'We've Taken the Greed out of Sports'

Yet, there was baseball, which gave Jernigan a place to go, a community, a connection to something larger than himself. "We spent so much time on the sandlots," Jernigan said. "My parents worked, but they always knew where I was because I was always at the park. My Memphis was a wonderful place to grow up. You have to put 'wonderful' in quotes because, with the discrimination we had in the deep South, it was an awful place at the same time. But, as far as my little world, it was a Happy Days kind of world."

As an adult, Jernigan is technologically savvy and up-to-date. Email is his preferred method of communication. Nobody is hired -- at his ball club or at Storage USA -- without being matched to a position by a Meyers-Briggs exam (Jernigan is an "INTJ"). Storage USA has outstripped its competitors in large part because it's more wired, more connected, and more current than any other outfit.

And yet Jernigan is also thoroughly nostalgic. He is a man who not only remembers what it was like to grow up in the 1950s in Memphis but wishes that he could re-create the best parts today. At the very least, he's determined to re-create the baseball part.

In AutoZone Park, Jernigan has designed a baseball park that tweaks his own memories and that conjures the past: It is all angles and quirks and intimacy. Although the Redbirds hired the famed stadium architecture firm HOK Sport of Kansas City to consult on the design of the park -- and the Jernigans do say nice things about the firm -- it wasn't HOK that gave the place its distinctive feel. "Architects can tell you how many points of sale you need, how wide the seats need to be," Dean Jernigan says. "But they can't put the soul in a ballpark. We had to do that."

Jernigan insisted on 7-foot outfield walls so that outfielders could leap up and bring home-run balls back into play. He insisted that the dugouts, the clubhouses, and the press box feel major-league. The Redbirds solicited designs for the outfield clock -- someone suggested shaping it like a huge guitar -- but scrapped them all for a design that Jernigan remembered from Camden Yards.

And then there's the 40-foot statue of a baseball player who stands astride the plaza entryway, a left-handed hitter poised to swing. Originally, before the franchise had settled on the "Redbirds" nickname, it needed a temporary logo. The Jernigans used a sketch of an old-style player that their advertising agency happened across one day. The player became so wildly popular with the community, such a perfect symbol of everything that the franchise stood for, that he now stands astride the park. Fans call him "Nostalgia Man." "He really tapped into something," Jernigan said. "He is one of the most recognized symbols we have."

It's away from the park, though, in the Redbirds burgeoning programs to bring baseball back to the inner city, where Jernigan finds his deepest baseball satisfaction. One Wednesday in August, he presided over Storage USA's quarterly board meeting and then attended an end-of-summer dinner for volunteer coaches in the team's Returning Baseball to the Inner-City (RBI) program. After listening throughout most of the program, he asked for the microphone, then made a request: He wanted to hear stories -- particular stories about particular kids.

Last year, a coach told a story about a girl who, after getting her free lunch, politely sat on the bleachers with the untouched plate of food on her lap.

"Why aren't you eating your lunch?" the coach asked.

"Because I'm taking it home for my brother and sister."

Another coach told a story about a boy who tugged at the coach's jersey and asked him where he could find the "top of the third."

"The coach had told him that the team would get ice cream,'' Jernigan recounted, "at the top of the third."

Sometimes, Kristi Jernigan wonders if, despite her husband's sincerity, all of this doesn't sound a little too cheesy. "Sometimes I chide him that he can sound trite," she says. "This idea of saving the world through baseball. But Dean knows what it's like. He sees himself in some of these children. He thinks that he has an obligation to help them have the same opportunities that he had."

Jernigan is no critic of capitalism. He believes in profit. On behalf of his shareholders at Storage USA, he would like to make as much money, as much profit, as he possibly can. His larger point is that people confuse the places where capitalism is appropriate and those where it is not. He wants the Redbirds organization to be as businesslike and as efficient as possible. He also wants every penny to go back into the town. "Baseball is different," he said. "It's a monopoly, like an airport. I think that if you are the holder of a monopoly, of a community asset like that, then you have an obligation not to run it just for the benefit of yourself."