Challenge #1 - Memphis

One perk for a college basketball fan is teaching at a school with one of the country’s best basketball programs. At least once a year, I find myself molding the minds of one of the young talents on the team. Typically, classes are huge lectures where everyone gets lost, but I teach during our three-week winter semester, which tends to draw out a huge amount of the athletes who are usually required on campus for practices anyway. These classes are much smaller – instead of hundreds of students, I have maybe forty or so. I like them because they are much more interactive, and yes, because this is usually when I get to teach the basketball players.

I won’t lie to you. It’s rare for a basketball player to get better than a C in Statistics. Truthfully, it’s rare for anyone to get better than a C in my class. It’s not an easy course, but basketball players have daily practices with a very demanding coach, and so I would be surprised if I had one do better than average.

What becomes a test of my conscience is when they are doing below average, but they need to pass in order to stay on the team.

As it happened, I got not one but TWO basketball players in my winter Statistics class one year. One was a benchwarmer but the other was a bona fide star! I was so excited…until the first quiz, and he not only failed it but also got a 13. Seriously, a 13! Out of eight questions, he got one right, and I suspected it might have been sheer luck.

I had him see me during the break mid-class.

“Look,” I told him, “you failed the quiz.”

He dropped his head. “Yeah, I kinda figured.”

“Did you not have time to study?” I asked. “Practicing too hard?”

“I don’t know. I just don’t get any of this stuff,” he admitted.

I told him my office hours, but he just shook his head and said it would interfere with practice. I debated on staying late just for him, but with my wife’s divorce threat still fresh on my mind, I decided against it just in case she wasn’t kidding. I told him I would try to think of something and to see me after class.

During the second part of the class, I handed back the quizzes to review them. The average quiz score was somewhere in the 70s, which is pretty normal for the first quiz and for the class in general. Like I said, not easy stuff.

As I was handing back the quizzes, however, I saw one that got 100. Not having graded them myself (but don’t worry, my TA was a prematurely balding young man as opposed to the “twinkie” my wife was claiming would come between us), I was shocked. I am actually not sure I ever had someone get a perfect score on any of my quizzes. In fact, I kind of prided myself on that.

The culprit was even more surprising. We will call her “Helen”, for that was the nickname my wife gave her later on, which is a whole other story. So anyway, this Helen raised her hand when I called out her name, and I saw it belonged to the tiny, adorable blonde in the class. I say “the” because she was one of the only females, and of the few there were, she was the only one I could describe as tiny and adorable. And blonde for that matter.

The Benchwarmer and the Star were sitting near her, and I kept noticing that the Benchwarmer kept stealing covert glances at Helen. And that’s when it struck me.

I asked Helen for a private word after class, while I had the two basketball players wait outside my office. I congratulated her on her victory, which she took graciously and then I asked if she would volunteer to tutor the basketball players. Even though the Benchwarmer had done okay on the quiz, I figured he’d get the Star to agree to it just to spend time with Helen outside of class. Thankfully, she agreed so I asked the boys to come in and ran the idea by them. They made arrangements for tutoring to start at 10pm every night when practice let out, and I patted myself on the back for my smart thinking.

Later, the basketball coach, in what would become one of the most glorious moments of my life, patted me on the back literally for helping his team. As it turned out, Helen wasn’t just a Statistics whiz, but she also excelled in Economics, English, French, Accounting, Finance…the list goes on. She informally became the official tutor of the team and wound up saving a few of them from probation. But again, another story.

Anyway, the Star wound up with a C in my class, and the Benchwarmer got a B, which is more than I expect from even my non-athlete students. I called the Star into my office on the last day of class to give him the good news. He was genuinely thrilled because the class was a requirement and thanked me for saving his butt. Thinking of my wife’s recent challenge, I said he can thank me by giving me a good recommendation for a long weekend trip where there’s a balance of history and fun.

“Well, you can visit my hometown. There’s lots of history there, and it ain’t too far away so it’s good for a weekend.”

Stifling the urge to correct his grammar (the result of my wife’s constant nagging of my own), I asked him where his hometown was.

“Memphis,” he replied. “For history, check out Graceland. For fun, go to Beale Street. And make sure you eat at Rendez-Vous.”

Perfect! Graceland would certainly constitute as history by my wife’s standards, but I was a big fan of Elvis’ songs so I knew I was much less likely to die of boredom this way. And it would be amusing to imagine my wife listening to jazz music in some smoky café on Beale Street.

When I got home, I told my wife about the idea, and she readily agreed. The next month, she had a long weekend because of Presidents’ Day, and I didn’t have lectures on Mondays so off we went to Memphis.

I booked us at the Peabody because of the history, or so I told Regina, but I really wanted to see the famous ducks. The ducks would emerge from their penthouse digs, led by a conductor, and make their way to a little fountain in the lobby where they would merrily play all day until the duck conductor led them back. Not a bad life for those ducks. And not too bad for me, as the duck fountain had a close proximity to the bar. And then even better, my wife said that the ducks held an historical appeal to her as well. Two birds, one stone…no pun intended.

We decided to spend the next day together, strolling the surprisingly small and clean city, stopping to browse the shops and have a bite to eat. We took the Star’s recommendation and tried Rendez-Vous. It took some convincing for Regina, who up until that night, I’m not even sure I ever saw her eat ribs. Let me tell you, there’s nothing more appealing than a woman who digs into a basket of ribs with zest. And boy, did she ever! The smell was incredible, and despite the hole-in-the-wall setting of the place, I spied pictures on the wall of famous athletes and past US Presidents. I tried to convince Regina that this constituted history, but she wasn’t having any of it.

And so the last day was our cross-training day as I thought of it. I would go to Graceland, and she would hang out on Beale Street.

The hotel called me a cab, and I took the ride to Graceland wondering if I would see the Elvis fanatics you always see in Las Vegas. Then my mind drifted to thinking about how I could convince Regina that Las Vegas was historical. I’d probably have to see the Hoover Dam, I thought to myself.

“Where are you from?” asked my cab driver.

I told him I lived near DC, and he perked up, saying he had family there. We talked about some local spots in our nation’s capital before I asked him how he came to live in Memphis.

“Well, I grew up here, and I suppose this is where I’m meant to be.”

“Have you always lived here then?” I asked.

Then he told me about how his parents moved him up north at one point because of the prominent racism and segregation in Memphis.

“It was terrible,” he said. “I was forced to go to an all-Black school. They didn’t want us going to the good schools.”

I asked him why he would ever come back with such a bad experience growing up. He shrugged and said, “It’s home. It may not be perfect, but I love it anyway. I doubt there’s a city in the world that at one point didn’t have its shame.”

As I digested that, we pulled up to Graceland, where a shuttle would take me from the museum part to the actual house.

“Here you are,” he said. Then he added, “You know, a lot of people didn’t like Elvis because they said he danced too much like a Black guy. Guess it goes to show you.”

“Yeah, people can be fickle,” I said.

“Our whole history is,” he stated as I got out. I watched him drive off and felt genuinely curious for the first time in my entire life about history.

My experience at Graceland wasn’t as historically enlightening. I did learn that Elvis had hideous taste in interior decorating, but then I thought about my parents’ home and wondered if I could chalk that up to the 70s. A lot of rooms had televisions with him performing, and as I watched him gyrating in a way that is probably considered tame by today’s standards, I thought back to the cab driver. I thought about history and its varying shame and glories and found myself thinking about where we could go next so I could learn more. My wife had inadvertently succeeded in piquing my interest in History.

When I got back to the hotel, I discovered that I had inadvertently piqued her interest in day drinking.

“There wasn’t much else to do. I felt so awkward being by myself so I had a drink to relax me, and I must admit, it was nice. But I got kind of bored.”

Disappointed, I asked her where she wanted to have dinner, and she replied without hesitation, “Rendez-Vous!”

I knew then that both of us had been slightly converted.

Special thanks to the Star of my favorite basketball team!