Tag: Hall of Fame

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Sports Tiger Blue

Penny Hardaway: Hall of Famer?

(Credit: U of M Athletics)

The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Pro Football Hall of Fame recently inducted their 2018 classes, Chipper Jones, Vlad Guerrero, Randy Moss, and Brian Urlacher, among others, joining their respective sport’s pantheon of immortals. Which has me thinking about the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, the shrine in Springfield, Massachusetts, devoted to honoring and celebrating legends of the hardwood. In particular, the recent ceremonies in Cooperstown and Canton have me thinking of this city’s most popular living sports figure, and his place in basketball history.

(Credit: U of M Athletics)

Anfernee Hardaway is a Hall of Famer. Or at least he should be.

Here we are, almost 11 years since the pride of Treadwell High School played his last NBA game (December 3, 2007), and Penny Hardaway cannot be found among the greatest to play the sport he commanded for an all-too-brief professional career. And that’s the catch for Hardaway: However great he may have been, we’re tortured by the question of what he could have been, perhaps what he should have been with stronger knees.

But there’s an advantage Hardaway holds as a former basketball great. The Basketball Hall of Fame has a significantly lower standard for induction than baseball’s Hall, and even lower than football’s. Unless your name is Sandy Koufax, a career abbreviated by injury eliminates you from consideration for Cooperstown. You have to have played ten seasons just to reach baseball’s ballot, and most inductees enjoyed careers of at least 15 years. As for football, Kurt Warner and Terrell Davis have recently been inducted, joining Gale Sayers among gridiron greats who starred brightly enough during brief careers to earn enshrinement.

Then there’s the hoop Hall. Here’s a look at four recent inductees to factor into the equation of Penny Hardaway’s qualifications:

• Maurice Cheeks (will be inducted this year) — Four-time All-Star. Never named to an All-NBA team. Played a supporting role (to Julius Erving and Moses Malone) on one of the greatest teams in NBA history, the 1982-83 Philadelphia 76ers. Played 15 years in the NBA.

• Sarunas Marciulionis (2014) — The face of Lithuanian basketball (particularly at the 1992 Olympics). Played seven seasons in the NBA. Never an All-Star.

• Jamaal Wilkes (2012) — Three-time All-Star. 1974-75 NBA Rookie of the Year. Played supporting role (to Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) for three L.A. Laker championship teams. Never named to an All-NBA team.

• Satch Sanders (2011) — Played supporting role (to Bill Russell and John Havlicek) for eight Boston Celtic championship teams. Never an All-Star and never named to an All-NBA team. Never averaged more than 12.6 points in a season.


Sorry, but these four players don’t so much as approximate the star power of Penny Hardaway in his prime. Let’s consider 50 games a “full” season for an NBA player. Penny played nine such seasons, so it’s not as though he went down after five or six no-look passes and a reverse dunk. He was named All-NBA three times, and twice first-team (after the 1994-95 and 1995-96 seasons). Consider his company on the 1996 All-NBA team: Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Karl Malone, and David Robinson (all members of the 1992 Olympic Dream Team). Hardaway was a four-time All-Star and averaged more than 20 points per game three times.

 

Let’s forget the stats and accolades, though. Basketball doesn’t have a significant counting number — 3,000 hits or 10,000 rushing yards — that introduces a player into discussions about Hall of Fame status. In nearly every case, it’s an eye test. Did the player do things on a basketball court we don’t see many (if any) others do? This is where Penny Hardaway’s Hall of Fame case becomes lock-down secure. Beyond Michael Jordan or Magic Johnson, who can fill — to this day — a 60-second highlight reel like Hardaway?

He was the national high school player of the year (according to Parade magazine) in 1990. He was named first-team All-America as a junior at Memphis State in 1993. And he remains an unforgettable performer at basketball’s highest level, an Olympic gold medalist. (Get this: Every member of the 1996 U.S. Olympic team is a member of the Basketball Hall of Fame . . . except Penny Hardaway.) The good folks at SLAM magazine recently published an issue ranking the 100 greatest players of all time, and Hardaway checks in at 92. (None of the Hall of Famers mentioned above made the cut.)

I’m convinced the Naismith selection committee will someday get this right. But make no mistake: the Basketball Hall of Fame is incomplete without Penny Hardaway.

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From My Seat Sports

A Memphis Redbirds Wall of Fame

The St. Louis Cardinals do history well. Their marketing slogan this season is “Tradition Meets Today.” With no fewer than nine statues of Cardinal greats just outside Busch Stadium — two for the greatest Cardinal of all, Stan Musial — a blindfolded fan might literally bump into a bronzed Hall of Famer on his way into the ballpark. Once inside the stadium (blindfold removed), that fan can count the retired uniform numbers of Cardinal heroes in two different locations. The team’s 11 world championships? There are 11 flags flying high above the rightfield stands, and 11 pennants painted atop the Cardinals’ dugout with every championship year from 1926 to 2011.

Here in Memphis at AutoZone Park, the Cardinals could teach local fans a history lesson or two. And now that the parent franchise has an ownership stake, it’s time to crack the books.

Deep in the bowels of the 15-year-old stadium, next to a batting cage, Memphis baseball championships are painted on the wall. This is the only place you’ll see any indication the franchise has two Pacific Coast League titles (2000 and 2009) to its credit. The red Pujols Seat remains — now a solitary chair — on the rightfield bluff, just inside the foul pole where Albert Pujols’s championship-winning home run landed on September 15, 2000. (The chair needs a small plaque for those oblivious to the most famous hit in franchise history.) As for the heroics of other former Redbirds, good luck.

Baseball history fades entirely at Third and Union, some of the fading intentional. Stubby Clapp’s number (10) was retired in 2007, but the back-flipping face of the 2000 PCL champs had his name removed from the bullpen wall last winter, the Cardinals asserting the number had been retired for Hall of Fame manager Tony LaRussa, negating the same honor — for the same uniform number — elsewhere in the farm system.

There have been too many good players — popular players — to wear a Memphis Redbirds uniform for the stadium to remain devoid of any form of tribute. My proposal: A wall of fame — presented where any ticketed fan can see it — with a photo or plaque saluting former Redbird heroes. Borrowing from the Cardinals’ own Hall of Fame, a new member of this wall of fame would be announced near the start of each season. And Memphis baseball tradition would, finally, meet today at AutoZone Park.

We’ll need an inaugural class, of course, so here are the five Redbirds that would receive my vote. Let’s establish a minimum of 100 games played with the team for position players, and either 50 games or 10 wins for pitchers. Apologies to the likes of Pujols and Yadier Molina. Great Cardinals, to say the least, but Redbirds all too briefly.

• Rick Ankiel — His two stints as a Redbird were Ruthian. As a 20-year-old flame-thrower in 1999, the lefty won seven games and struck out 119 hitters in 88 innings pitched. He was the last Memphis baseball star at Tim McCarver Stadium. Eight (long) years later, having lost his ability to throw a baseball over the plate, Ankiel returned to Memphis as a centerfielder and led the Redbirds with 32 home runs and 89 RBIs in just 102 games. There will never be another like him, for good or ill.

• Stubby Clapp — His backflips (a tribute to Cardinal great Ozzie Smith) are memorable, but Clapp was the heart and backbone of that 2000 championship team, leading the club in runs, hits, and dirty uniforms. He remains third in franchise history in games played (425) and hits (418). Stubby was the Gashouse Gang by way of Canada.

• Skip Schumaker — He’s the only player to appear in 200 games as a Redbird and 500 games as a Cardinal. Never a star, he merely played solid baseball, in the outfield and at the plate, then at second base for a team that won the World Series. In trying to define the fabled “Cardinal Way,” Schumaker would be good source material.

• Nick Stavinoha — The Redbirds’ career leader in games (479), hits (531), home runs (74), runs (531), and RBIs (316). Stavinoha was a slugger without a position, but not quite enough slugger to find his way to an American League team where the DH lives and breathes. He played in 72 games for the 2009 PCL champs, but was with the parent club when Memphis reeled off six straight playoff wins.

• Adam Wainwright — Waino was a .500 pitcher (14-14) over two seasons with Memphis, though he led the PCL with 182 innings pitched in 2005. Since then, though, he’s won 121 games with the Cardinals and climbed to second on the franchise strikeout list behind Hall of Famer Bob Gibson. As a rookie out of the bullpen, Wainwright was integral to the Cards’ 2006 World Series win.

History matters in baseball. It should be given life at AutoZone Park

Categories
Music Music Features

Hall of Famers

The Memphis Music Hall of Fame will induct its latest class at a ceremony Thursday, November 7th, at the Gibson Showcase Lounge.

This year’s nominees include some glaring omissions from last year’s inaugural class: Johnny Cash and Carla Thomas. There are some well-reasoned picks who were recently lost to us: Roland Janes and Sid Selvidge. There’s a nod to the depth of the Stax roster with the Bar-Kays, David Porter, and Albert King. There’s a nod to Sun with Knox Phillips and to Elvis Presley’s gospel roots with the Blackwood Brothers. But there are four lesser-known inductees we will consider here. While they may not be as well known as the others, they left their mark on the sound of this city.

Kay Starr

Kay Starr may not ring the memory bell like this year’s other nominees, but Starr glowed brightly over the middle 20th century. Her work spanned several decades and included hits both on her own and with established greats.

The native Oklahoman was gigging before age 10, which helped her family during the Depression. Her dad was relocated to Memphis, where she took her talent to local radio station WMPS. The staffers at the station noticed her name was misspelled in her fan mail and added the second “R.” So, while she’s not a native Memphian, our civic-wide inability to spell “star” left a permanent mark on her nascent career. At 15, she took up with bandleader Joe Venuti and landed a job singing at the Peabody. She did a brief stint with Glenn Miller in 1939. Later, she joined a female-heavy roster at Capitol and got lost in the mix.

In 1950, Starr heard a version of Pee Wee King’s fiddle tune Bonaparte’s Retreat. She was so taken with it that she took it straight to Roy Acuff in Nashville. Acuff, the multigenerational master of the music-publishing game in Nashville, wrote lyrics for the song, which sold close to a million copies. Starr’s run through the 1950s netted more than 10 songs in the top 10 of Billboard‘s Hot 100 chart with “Wheel of Fortune” and “Rock and Roll Waltz” hitting #1.

The rise of rock-and-roll music eclipsed her notoriety in the public’s mind. But Billie Holiday’s biographer quotes the jazz great saying that Kay Starr was the “only white woman who could sing the blues.”

Rev. Herbert Brewster

For the 57 years leading up to 1987, Rev. W. Herbert Brewster was the pastor of East Trigg Avenue Baptist Church. But through his compositions and his radio broadcasts, he reached a wide audience. Brewster was the first artist to sell a million copies of a gospel record with both “Surely God Is Able” and with “Move On Up a Little Higher,” Mahalia Jackson’s first hit. His works are staples of the gospel choir repertoire and were recorded by such masters as the Soul Stirrers, Queen C. Anderson, and Marion Williams.

Brewster is also known for his musical dramas. He wrote more than 15 plays and was noted by the Smithsonian Institution, which produced his Sowing in Tears, Reaping in Joy in 1982.

There’s lots of ink on Sam Phillips and Jim Stewart and their intrepid journey into African-American culture and the revolutions in popular music that followed. But it has to be said that Brewster, perhaps more than anyone, paved the way for that cross-pollination of American music. Sam Phillips was a regular listener to Brewster’s broadcasts. Elvis Presley was so enamored of the sermons and sounds he heard on his radio that he attended services at Trigg.

Phineas Newborn Jr.

The Newborn name is synonymous with jazz in Memphis. Phineas Sr. was a musician and his sons Phineas Jr. and Calvin would cement the surname into the annals of Memphis music greatness.

Two generations of Newborns were members of what may be the most important band in Memphis music history. Before the MGs or the Tennessee Two, there was the band at the Plantation Inn in West Memphis. Ask any Stax luminary where it all started. The answer is over the river. The house band included Phineas Sr. on drums, saxophonist Ben Branch, Tuff Green on bass, and a trumpeter named Willie Mitchell.

Jim Dickinson and anyone else alive at the time not only heaps praise on the band that was out of Boss Crump’s reach, they go so far as to credit this band with the Memphis sound: the smaller horn section, the stompy, surly grooves, and the shout all come from West Memphis. At a time when the culture of Memphis was supposedly not ready for Elvis, plenty of Memphians crossed the bridge to have a drink and dance their crew cuts off.

Phineas Jr.’s influence stretched farther than East Parkway, though. He played with Charles Mingus and Lionel Hampton. He was on B.B. King’s first-ever recording and his first recording on Sun.

Newborn struggled with health problems and died in 1989. His financial difficulties spurred the creation of the Jazz Foundation of America, which still provides musicians with career support as well as emergency funds.

The Memphis Jug Band

The Memphis Jug Band should be honored for lots of small reasons: for adding the kazoo to the jug-band sound or for having a song called “Insane Crazy Blues.” But the big deal is their influence on this community’s musical culture.

The band started in 1926 under the leadership of Will Shade, a romantic rival to Furry Lewis. They were the subject of the first commercial recordings to be produced in Memphis, eventually cutting for Victor, Champion-Gennet, and Okeh labels. The band was rooted in the past and also more forward-looking than you might think. Musicologists have described the instrumentation of jugs, banjo, and fiddle as closely tuned to the African string traditions. The band’s repertoire reflected the onset of jazz as the musical language of the 20th century.

They were a favorite of Boss Crump and appeared with him in a photo in Life magazine in 1941. In the 1950s, they were documented as part of the field-recording movement that was the vanguard of the nascent folk explosion.

Memphis Music Hall of Fame 2013 Induction Ceremony, Thursday, November 7th, at the Gibson Showcase Lounge. Valet parking will be available. Reserved seating is $50 per person; tickets for premium seating and limited reserved table seating are $100 per person. Tickets are available by calling 205-2536 or by emailing pam@memphisrocknsoul.org.