Lessons From a Losing Locker Room

hancy Carr, who had a good performance until misplaying a punt with less than three minutes to go in the game, sits on a table outside the Tiger locker room. His head is down, his uniform and pads half on, half off. He never looks up as I walk past him.

Inside the sprawling locker room in the Shoemaker athletic complex, the silence is frightening. Nearly 100 men, counting coaches and trainers, in various stages of showering and dressing, but not one word. The quiet is broken only by the soft splash of water. Several players sit alone with their heads down. They are probably crying. Maybe not sobbing, but mourning deeply.

Suddenly Lou Esposito, the 6-5, 325-pound sophomore, raises his head and bellows. He wants a pair of scissors to cut the tape from his hands and feet. No one responds. The silence returns. Esposito lowers his head again.

Losing locker rooms are not always like this. Some teams accept defeat and move on. Players often will be a little more quiet than usual, but sometimes that is more out of habit or fear of what the coaches will think.

The Memphis locker room following Cincinnati's 20-17 victory is morbid. This team came to Ohio believing they could beat Cincinnati. They gave an effort that no coach could have faulted. But in the end they didn't play well enough to win. A holding call negated a touchdown. A missed tackle led to a 62-yard punt return. A twisting, turning, extra-effort run led to a fumble four yards short of the winning touchdown. And finally a wind-aided punt went over the head of Chancy Carr and rolled to the 5-yard line. Leaving Carr, who caught five passes for 58 yards, and his team with a silent locker room and a long flight home.

"Show me a good loser, and I'll show you a loser," the late Cubs manager Leo Durocher is supposed to have said.

Head coach Rip Scherer seems pleased when I recount my locker-room experience. He thinks he understands.

"That gives me reason to believe that we can be good -- that we can be successful this year and in years to come," he says. "It's more important to them now. When it's not that important, it doesn't hurt that much. But when you invest your heart and soul into something and come up short, it hurts more."

Daniel Gomez is a fifth-year senior. At 23 he is one of the team's oldest players. "This team reminds me of my freshman season," he says. "We just need something to get us going."

Gomez was a freshman in 1992. That year Memphis began its season by losing its first three games by a total of seven points. After the third loss, the players walked out on head coach Chuck Stobart, then, after two days of negotiations with university president Lane Rawlins, went back to work and promptly won five games in a row. They finished 6-5.

Gomez is quick to point out that this team does not need a boycott. In fact, the big tackle from Joliet, Illinois, is convinced that Rip Scherer and his staff have this team moving in the right direction. The players believe in what they are doing. That's why the loss at Cincinnati hurt so badly. They were convinced that their first conference game provided them with the opportunity to jump-start the season. Instead they walked off the field with their third three-point loss of the year.

Teams reach turning points. The pressure of losing mounts. The 1992 team responded by striking, then used the unity developed by that action to win six of the final eight games. The 1997 team will not strike. The guess here is that they will bounce back from this setback and salvage the season. To accomplish a winning season they would have to win five of the final six games. That is possible, but unlikely for a program which is 8-19 over the past three years.

Still I learned something from that funeral-like locker room in Cincinnati. These guys have an emotional investment in Tiger football, more than I have seen in the six years I have covered the program. Never mind that they don't receive the greatest support from hometown fans. Never mind that the school hasn't won seven games in a season since 1976. These cats have faith, and that alone will take you a long way.

Two weeks ago, after a small crowd watched loss number three against Minnesota, I wrote words that are heretical for true Tiger fans: "If the current athletic administration and coaching staff cannot get the program off this plateau of medio-crity which has lasted for more than two decades, it may be time to give up football and spend the energy somewhere else."

That was before I experienced the baptism of that losing locker room in Cincinnati.

I still believe that the athletic department at the University of Memphis has accepted losing football for far too long. I still think they need to promote the games to more people. But they can't give up football. Not while they are still capable of putting together a team that plays this hard and cares this deeply.

These Tigers can win. If not this year, the next. Almost every indispensable player on the team -- Mike McKenzie, Caspor Stiles, Marquis Bowling, and most of the defensive starters, along with Richie Floyd, Damien Dodson, Boo Blevins, and Bernard Oden -- should return next year. Only nine points separate them from a 4-1 record right now.

I looked despair square in the face in that Cincinnati locker room. Now I'm a believer.

Changing Faces

Zack McMillin is the new Tiger basketball beat writer at The Commercial Appeal. McMillin, 25, is a graduate of Skyview Academy and Vanderbilt University. He is also, we're proud to say, a former Flyer intern. The Tiger basketball writer is arguably the most high-profile job in the CA sports department, but the position has been a hot potato lately. McMillin will be the third reporter on that beat since Lynn Zinser left at the end of the 1993-94 season.

McMillin had been covering Memphis prep sports for the daily, and an incident last week involving prized basketball recruit Paris London provided a nice segue into the Tiger basketball season. London, a senior at Hamilton High School, has been accused of striking the mother of his infant child in a dispute that also involved the player's current girlfriend. As a parting shot, London, who has narrowed his college choices to Arkansas, Cincinnati, and Memphis, told McMillin, "If this gets all blown out of proportion, you can forget about me going to Memphis."

Well, here's hoping we see you in Cincinnati, big guy.