'We've Taken the Greed out of Sports'

Memphis may be the most beaten-down, embittered sports town in the country, a city that has been discouraged by a series of failures, each more humiliating than the previous. An entire alphabet of minor leagues have been through Memphis -- among them, the ABA, ABL, AFL, USBL, USFL, and WFL -- none to any good end. The NFL repeatedly wooed then rejected Memphis during a three-decade tease. When the NFL passed over Memphis the last time, in 1993, a cartoon appeared in Memphis's Commercial Appeal of a hound dog -- that was to be the franchise's name. The dog was lifting a leg and urinating on the NFL logo. The cartoon was put on T-shirts and sold throughout the city.

Jernigan, who had been a minority owner in a minor-league baseball team in Memphis in the early 1980s, understood the city's frustration. So when he heard that Memphis might lose its Double-A baseball franchise to Jackson, Tennessee, he knew instinctively that he could not let the city get treated that way. He started making phone calls the next day. He called David Hersh, the owner of the Double-A franchise, to open negotiations to buy the team. He called friends who were connected to baseball's Triple-A expansion committee about lining up an expansion franchise if the Double-A negotiations fell through. And, in the back of his mind the whole time, an idea brewed: If he was to get a team, he would create something like the Green Bay Packers, an organization that was so woven into the fabric of Wisconsin that people framed their Packers stock certificates and hung them on their walls.

"That first night, he said that if we did it, we were going to do it a completely different way,'' said Kristi Jernigan. Negotiations to buy the Double-A franchise fell through. In October 1996, Jernigan held a press conference and said, "I will do everything in my power to bring professional baseball back to Memphis and bring it back at the highest level possible." Three months later, in the Peabody Hotel -- just four months after he had received that initial call -- Jernigan held another truly extraordinary press conference to announce that he had acquired a Triple-A franchise. "We are bringing baseball for the fans,'' he said. "I'll never take a salary, I'll never take a profit, and I'll never take an appreciation value for the baseball team."

In the corner of the room, Pat McKernan, head of baseball's Triple-A expansion committee, just watched and grinned. "He turned it around for this city," McKernan says. "Remarkable man, isn't he?"

(III) It's A New Ball Game

Early on, an architect looked at the space that the Redbirds ownership selected for its ballpark and identified a corner of the property where the team could build a hotel to maximize revenue. The Jernigans nixed that idea and built a public plaza instead. Go there any day of the year, and you can enter under the legs of the giant baseball player, walk on the mosaic baseball diamond, and listen to "sound art" -- recorded baseball-game sounds -- as you round first, second, and third.

Blue-Collar Dreamer

Some years ago, Jernigan was driving through Kansas City when he happened to see the lights on at what was then Royals Stadium. As if in a spell, he followed the lights straight to the park. "I had my family with me," says Jernigan. "I pulled in and said to them, 'Give me 30 minutes. Y'all come in if you want to, but I want to see this ballpark.' "

Sometimes, Jernigan imagines that he was destined to build a ballpark. Never did he imagine that building one would be quite so hard. Problem number one: Where to put the ballpark? It was an article of faith in the city that any new stadium should be built in the city's booming eastern suburbs. Hersh, the owner of the Double-A franchise, had concluded that a downtown ballpark would be doomed -- despite the success of downtown stadiums in both Baltimore and Cleveland. Memphians, it was thought, were too scared of crime, too fond of convenience, too reluctant to commute.

"Kristi knew intuitively that downtown was the right place,'' says Jernigan. "I did my homework and quickly decided that she was absolutely right. Downtown, a ballpark can have an impact beyond baseball. To build a ballpark like this and then surround it with parking lots would have been a crime."

Problem number two: How to structure the team's ownership? Jernigan knew that he wanted to operate the franchise to benefit the community. He didn't have the slightest idea how to structure the franchise to achieve that goal. The answer came from Jim Rout, Shelby County's mayor. "I remember exactly where I was,'' says Jernigan. "Mayor Rout was at a bond closing for the county in New York, and we had flown up there to gauge his support. While we were there, we told him a little bit about what we planned to do with the club and he said, 'Why don't you do it as a 501(c)(3)?' It was the first time I had ever heard that term."