You might say it’s a brand-new ball game for spectator sports in Memphis. After decades of having to watch underfunded minor-league teams play in barely adequate facilities, Memphians are finally seeing how the other half lives. And they are showing their approval by purchasing tickets in record numbers.
The new dawn came at perhaps the city’s darkest sports hour. Memphis, which has enjoyed professional baseball—usually at the double A level—for more than 100 years, lost its team in 1997, when the ownership moved it about 95 miles east to Jackson, Tennessee. However, less than a year later, a new ownership team won a triple A franchise and announced plans for a new downtown ballpark. And to make it even better, the new owners landed a major-league affiliation with the St. Louis Cardinals, the lopsided favorite of Memphis baseball fans. When AutoZone Park opened in 2000, it was the best of all worlds for the Memphis fan: a triple A (not double A!) franchise with a Cardinals affiliation in a facility widely regarded as the best in the minor leagues. One member of the St. Louis Cardinals, playing in the exhibition game that inaugurated the ballpark, said, “This is not a great minor-league park—it’s a great major-league park for minor-league baseball.” During the next three seasons, Memphis finished second in attendance for all of minor-league baseball, missing first place by just a few thousand tickets each year.
AutoZone helped launch the revitalization of downtown Memphis, and the trend has continued since then. University of Memphis basketball, fueled by the arrival of coach John Calipari, saw a dramatic rise in ticket sales for its games at the nearby Pyramid Arena. Then came the arrival of the NBA Grizzlies: Finally, after a seemingly endless parade of fly-by-night pro-basketball leagues, Memphis had its very own honest-to-goodness major-league team. Even better, the Griz made the playoffs during the 2003–2004 season, and since the 2004 NBA season, the team has played in the new FedExForum, another downtown facility that has won raves nationally. Almost lost in all the good news from downtown Memphis is the area’s professional hockey team, the RiverKings. This Central Hockey League team is playing in a beautiful new facility in the nearby suburb of Southaven, Mississippi, where they, too, are setting attendance figures and winning league championships.
As if to validate Memphis’s rise to national sports prominence, the Mike Tyson–Lennox Lewis title fight—one of the richest prizefights in boxing history—was held in the Pyramid in 2002. Of course, to many the real spectacle was the three-ring circus surrounding the bout, as celebrities and television crews poured into town, and Memphis found itself squarely in the media spotlight.