“Crazy About Sports” in the UK and the USA

Thanks to Daily Squash Report and Squash Mad, I've been following with great interest the perils of squash and five other sports that were put on notice recently that they must increase participation to continue to get funds from Sports England.

"There are tough messages here for national governing bodies," said Sport England chief executive Jennie Price to the BBC. "If they don't grow participation, we will reduce their funding and we won't make long-term investments until we have confidence in their ability to deliver."

Ping pong, tennis, squash, swimming, fencing, and basketball are on the short list. Accountability is the name of the game, data is the driver. Use it or lose it. Someone's dish could wind up on the chopping block.

My first reaction was some good old American condescension. Oh those wacky Brits with their nationalized weird sports and some bureaucratic Mr. Bean counting ping pong balls.

That's not how we do it here. Our local and state governments don't fund specific sports via governing bodies, but they fund facilities from tennis courts to soccer and football fields to golf courses with budget allocations, tax breaks and sales taxes leveraged by federal grants and private funds.

Competition for public funding is as spirited as competition for trophies, with bike lanes and skate parks added to the mix in recent years. The threat of closing sports facilities and cutting high school extracurricular activities is an annual event at budget time. Name a sport or recreational activity and there is a diehard proponent armed with a survey showing that it is enjoyed by millions.

By way of introduction, Memphis is barely a major-league city, with an NBA basketball team, 655,000 residents and a five-county metro population roughly twice that size. West Tennessee, which should not be confused with booming Nashville 200 miles away, has no mountains, beaches, or blue-water lakes. A lot of thinking has gone into putting Memphis on the sports map. We are sometimes said to be as “crazy about sports” as we are about Elvis.

Both propositions are dubious. Let's take a closer look.

In 2000 Memphis opened $70-million AutoZone Park, the most expensive minor-league baseball stadium ever built, for the Class AAA Memphis Redbirds. A few years ago the owners defaulted on their bond payments, and last year the city of Memphis agreed to buy the ballpark for less than a third what it cost to build it. Efforts to connect baseball to kids via a program called Return Baseball to the Inner-City have struggled.

Memphis has three basketball arenas but only one of them, FedEx Forum, home of the NBA Grizzlies and University of Memphis Tigers, is used. The downtown Pyramid, a landmark built in 1991, has been closed for nine years and is being converted to a Bass Pro Shops store at a public cost of nearly $200 million. The mid-city coliseum it replaced is probably headed for demolition.

The coliseum and our football stadium, Liberty Bowl Memorial Stadium, anchor a mostly empty area called the fairgrounds. The stadium seats 60,000 people but usually attracts 25,000 or less. It is used eight or nine times a year. Memphis is seeking state approval for more than $100 million in future sales tax rebates to develop the fairgrounds as a youth sports center.

Our tennis headliner is the U.S. National Indoor Championships, an ATP event played last week at The Racquet Club of Memphis, a private club. The tournament, 39 years old, no longer owns February on the sports calendar especially when the weather makes you want to stay home and watch the downhill at Sochi on television. There was no title sponsor and no Connors, McEnroe, Sampras, Agassi, Roddick, or other American star in the field. Kei Nishikori beat Ivo Karlovic in the final. No disrespect, but that's a tough sell here.

Pro golf has had an event here for decades, but FedEx had to step in to save it a few years ago when another sponsor went bust. We have a PGA-quality tournament course and another lovely one built by local-boy-made-good Justin Timberlake, but the city of Memphis has had to close public courses that were losing money.

Spurred by a local philanthropist, Memphis collared some $36 million in public and private funds to build a bike and pedestrian path across the Mississippi River to West Memphis, Arkansas. The Harahan Project, named for the old railroad bridge it adjoins, is supposed to begin construction this year. Allowing for the flood plain in Arkansas and approaches on both sides, the span is a couple of miles, the whole kit and kaboodle 10 miles or roughly $3 million a mile.

The aforementioned Bass Pro Shops super store is targeted for completion this year. It will have indoor exhibits that replicate swamps, forests, wetlands, lakes and, for want of a better word, zoos. Southerners are crazy about hunting and fishing and boats. And tall pointy buildings. We hope.

Finally, since this is a squash site I should mention that Memphis has four international courts at three different locations and perhaps 25 regular players. We are a backwater, and must go to Atlanta or Chicago for tournaments. The same is true of racquetball, once a Memphis specialty with a home-grown world champion and a pro tournament but now an outlier. When I was in south Florida last week the most popular court sport, by a mile, was Pickle ball.

Our situation in Memphis, of course, is not unique. While many of our politicians and philanthropic angels grew up with Willie Mays, Arnold Palmer, Joe Namath, Converse All-Stars, and 19-inch televisions, our kids know lacrosse, field hockey, Asics, skateboards, ESPN, and Smartphones. To get the sports menu right, cities and their decision makers have to account for what people watch and what they actually do. We watch a lot of football and baseball, but those are not lifetime sports. Once you're 21, you can put your cleats on Ebay. Memphis is rightly called a basketball town, but you won't find many players over the age of 40.

The most popular participant sport for all ages? One man's opinion: running and jogging on public streets and treadmills or bouncing around in an exercise class. And I wouldn't do it with a gun to my head. Call me crazy, but we should make sports funding undergo some British-style testing.

John Branston (jbranston@bellsouth.net) is a Memphis writer and sports fan.

What's On My Mind is a column by rotating authors.

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