Author: Frank Murtaugh

GRAB YOUR SHOULDER PADS

Ahhh . . . September in the Mid-South. The temperature drops into the low 90s, kids hither and yon return to the classroom, and the spit-flying collision of helmets and shoulder pads can mean only one thing. Let’s play some football! (Word is, there were some college games that counted last month. I can no more pay attention to football in August than I can fat, bearded men wearing red suits in April. In the name of Knute Rockne, let these big men have a summer!)

Am I the only one who recognizes the seismic shift in expectations of Memphis Tiger football this season? An established (though young) quarterback in place. An offense with a higher performance ceiling than the defense. And a coach who has claimed his team will pass first and run, well, later. Is this the University of Memphis or the University of Florida? I’ll tell you one thing: I can’t wait to see them play.

Based on last Saturday’s drubbing of Murray State Ñ be they a I-AA opponent or not Ñ it’s going to be an intriguing season at the Liberty Bowl. The 52-6 victory was the program’s first season-opening win since 1993 and the most lopsided Tiger triumph in 33 years. Here are a few questions for the months ahead, based on the Tigers’ first 60 minutes.

DESTINATION UNKNOWN

Jim Rout won’t say yet where he’s going, but he’s happy to talk about where he’s been in 30 years of county government.

Rout leaves office at the end of August, having completed two terms as mayor of Shelby County plus stints as a county commissioner and county coroner.

“I don’t anticipate being on the ballot again,” said Rout, who turned 60 in June. He’s headed for a job in the private sector but doesn’t want to disclose his plans until the end of this week. He announced his retirement last year. In an informal meeting with Flyer reporters this spring, he said his „ at that time „prospective new employer was not anyone or anything that would pose a potential conflict to him as mayor.

Rout came to the mayor’s office in 1994 as a commissioner known for happily immersing himself in the details of county government. He has spent most of the last two years, however, dealing with former corporate CEOs Pitt Hyde and Ron Terry on the NBA arena and Shelby Farms.

Friends say the long hours have taken a toll on him, and Rout doesn’t disagree.

“No question, it has been a tougher period,” he said. “When you work as long as we all did on the arena or as long as Ron Terry and I did for almost two years only to see [the Shelby Farms proposal] go down the tubes, sure, it is not as much fun. It’s always more fun when you first start. That’s why you see a lot of entrepreneurs move on after four or five years.”

The failure of the Shelby Farms proposal, which Rout thinks will resurface next year, was the low point of his mayoral career, he said. He blamed “bad timing,” although the proposed $20 million infusion of private money into the park failed to catch fire at the grassroots level, allowing several commissioners to safely change their yeas to nays.

The highlight is no surprise either.

“Less than two years ago, no one would have thought we would have an NBA team, a new arena under construction, and Jerry West living here,” said Rout. Controversy be damned, “you’ve either gotta be big-league or bush-league.”

The enthusiasm of Rout, a Pyramid opponent, for the publicly funded arena has to run a close second to Gov. Don Sundquist’s support of a state income tax when some diehard Republicans talk about betrayals. But where Sundquist foundered, Rout succeeded, with the help of Hyde and Memphis mayor Willie Herenton as well as the commission and city council.

Rout and Herenton had “a little brouhaha” over toy towns in Rout’s first term, but “we’ve gotten in rhythm” in the last few years. Yes, and Memphis has been having a little humidity lately. The conflict highlighted all of the fundamental problems with split government, suburban versus urban interests, and school funding which are still around five years later, despite the efforts of two special committees to resolve them. There was no open warfare, but there was no resolution either. Rout predicts there will be single-source funding for schools within the next two years. You might want to take some of that action if you run into him.

Rout and his family know firsthand the suburban growth that is putting pressure on politicians to come up with something. They moved from Parkway Village and Fox Meadows to the Richwood subdivision in southeast Shelby County 13 years ago when it was still uncrowded, even rural in places. Today, it is surrounded by new schools and homes, and by the end of this year, it is supposed to be annexed by the city of Memphis.

“Sprawl is a fact of life,” he said. “We probably didn’t do as well as we should have to attach appropriate fees or requirements on new development as it applies to schools. This is America, and people are going to live where they want to live. Maybe we need to tweak what we require to do development there.”

Rout won his first election in 1972 (as coroner), but he traces his political involvement to 1967, when he helped organize his Parkway Village neighborhood in opposition to a plan to build 2,400 apartments on a site that would become the Mall of Memphis instead. He sold memberships to the upstart Cottonwood Civic Club for $3 by going door to door. When they needed a president, somebody said, “Jim, you’ve been real active. You run for it.”

In a somewhat similar way, that’s what happened again in 1994 when good old Jim got the nod from the Republicans by a two-to-one margin to run for mayor, then prevailed in a six-candidate free-for-all general election. Democrats got their act together after that and started having primaries themselves. But then Republicans like Rout and Sundquist started occasionally acting like Democrats and supporting new taxes and public subsidies to pro-sports teams, and the lines blurred again. Mayor-elect A C Wharton, a Democrat, comes into office by the same three-to-two margin as Rout did in 1994.

“It’s been good. I’ve had a great run,” Rout said. “I don’t mean it as a reflection on anyone else, but there will never be, at least for a long time, a campaign like 1994, when we were able to win the primary two-to-one and the general 60-40 against six opponents.”

At least not for Shelby County Republicans.

BACK ON THE HILL

Finding it hard to root for baseball players these days, what with all the discussion of steroids and strikes? Well, I’ve got a diamond in the rough for you. Andy Benes is a St. Louis Cardinal pitcher with more than 150 wins but with more recent heartache than any opera would dare present. The big righthander — who turned 35 last Tuesday — suffered a career implosion halfway through the 2001 season when he essentially became a batting-practice pitcher . . . for Cardinal opponents. His ERA ballooned to 7.38 and St. Louis manager Tony LaRussa shut him down for the last two months of the season as his club roared toward the playoffs.

Benes appeared to have regained an edge last spring and earned a spot in the St. Louis rotation as the season opened in April. But once the lights were turned on, he reverted to his 2001 form, shelled for 12 earned runs in only 10 innings pitched before announcing his intention to retire (due ostensibly to an arthritic right knee). Benes was a key player in this space several weeks ago as I examined “The Curse of Ol’ Diz,” the inexplicable history of woes and ailments suffered by St. Louis pitchers, from Dizzy Dean to Rick Ankiel. (Ace Matt Morris is on the disabled list now, having strained a hamstring running out a ground ball, for crying out loud.) And that was before June 22nd, when the leader of the Cardinal staff, Darryl Kile, was found dead in a Chicago hotel room. As the fates would so randomly have it, that dark weekend

was almost precisely when Andy Benes found his pitching life.

The day after Kile’s death, Benes took the mound for the Redbirds here in Memphis. With his heart in Chicago — and Kile’s number 57 on his back — Benes pitched four solid innings in sweltering heat against the Tucson Sidewinders. Right after that Sunday afternoon game, Benes drove up I-55 to join his Cardinal teammates in time for Kile’s memorial service at Busch Stadium June 26th. He rejoined the Redbirds for two more starts — including a win over brother Alan and the Iowa Cubs on July 3rd — before finally being promoted to St. Louis when LaRussa and pitching coach Dave Duncan simply ran out of arms.

It should be remembered that there was a time Andy Benes was the lead dog in the Cardinal rotation. He won 18 games for the 1996 division champions, another 10 in ‘97. When contract negotiations exceeded a signing deadline before the 1998 season, Benes was forced out of town. After two years in Arizona, though, he happily re signed with St. Louis, claiming it had felt like home all along. He was the only Cardinal hurler to hold his own in the 2000 National League Championship Series, beating the Mets in Game 3 of a series St. Louis would drop in five games.

Beyond his accomplishments on the mound, Benes is by all accounts one of the truly good guys in professional sports. He’s active in the St. Louis community, an articulate, willing interview, and a guy who never made excuses, even when he was doing a rather nice bobblehead imitation in following the flight of countless gopher balls. Which makes his comeback all the more pleasing to fans soured on the spoiled-rotten culture of Major League Baseball.

Benes opened eyes August 4th, when he held the world-beating Atlanta Braves to one run over seven innings. He won three games over the next three weeks, including seven innings of shutout ball against Pittsburgh the day before his birthday. LaRussa has gone so far as to say the Cardinals would not be a first-place team without one Andrew Charles Benes. And to think four months ago he was being fitted for a gold watch.

Considering Kile’s tragic fate, it’s inappropriate and borderline offensive to speak of Benes as a baseball Lazarus as some scribes have. He has merely found a way to pitch — successfully, and differently — instead of calling it quits. He has put together the biggest singLe-season turnaround in recent Cardinal history, and one would have to presume Darryl Kile is part of his inspiration. Andy Benes is a 6’6”, 245-pound reminder that nice guys don’t finish last after all. They just finish what they started.

Sometimes the world of sports takes you for a ride . . . and sometimes it’s the other way around. Over 16 recent days, I attended two weddings, a Hall of Fame induction ceremony, walked on the rink where the Miracle

On Ice took place, said a gloomy goodbye to two more St. Louis Cardinals (what a year!), and survived a week without Sports Illustrated. All stretch required was eight plane rides, two ferry trips across Lake Champlain, and several miles of driving in rural Vermont and upstate New York. Not bad for a sports nut badly in need of a grip on what really counts in life.

Twenty thousand baseball fans in Cooperstown, New York, to honor your boyhood hero seems like an emotional pinnacle. Until, that is, you see your one and only sister escorted down an aisle by your dad . . . and she’s dressed in white. omeday I’ll remind Liz that she married the most wonderful Philadelphia Phillies fan on the planet almost two weeks to the day after Ozzie Smith entered the Baseball Hall of Fame (along with, incidentally, Phillies broadcaster Harry Kalas). When I do, I’m sure her answer will be the same as it would have been at the end of that aisle? Hall of Who??

As if a central-Vermont chapel isn’t wedding enough for one person, I hopped the Charlotte Ferry (the morning after my sister’s big day) on my way to Lake Placid, New York, as my best man\ (of eight years ago, mind you) tied the knot a few two-irons from the arena where the last great amateur sports moment — ever — took place on February 22, 1980. That of course, was the date when miracles were indeed made believable, when he U.S. Olympic hockey team, behind captain Mike Eruzione and goalie Jim\ Craig, beat the might Soviet Union and reminded the world that

Cinderella was born, raised, retired, and bronzed as a Yank. I managed an unauthorized stroll on the ice surface, goose bumps the size of corn kernels. Yet by the time I left the wedding reception that evening — having caught up with more high school mates than I’ve seen in any one

place in years — the rink shuffle was merely the second biggest highlight of the day.

Games played on as I traipsed across the northeast. The Cardinals suffered their longest losing streak of the season — seven games — and I almost felt rotten. But then I learned Darrell Porter — the troubled catcher who earned MVP honors for the 1982 world champion Cardinals — was found dead in a Kansas City park. With cocaine in his blood. I’m not sure if the latter knowledge makes his premature death more understandable, or just more terribly sad.

Barry Bonds hit his 600th home run while I was a time zone away from Memphis. Say what you will about his personality . . . Bonds is the greatest player of the last 30 years. The only real question is, who’s second? (My vote: Johnny Bench.) Wouldn’t you love to see the player Bonds would have been had he been born with Enos Slaughter’s fire? (If there is footage of Barry Bonds going from first to home on a double —

as Slaughter so famously did to win the 1946 World Series — I want to see it.) Cardinal Nation was left to grieve one more (last? please??) time August 12th when the Hall of Fame outfielder known as “Country” died at 86. Slaughter’s death didn’t match the headlines of Ted Williams’ passing, and that’s understandable. But as more and more fans yearn for the days of “old school” baseball, Slaughter’s position in the

sport’s history should be solidified.

It’s nice to be back in Memphis. (How about that race in the PCL East?!) Back to a more rhythmic pace and a more steady take on what’s happening in sports. My 16 days of travel sure were a fun reminder, though, that while we’re enjoying the games we love, cheering the heroes we adore . . . real life is happening all around us. And quite honestly, there’s nothing more exciting.

How is investing like whipping up a batch of lasagna or removing a bunion?

It isn’t, of course, except in the inscrutable logic of The Commercial Appeal.

Every Sunday for several years, the newspaper has run a column on mutual funds by Frank A. Jones on the front of its Money & Business section. Jones is not a reporter for the CA or any news syndicate. He is a financial adviser for Memphis-based Summit Asset Management.

It’s a great gig for Jones, whose smiling, grandfatherly visage runs with the column each week. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands of financial advisers and firms in Memphis, but only Jones gets a regular column in the only Sunday newspaper in Memphis, with a circulation that dwarfs every other day of the week. It gets good display, too. By the time you debone the Sunday paper, there are four news sections. The column takes up roughly a quarter of a page of one of them. An ad that size would cost roughly $4,000 each week, based on published CA ad rates.

I know first-hand how valuable advertising space is. This newspaper depends on it. And for five years I wrote a column called Memphis Money for its sister publication, Memphis magazine. Every year at least one financial adviser would call me and suggest, subtly or otherwise, that he supplement or replace my scribbling with some professional expertise for our well-to-do audience. We always said no thanks; there are lots of things we don t know as much about as the experts but we’re reporters and we do our best and that’s how it is.

That’s generally the philosophy of the CA, too. It doesn’t let U of M football coaches write a weekly sports column or politicians write weekly political columns or corporate flacks write the business pages or broadcasters write the television column. Reporters do that. Even the Pets column is written by a reporter, not a veterinarian.

But for some reason it lumps investing in with collecting stamps and comics, cooking, home decorating, and medical advice. Eat your vegetables, exercise regularly, don t overcook pasta, be careful how you match those bold paint colors, and buy mutual funds. These are the verities of our time. Who could doubt any of them?

I have never met Frank Jones and am not suggesting he has done anything wrong in his column. You pays your money and you takes your choice. I have been a faithful reader of the column since the day it began. But there is a fundamental difference between reporters and financial advisers. The reporter’s creed is skepticism: if your mother says she loves you, check it out. The financial adviser s creed is salesmanship and belief.

Rogue companies are getting the blame for the stock market crash, but it wasn t rogue companies that drove the Dow to 12,000 three years ago. It was the investing public’s and the media’s willingness to embrace the gospel of mutual funds as if it was no more controversial or dangerous than a casserole recipe or a bunion treatment.

The gospel usually comes in a package of platitudes and “well, duh” advice. Jones’ most recent column on paying for college is typical. Plan ahead. Don’t panic. Convert stocks to cash when it comes time to pay tuition (as if bursars would take anything else).

Then the pitch comes.

“Progessively shift your allocation from equity funds to stable value assets like bond funds.” Stable? Some bond funds — and we’re not talking junk bonds — have lost 20 percent in a year. The unit asset value goes up or down with fluctuations in interest rates and, sometimes, defaults or the threat of them. A bond fund, unlike an individual bond, never matures so your gain or loss depends on when you buy and sell.

“Try to avoid selling equities at depressed prices.” Don t we wish we could. So was WorldCom depressed at $40? After all, it had been $60 a few months earlier. Or was it depressed at $20? Or at $2, where a celebrated Wall Street analyst and media star was still recommending it?

But the cornerstone of the mutual funds industry is this: Over time, stocks will outperform bonds because they always have. The favorite “leave behind” of mutual fund salesmen is a cardboard “asset calculator” that shows how investments grow over time. In the go-go Nineties, the rate table was rarely lower than 7 percent and sometimes as high as 15 percent a year! The asset calculator never showed what happens to investments when they decline 20-30 percent a year, as many leading mutual funds have for the last three years. The Nasdaq composite, once over 5000, stands at 1,200 this week. An investor who put $10,000 into the Nasdaq in 1999 would have about $2,400 today. If the index rises 7 percent a year every year from now on, the investor will break even in 2024.

Stocks did outperform bonds over the last century, but that was because of the bull market from 1982 to 1999. The comparison doesn t look so good if you pop the bubble and use as your ending year 1982, when the Dow was 777, or even 1994, when it was 3,900.

Such are the facts. I apologize for the indecency of printing them. Check the numbers and my math if you like. And remember, always consult a professional financial adviser before investing.

THE CASE FOR SO

From the St. Louis Arch to the gates of Graceland, a lot of Cardinal baseball fans must be scratching their heads these days over Memphis Redbird outfielder So Taguchi. The former Gold Glove outfielder with the Orix Blue Wave of Japan’s Pacific League was signed to a much-hyped three year contract last January that pays him $1 million a year.

With seven figures on his contract, Cardinal fans had to presume this was at least a baby-step in the same direction Seattle took when they lured all-world Ichiro Suzuki (a former teammate of Taguchi’s) to the Pacific northwest. While a million beans may be pocket change to Sammy and A-Rod, it’s not minor-league compensation.

Alas, four months into his first season in the western hemisphere, Taguchi has played all of four games for the Cardinals, with four at bats and nary a base hit. He’s been an everyday outfielder for our Redbirds, though his batting average has dipped below .250 for most of the season, he hasn’t shown much power, and hasn’t been on base enough to make his speed a real asset for Gaylen Pitts’ club. So Cardinal Nation is asking: What in the name of Sadaharu Oh did St. Louis brass see in this guy? And what about that million-dollar price tag?

First and foremost, Cardinal (and Redbird) fans need to cut the 32-year-old “rookie” some slack. The day he first put on a Memphis jersey, Taguchi had a pair of enormously high (and unfair) standards by which he’d be measured. The first is Ichiro, either the best or worst thing that has ever happened to Japanese professional baseball. In 2001, the cannon-armed speed demon became the first player in 26 years to earn both Rookie of the Year and MVP honors. To expect the same from a player whose career average over 10 years in Japan was .277 is irrational.

The second lofty standard is the Jackie Robinson effect. From Hank Greenberg, to Robinson himself, to Fernando Valenzuela, baseball fans have come to expect players in a particular cultural vanguard to exceed normal standards of achievement. As a measure of how unbalanced this perspective can be, the fact is Greenberg was not the first Jew to play major league baseball, nor Valenzuela the first Mexican. They were the first stars to carry their respective cultural flags into the national pastime, so history has placed them in the same category Robinson very much earned. Taguchi is the first Japanese player in 110 years of Cardinal baseball, which is meaningful in itself. But as with every “investment” in a professional athlete, there’s no performance guarantee.

As you’re disecting Taguchi’s disappointing offensive numbers, check the rest of the Memphis stat sheet. You’ll see players like Jon Nunnally,

Warren Morris, and Chad Meyers — each with a few big-league notches on his belt — haven’t exactly torn the cover off the ball in Pacific Coast League play. Despite his struggles, Taguchi has played a solid centerfield and, best of all, hustles out of the batter’s box regardless of what kind of contact he’s made. On top of that, he can actually be seen smiling now and then.

Which brings us to the reason So Taguchi remains worth rooting for, and remains a sound investment for the Cardinals. The easy approach for Taguchi would have been to add a clause to his contract that stipulated if he did not make the Cardinal roster by a certain date, the contract was void and he could return to Japan and pick up where he left off with the Blue Wave. (This was the clause that had Gerald Williams in and out

of Memphis quicker than spring.) Instead, Taguchi chose to fight the

good fight and try and earn a roster spot, just as countless other

ballplayers in 30 major league farm systems are doing this summer. He

asked no special favor, and has yet to display the kind of sulking all

but expected these days from players on the cusp of reaching The Show.

So Taguchi is no Ichiro. He’s certainly no Jackie Robinson. And despite

wearing number 6, he’s still not in the same baseball hemisphere as Stan

Musial. But he’s a fighter, and a noble one at that. And wearing a

baseball uniform. Perhaps a pioneer after all.