Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, March 9, 1991 TAG: 9103090275
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
"Why?" she said, repeating the question incredulously. "Why what? We do this all the time."
It's just that when basketball experts said Memphis State fans take their Tigers so seriously they go to the games wearing furs and tails, one pictured something, uh, different.
Instead, it was hard to spot a Memphis State fan at Friday's semifinal game in the Metro Conference tournament in Roanoke who wasn't trailing a striped tiger tail.
Indeed, Janice Hall's get-up seemed positively low-key compared with those of Byron and Diane Graves, an otherwise normal couple who came to the game dressed in homemade tiger costumes.
"We have two boys who think Mom and Dad are really stupid," Diane said. "They're 25 and 24. They say we've not supposed to act like this. But we're in a second childhood."
Memphis State may have lost its game Friday night, but the Tigers' boisterous cheering section could at least claim an unofficial consolation prize as the tournament's most visible (if not audible) fans.
Not that it wasn't close, mind you. After all, there were these Louisville fans running around the Roanoke Civic Center with stuffed cardinals pinned to their shoulders.
Conveniently enough, Memphis State and Louisville happen to be arch rivals. So when they met Friday in the semifinals - for perhaps the last time, with the Tigers headed for a new conference next year - the contest wasn't only on the court.
Memphis State fans wore buttons proclaiming, quite frankly: "Go to HELL, Louisville."
And even the Cardinals' mascot couldn't resist waving his (her?) hands (feathers?) in the Tigers' mascot's face when the teams were introduced.
The Memphis fans didn't have a good explanation for all this hubbub, but their only slightly more sedate counterparts on the Louisville side did.
"It used to be because Dana Kirk [the Memphis State coach at one time] was an ex-assistant at the University of Louisville," Cardinal fan Jerry Dooley said.
"And for so long we couldn't play Kentucky, so to have a rival, it was Memphis," added Carolyn Dooley.
The fact that Metro tournaments have often come down to Louisville-Memphis State championships also fueled the rivalry. (How seriously do folks in Louisville take the Metro Tournament? A Louisville radio station has been broadcasting its morning drive-time show from the lobby of the Marriott this week.)
So when Louisville, suffering through an uncharacteristic down year this year, unexpectedly won its first-round game Thursday - and found itself pitted against none other than Memphis State in the semis - Cardinal fans started burning up I-64 toward Roanoke.
They also burned up the phone lines.
Friday afternoon, Civic Center box office workers showed off a thick stack of phone orders for tickets - all with Kentucky addresses. By the time the game was over, civic center officials put the crowd at 7,569 - up 788 from the night before, due primarily to the influx of Louisville fans.
Despite the numbers, the reinforced Louisville section had a hard time matching the unabashed fanaticism of the Memphis State fans.
"The thing I like about the Memphis State fans is they're not afraid to be fans," said Laban Johnson, Roanoke's special events coordinator, who helped organized the tournament. "I saw two elderly ladies, well into their 70s, and one had braided a tiger - a stuffed tiger - into her hair."
Janice Hall, our friend with the tiger gloves, put it another way: "Louisville people think Memphis people are a little weird."
(Memo to Janice: It's not only the Louisville people.)
Hall confessed to year-round Memphis mania. Tiger logo on her shoes. Tiger on her purse. A pin that spells out "Tigers" in diamonds.
Hall even wore her tiger regalia to lunch Friday at the Greenbrier in White Sulphur Springs, W.Va. "It was a little out of place," she said, "but they took our money."
However, Hall insists, she puts on the tiger paws and ears only for the tournament each year. "They're actually Cincinnati Bengal arms and ears," she said. "Things like this are hard to find in Memphis." Imagine that.
Likewise, the Graveses say they wear their tiger costumes only at tournament time. But when they do, they don't come off, no matter what. "One year we were in Louisville and it was 80 degrees," Diane Graves said. There's no reading for what the temperature was inside the suits.
Beside the blue-clad Memphis State fans with their tiger tails and the red-sweatered Louisville fans with a chick on their shoulder, the rest of the fans at the tournament sort of all looked the same.
. . . Well, there was one way to tell the others apart:
In a corner of the beer tent outside the Civic Center, the Virginia Lottery was doing a brisk business, mostly to fans from states that don't have a lottery.
"They didn't know how to play, but they were still buying," said regional sales manager Mark Merritt. "I didn't think we'd do $5,000 the whole weekend, and we sold 5,000 tickets the first afternoon."
Fans from the losing schools tended to be the best customers, he said.
"One guy, I don't know where he was from, but his school lost, said, `I'm here for four days, I've got to win at something,' so he started buying lottery tickets," Merritt said. "A couple people bought $100 worth at time."
It may be a good thing for Virginia taxpayers, then, that Memphis State lost. If the Tiger fans bring the same enthusiasm to the lottery they brought to basketball, they might take care of Virginia's budget problems until the next time the Metro tournament comes to town.
by CNB