My father first told me about the Memphis Tigers many years ago. He told me that they were one of the best pro football teams he had ever seen and that as a boy he had watched from the stands of old Hodges Field as they played and beat on successive weekends the Green Bay Packers and the Chicago Bears. Fixated as I was about football, it was a story that never left me, although I knew practically nothing of the particular details except that the Tigers played a long time ago. As I grew older and entered early manhood I began to wonder about the strong feeling I had for football and certain teams, wondering just what it mean, or if it meant anything at all. And so I decided to write about it, to put it into a story not completely of my own creation – for what is of anyone’s completely own creation – and see just what kind of sense it would make, or if it would make any sense at all.

Thus, I began writing a novel about a young man so obsessed with his city’s professional football team that he lived, and almost died, and by their success and failure. And it was a good story and was going well and I was having a good time writing it. But I came to a point where I felt I needed more actual historical background to make the story flow easy and well,  to have something more exact and less vague to create from. So I went to the main library to find out what I could, thinking I would find a whole lot there about this team my father had told me so much about so many years before. It was in the spring of ’85 when the main library of Memphis was still on the corner of Peabody and McLean, and I thought that it would all be there. I was certain they had been real, but there was nothing in the stacks about the Tigers at all. The Shelby County archivist, John Harkins, had been my history teacher at Memphis University School and he took the time to find what he could. But all he could find was a small article in one of the newspapers about Memphis State naming their athletic teams after the “Sole Owner Tigers.” However, Dr. Harkins did suggest there would certainly be more if I took the time to go through the old newspapers, all of which the library had on microfilm all the way back to the middle of the nineteenth century.

And so I began researching and writing about the old professional football team, the all-but-forgotten Memphis Tigers; writing notes in notebooks as I read the newspaper articles that recorded the victories and defeats for the public as they had happened sixty years before. I was fascinated and hooked on the subject because reading old newspapers is like opening up a living book of history and taking a trip back in time. The Tigers played for nine years and as I read the accounts of the old scribes and sportswriters the team came alive again. I could feel the sweat on the foreheads of the players and the saw the dirt under their cleats as they took to the field and played against some of the best teams and players of this early remarkable era. Some of the men taking part in the story were some of the most famous athletes of the age: men such as Red Grange, Ernie Nevers, Mel Hein, Bronko Nagurski, Tim Mara, and George Halas. But when I finished the research and wrote out the book, Dr. Harkins gently told me in a very nice way that it was written like a sports article from an old newspaper and that I should go back and rewrite it with the intent of “getting to the story behind the story.”

And so I rewrote the story with more thought and feeling and this time Dr. Harkins liked it so much that he and Leigh MacQueen, another formidable instructor at MUS, had it bound and placed it in a corner of the library at Memphis University School, where that particular copy still resides. That was a long time ago, 1990, and for a long time, except for use as research by a few individuals, the manuscript set fallow on a shelf above the desk in my office in the basement of my home. Now, though publication by THE SUNBURY PRESS, it will be available for the rest of the world. My wish is that those who read it enjoy it very much.