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Memphis Hoops: Race and Basketball in the Bluff City, 1968–1997 by Keith B. Wood

2022; Southern Historical Association; Volume: 88; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/soh.2022.0155

2325-6893

Kate Aguilar,

American Sports and Literature

Reviewed by: Memphis Hoops: Race and Basketball in the Bluff City, 1968–1997by Keith B. Wood Kate Aguilar Memphis Hoops: Race and Basketball in the Bluff City, 1968–1997. By Keith B. Wood. Sport and Popular Culture. ( Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2021. Pp. xiv, 218. $35.00, ISBN 978-1-62190-668-1.) On Thursday, October 28, 2021, the University of Memphis, previously known as Memphis State University, unveiled a statue of former player and coach Larry Finch on the university's South Campus. Finch was a local basketball star from the segregated Memphis, Tennessee, neighborhood of Orange Mound who became the first Black head coach at Memphis State University in 1986. He was an All-American who led the Memphis State Tigers to the 1973 national championship game against the University of California, Los Angeles and, as a coach, led the program to six National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) postseason tournaments. According to attendee Memphis mayor Jim Strickland, Finch is "one of the 10 most significant Memphians of all time" (Steven Johnson, "U of M Honors Larry Finch with Ceremony, Statue and a Host of Memories," Memphis Daily Memphian, October 28, 2021, dailymemphian.com). Keith B. Wood's Memphis Hoops: Race and Basketball in the Bluff City, 1968–1997employs Finch as a "complicated symbol through which to understand Memphis basketball" and racial politics in the mid-to-late twentieth century (p. 6). For Wood, both Finch and Memphis hoops provide windows into the intersection of race, sport, and national cultural politics. Wood demonstrates how critical it is to unpack sport as a story of both racial progress and inequality. Positioning Finch's early success, eventual forced resignation, and mythologization in the popular press alongside local events, Wood's work skillfully uses sport to both reveal and challenge the racial status quo. Chapter 1 explores how athletic directors and coaches attempted to use basketball to improve race relations in Memphis in the 1960s. They did so, in part, through the 1969 high school city championship game, during which Finch's all-Black Melrose team took on Johnny Neumann's all-white Overton Wolverines. Finch represented a new era for Black high school athletes when he was recruited to play at Memphis State as a hometown hero. Chapter 2, which focuses on Finch's senior year at Memphis State, analyzes how the city's 1969 championship game and the university's 1973 national championship run were read together to suggest that basketball had helped heal the city's racial wounds. However, throughout Finch's collegiate career, Memphis was embroiled in a bitter struggle over school desegregation. Chapter 3 weaves in the history of professional basketball for the region. Chapter 4 then looks at the difference in attention given to Finch and Memphis State compared with the city's historically Black college, LeMoyne-Owen College. Both chapters debunk basketball as solely a space of racial unity. Chapter 5 spotlights the life and career of Verties Sails Jr., the first full-time Black assistant coach at Memphis and in the South, who recruited Finch and paved the way for his [End Page 592]tenure as head coach. Chapter 6 focuses on Finch's coaching predecessor Dana Kirk, and chapter 7 explores Finch's tenure as head coach. Wood's book is an important addition to histories of Memphis, its university, and sport. Through analysis of high school, collegiate, and professional basketball, this work demonstrates how central basketball is to shaping the racial climate. As Memphis remained divided, Finch was upheld as a symbol of hope. To make this argument, Wood relies on an important cast of characters, including lifelong Memphian and sports writer George Lapides, who used the Memphis Press-Scimitarto build a bridge between the white and Black communities, and Verties Sails. Wood concludes with the similar trajectory of local basketball phenom Anfernee "Penny" Hardaway, who was raised in Memphis, helped Finch's Tigers get to the Elite Eight, and now serves as the university's head coach. Each personal story segues into a political moment that allows for a larger analysis of the roles that sport, media, race, and place—including the stadiums themselves—play in shaping...