Pharmacy Number 2, an almost identical facility that once stood on Park Avenue (where Memphis Pizza Cafe is today). Besides a great old-fashioned soda fountain offering jumbo sodas for 19 cents and chocolate sundaes for 20 cents, the drugstore was stocked with all sorts of neat stuff: Ace combs, Pro toothbrushes, Stag lip aid, official “Robin Hood” hats, Rit tints and dyes, Mennen “lather shave,” Casco heating pads, and Nelson color hair rinse, along with housewares, candy, cosmetics, and dog collars. Why, there were even boxes of something called “Kuddle Kitty” and I don’t really want to know what that is.
“There are still some Rexall products that have never been duplicated,” says Marie.
“Thru Linament was the best thing in the world for sore muscles.”
With all that merchandise, the Peeks did a bang-up business, and even had one or two special customers. “One day Elvis came in and bought some Royal Crown hair grease,” remembers Herbert. “I didn’t even look up, but the girl behind the counter just about had a fit!”
The Peeks sold the property in 1981. The physicians building came down, and Houston’s renovated and enlarged the old drugstore. The restaurant opened in 1983. “We go in there,” says Herbert, “and look around and think, now here’s where the soda fountain was, and there’s where we filled prescriptions.”
It must be a strange experience. Perhaps I’ll find out myself when I travel there to receive my free dinner.
Introducing Rufus
Dear Vance: Please tell me why there is a big stuffed gorilla standing in front of that vacuum-cleaner shop on Madison. I just don’t get that. — F.M., Memphis.
Dear F.M.: Well, you’d “get it” if you were a vacuum-cleaner shop — or any other business, for that matter — and wanted some way to make people remember you. “It’s kind of a landmark,” explains John Hardin, manager of Tri-State Vacuum. “People come in from out of town and it helps them find the place — you know, the one with the gorilla out front.”
Hardin told me that the gorilla was the idea of the shop’s former owner, a fellow named Robert Hogwood.
“It’s just something he did when he bought the place,” says Hardin, and it’s been standing in front of 1583 Madison for almost 40 years now.
The old gorilla even has a name. They call him Rufus, and they do bring him in every night, in case you were wondering how he spends his evenings.
When I strolled over to Tri-State one morning to take a better look at Rufus, I made a surprising discovery. Inside the store, half hidden behind boxes of Eureka vacuums and Hoover uprights, stood a second gorilla, apparently the mate to the first, dressed in a fetching gingham dress and straw hat.
Like the gorilla outside, this one is no longer in operating condition. “At one time Rufus used to work — bend and raise his arms a bit,” says Hardin, “but he’s pretty much worn out now.” Some of my co-workers, I know, say the same things about me.
Corky Question
Dear Vance: Who the heck is Corky, anyway? — F.D., Memphis.
Dear F.D.: Well, let’s see. If I remember correctly, Corky Sherwood was that spunky reporter on the old Murphy Brown television series. And Corky St. Clair, played by Christopher Guest, was the small-town drama teacher determined to put on the play in that rather droll movie Waiting for Guffman. And . . . oh, you probably mean the Corky of Corky’s Barbecue.
Don Pelts, founder of that fine establishment on Poplar, let me in on a little secret. He tells me that his favorite movie was Porky’s, and very few people would admit that. Still, to each his own, as I say. When, in 1984, Pelts decided to open his own barbecue joint, he started to call it Porky’s but discovered — as you might imagine — that clever name was already taken, and besides, there was always the risk of a tiresome lawsuit from that pesky Porky Pig fellow in all those Warner Bros. cartoons. So he put his thinking cap on, changed just one letter, and came up with Corky’s.
[“Ask Vance” appears every month in Memphis magazine. Got a question for Vance? Send it to “Ask Vance” at Memphis magazine, P.O. Box 1738, Memphis, TN 38101, or e-mail him at askvance@memphismagazine.com]
Billy Gibson at the Center for Southern Folklore.
“The greater the pain, the greater the gain.”
— Early Christian writer Ignatius of Antioch
So Nike, Gatorade, the NFL, and ESPN didn’t invent all the fitness and sports mottos after all. Did the ancients, perhaps, also feel the burn? Go the extra mile to Carthage or Pompeii? Raise their games to the next level? Get buff? Eat right for health? Go on crash diets? Did Ignatius of Antioch have rippled abs and buns of steel?
Beats me. I got that quote (actually pleion kopos, polu kerdos) out of a book by a serious scholar, Garry Wills. What I do know is that our current obsession with physical fitness and professional sports is, well, ridiculous.
Fact: Convicts now have spinning machines. It’s a fitness contraption, not a way to make a garment.
Fact: Kids can now buy a really cool candy bar laced with muscle-building creatine.
Fact: Personal trainers in Memphis make as much as $100 an hour.
Fact: The NBA wants Memphis to spend $250 million for a new arena.
What America needs at times like this is another H.L. Mencken, the great cynic and newspaperman who was famously pear-shaped, enormously fond of beer and cigars, and proud of it.
In his book Heathen Days, Mencken wrote about his youthful experiences at the Baltimore Y.M.C.A.:
“All that the Y.M.C.A.’s horse and rings really accomplished was to fill me with an ineradicable distaste, not only for Christian endeavor in all its forms, but also for every variety of calisthenics, so that I still be-grudge the trifling exertion needed to climb in and out of a bathtub, and hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense. If I had my way no man guilty of golf would be eligible to any office of trust or profit under the United States, and all female athletes would be shipped to the white-slave corrals of the Argentine.”
Of course we now have a president, George W. Bush, who once owned the professional baseball team that paid $252 million for a single player this year and whose great-grandfather, George Herbert Walker, was one of the founding fathers of golf and namesake of the Walker Cup. Mencken would love it.
Mencken’s greatest decade as a critic and newspaperman, the Roaring Twenties, was also the first Golden Age of Sport, the decade of Bobby Jones, Jack Dempsey, and Babe Ruth. The most popular spectator sport of that era was baseball.
No sport has come farther from its humble past as an innocent children’s game and the pastime of the American masses than baseball. In his book about leadership, Certain Trumpets, Wills retells the story of Carl Stotz, the founder of Little League baseball. In a strange way, Stotz was Mencken’s antinomian counterpart even though Stotz loved sport and was anything but an intellectual.
In old photographs, Stotz looks the quintessential Everyman of what Tom Brokaw has called The Greatest Generation — wiry, dark-eyed, wearing a plain white T-shirt tucked into what appear to be wrinkled pin-striped dress pants, with dark socks and leather street shoes. He is never wearing a baseball uniform. The game, he firmly believed, was for kids, not grown-ups, and he resisted all attempts to make it anything more than that. It was a game, for crying out loud, and the important thing was that every kid should play. Grown-ups would get their reward by being spectators or volunteer coaches, and the whole community would be better for it.
When Stotz founded Little League in Pennsylvania in 1938, America was still coming out of the Depression, and 56 companies turned him down when he asked them to put up $30 to sponsor a team. After Little League got going, Stotz was insistent that every boy get a chance to play in the field and that teams be more or less equal in ability. He even set up a point system to keep teams from recruiting too many stars, a forerunner to the salary cap now commonplace in major-league sports.
Stotz agreed to be the first Little League commissioner, but he was always uneasy with commercialization and anything that threatened Little League’s pristine foundation and grassroots organization. He re-signed in protest over commercial and competitive pressures in 1955, in the middle of baseball’s golden decade, when the immortal centerfield triumvirate of Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, and Duke Snider were in their prime. That same year he declined to go on the hit TV show This Is Your Life because it featured cigarette commercials. Half a century later, Little League lives on, while its founder is largely forgotten.
As Wills says, the commercialization of Little League, which now has its own televised World Series, was probably inevitable.
“If kids imitate the major leagues, they come to resemble the major leagues, in bad ways as well as good,” he writes.
When Stotz died in 1992 (he was 82), America had certainly shown him a thing or two about the error of his ways. Cities like Memphis learned that responsibility and leadership in athletics are properly vested not in the common herd but in something called a Sports Authority, an appointed agency whose very name connotes its wisdom and majesty. Its key members come mainly from the aristocracy and meet with moguls and obedient politicians over lunch at the country club. The focus of their dealings is never anything so trivial as children and participatory sports; it is professional teams and athletes like the NBA’s Jason Williams, famous for reminding kids that a good jump shot beats a good book any day.
The driving principle in sport today, used to justify anything from $100 million contracts to $250 million arenas to $10 autographs (a bargain, to be sure) is “that’s what the market will bear.”
Only a cynic like Mencken would point out that “the market” today is heavily infused with public subsidies and money-losing franchises. The market, it appears, won’t bear so much after all. The NBA all-star game in February? All-time television ratings low, down 17 percent from 2000, the previous all-time low. Baseball’s All-Star game and World Series? The lowest ratings ever. The Wall Street Journal has reported a collapse in ticket prices to pro sports events that is “enough to send a chill down the spine of the sports industry.” A newsletter called The Elliott Wave Theorist has been heralding a crash in pro sports for years, and notes that government is “the ultimate crowd, always acting on the last trend, the one that is already over” in pursuit of major-league status “that is on the cusp of its biggest devaluation in history.”
In the midst of wretched excess, it is pleasant to remember men such as Mencken and Stotz from time to time. Their crackpot notions about fitness and sports are as nostalgic as reruns of Andy Griffith, a glimpse of a two-toned Edsel, or a visit to the Pink Palace Museum. Mencken died in 1956, eight years after suffering a stroke, a naysayer to the end. The consequence of all those beery nights at the Hofbrau Haus and those dreadful cigars, no doubt. Stotz, the mope, was sitting on a gold mine of commercial possibilities and he walked away!
As for St. Ignatius of Antioch, The Catholic Encyclopedia says he was “an athlete for Christ,” fearless and steadfast, and a wordsmith ahead of his time to boot. He was martyred around 100 A.D., taken to Rome in chains, “there to become the food of wild beasts and a spectacle for the people.”
Athlete indeed.
[This story was originally published in the June issue of Memphis magazine.]
Little Rock correspondent Peggy Harris recently reported that Star Wars-type satellite images helped the U.S. Attorney s office win close to $300,000 in a case against a trio of Arkansas farmers. The farmers falsely claimed their crops had been destroyed by cold weather, but data gathered by satellites proved that the fields had never been planted. Similar Star Trek-type technology may help jealous girlfriends find out if their boyfriends are cheating and help feuding families determine who didn t fill the ice tray.
Today s big show is a free Overton Park Shell Concert, featuring veteran Memphis musicians Adam 12, Lucero, Jim Dickinson, and the North Mississippi Allstars; starts at 2 p.m. In other music, The Memphis Jazz Orchestra is at Alfred s on Beale; Little Jimmy King is just down the street at B.B. King s; Memphis jazz legend Kirk Whalum is at the New Daisy with Wayman Tisdale; there s live jazz with Little Albert at Melange this afternoon; and Di Anne Price & Her Boyfriends are at Huey s Midtown this afternoon, followed by The Gamble Brothers tonight.