We Love Our Coaches Like We Love Our Leaders-A Little Dirty..

I saw this article in Kentucky about why some folks there don’t want Calipari to become the basketball coach. When I read it I remembered Calipari’s checkered past and some of the embarrassments that have hit the University of Memphis. This got me thinking of how much our college basketball is a reflection of our local political culture.

Memphis has a very banana republic, not the retail store but more the Latin American country, feel to it. We want to be taken seriously but we don’t want to do all the hard work of doing things the right way. Mostly because we’ve had a long established oligarchic system used to getting its way by hook or by crook. Trickling down from that is a tolerance for a great deal of petty and mid-level corruption. Added into the mix is the fact that our oligarchy isn’t really that far sighted and has an inferiority complex to other cities. This leads us to build a really big basketball stadium for an NBA team we can’t afford or turning over the athletic department of our university the aforementioned colorful coach. We’re so inured to the surrealness of our banana republic, it comes as a shock that people in other places don’t want the “Memphis model” brought to their area even if it means winning.

Take a moment to consider how corrupt our own political culture is. Sure there are the brazenly stupid, pettily corrupt folks like Joe Copper, Ricky Peete, the white guy from the County Commission, and all the Tennessee Waltz folks. Yet it is the systematic corruption that keeps Memphis backwards. Just off the top of my head, I know of three convicted felons still working in/with local government. That’s only the most obvious examples. We had long time, former city council members with serious conflicts of interest that resulted in tens of millions of dollars being poured into capital projects that didn’t have any reason getting built. We’ve got a juvenile court system that’s rife with conflicts of interest. How pathetic a local society are we that we don’t really see much of a problem making money off of imprisoning kids. It’s not like this hasn’t been going on for a couple decades with the same cast of characters. Hell, even our oligarchy is so blind to even the most Somoza-like behavior they don’t even question the ludicrous idea of paying some guy with a not so flattering past a $1,000 a ticket to have an annual Christmas Party with a certain elected official. Really? I have a hard time believing that is the only face time the oligarchs get with the official. Can we at least get some better oligarchs because ours suck. Like the amoral oil companies operating in Indonesia say, “It’s just the cost and way of doing business here.”

I recently had a conversation with a friend who mentioned the slow pace of reform and improvement in our city. One of the explanations this person heard for this was a lack of consolidated political power. I disagreed. There are two concepts people have a hard time grasping. First, somebody is always making a profit from the status quo no matter how fucked up it is. The second is that some people would rather rule in hell than be ruled in heaven. The status quo for Memphis is corruption, but our corruption is pretty highly evolved. We have clever patronage schemes through contracts and bureaucracies. Power and influence is also exerted by more respectable folks through “foundations” or nonprofit organizations. Did you know that Memphis has more public (government) and private (nonprofit) collaborations than any other major city in America? Fascinating, yet after all these years, we still live in a segregated society with the same problems we’ve always had. Hell ain’t so bad when you are at the top of the heap.

Like all shady characters with higher aspirations, whether it be a CEO or a politician's fixer, there is that desire for respectability. Joe Kennedy used his fortune made through non-legal ways to create a political dynasty. Poor ass Memphis built a cathedral to basketball to be taken as a serious city. And Calipari wants to go coach at a school with a storied basketball past so he can one day get his shot at entering the pantheon of coaching legends. (The irony of this is that Kentucky still sees itself as some sort of storied program. Kentucky is very much like France, still thinking it has some superior standing, neglecting all its racist past, rules violations, and probations.)

Yes Memphis, we love our coaches like we love our local leaders-a little dirty and in the constant pursuit of thinnest veneer of respectability.