MEMPHIS — North Carolina’s approaching NCAA Tournament third-round game against Gonzaga played a faint second fiddle in Memphis on Thursday. And Syracuse vs. Oklahoma? Third fiddle.
Even with the South Regional semifinals in town — Friday and Sunday in the FedExForum — buzz for the games is light. There’s very little foot traffic around the building, no ticket scalpers out front, the usual Carolina groupies are all but nonexistent.
This quaint, but normally busy city, on the Mississippi River’s banks is locked, loaded and fully braced for the hometown Memphis Tigers’ Thursday NCAA West semifinal game against Missouri in Glendale, Ariz.
“How ‘bout ‘dem Tigers against ‘dem Tigers?” is a phrase you hear a lot in the hotel lobbies and on the streets.
Game time for the Memphis-Missouri game is 8:37 p.m. Central, roughly 20 minutes before Duke and Villanova are to start in an East semifinal game in Boston. But if your night’s plans were to catch television coverage of the Blue Devils and Wildcats, sports bars and digital channels were the only options.
Dating back to the 1960s and ‘70s, Memphis has been a college basketball hot spot. A few years before, and long after the 1972-73 Tigers lost the national championship game to UCLA and Bill Walton in St. Louis, the city has actively pursued a visible role in the sport. Landing this regional was a goal city leaders chased for years, but the Tigers’ run understandably has dominated regional attention.
Under John Calipari, interest in the local college’s basketball team has exploded. Tickets to most home games were difficult to land even prior to last season’s march to another NCAA championship game. Interest in this season’s team, seeded second to Connecticut in the West, is such that the city’s newspaper ran a full-page photograph on Thursday of Calipari working the sidelines during last weekend’s opening-round games.
“Citizen Cal” the locals refer to him. Blue T-shirts bearing the coach’s face are commonplace. It’s his turf to the extent that the NBA Memphis Grizzlies (17-53) might as well be an expensive warm-up act.
