Under that framework, Jernigan would sell the team to the Memphis Redbirds Baseball Foundation, which would be run by a volunteer board. The Redbirds foundation would then contract with Blues City Baseball -- headed by Kristi Jernigan -- to run both the team and the stadium for 15 years. "It was a perfect, legitimate structure for what we were going to do," Jernigan says. "If we had not done it, and we were out there saying that we're not taking any money from it, well, nobody would ever know for sure. But by putting it in this tax structure, we absolutely have no way of taking any money out of it, nor does anyone in the future -- which pleases us to no end."
Problem number three: How to pay for the new stadium? The city and county said that they could offer $8.5 million combined in assistance for a new ballpark. These days, that barely buys cup holders. Jernigan said that he'd line up private financing for the rest. Jernigan's first banker in the deal, NationsBank, came up with the idea of financing the stadium through the sale of $72 million worth of tax-exempt bonds, which would be paid off by contractually obligated income from the park itself. If the Redbirds could get local companies to agree to long-term deals for naming rights, for box suites, for exclusive concessions deals, and for club-level seats, the team's ownership could use those contracts to support the bonds.
The catch, of course, was that the Memphis business community had a dismal history of supporting minor-league sports. And why would any company want to hitch its future to a Triple-A baseball stadium, especially one to be built in a place where everyone seemed to agree that it would fail miserably? "The not-for-profit angle helped immeasurably,'' says Allie Prescott III, 53, the team's president and general manager. "So did Dean's credibility in the community. People wanted to get on board."
AutoZone agreed to pay $365,000 a year for the first 10 years and $250,000 a year for the next 5 years to put its name on the new ballpark. Coca-Cola agreed to pay $250,000 a year for 15 years to obtain exclusive beverage rights at the stadium. FedEx guaranteed the sale of 750 club seats a year at the park. The Redbirds leased 47 luxury suites for $38,000 or $45,000 a year, almost all of them in long-term contracts. "One thing that you should know about Dean," says Kristi Jernigan. "His mother used to work in Shainberg's, a local department store. And every year, she won the award for selling the most blankets in the month of July."
Even after all of the contracts were in place, it took two years and a change in banks to push the transaction through. NationsBank never felt comfortable enough to pull the trigger on the deal. Opening Day at AutoZone Park, originally scheduled for the 1999 season, was pushed back to 2000.
This was a point when some people might have given up, or at least might have modified their vision for the team. The holdup meant an enormous hole at the stadium site -- the Jernigans paid for initial demolition and for excavation work themselves -- that triggered a string of jokes about what might become of the hole when the project inevitably failed. A giant wave pool was a popular idea.
Dean Jernigan neither wavered nor scaled down his plans. Instead, he switched to a local bank, First Tennessee, and to a local investment firm, Morgan Keegan & Co. Inc., to handle the deal. "My mistake was not changing sooner," he said. "I gave credit to NationsBank for being with us at the start, and so I stayed with them longer than I should have. But once we got the right financial team in place, the process went pretty quickly."
By late 1998, the financing was in place. A huge crane moved in to resume working on the project. The wrecking ball was painted like a big, white baseball -- red stitches and all.
At a baseball game this season, Jernigan stopped to watch some children play a game called "Kiddie Striker." It's a sledgehammer game in which youngsters pay to swing a sledgehammer and try to ring a bell. Jernigan watched child after child ring the bell. He decided that it was too easy to be fun. "It's a rip-off," he told members of his staff, and he asked them to make the game free if it was going to be so easy to play.
Dean Jernigan's parents moved to Memphis when their son was in the seventh grade. They didn't have a lot of money. He had three shirts to wear to school all year long.Both of Jernigan's parents worked. His father was a carpenter, and his mother was a saleswoman at Shainberg's. Growing up poor in a Mississippi River town, Dean and his four siblings often had to take care of themselves.
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