In Need of a Showcase Just because the Tigers are in the midst of a losing season doesn’t mean basketball is on the skids in Memphis. High school basketball is enjoying one of its best years in recent memory. Hamilton, Raleigh Egypt, and White Station are possibly the three best teams in the state, and each has at least a couple of future major college starters. Unfortunately, these teams are not getting the city-wide exposure they deserve. This week is a perfect example. Hamilton, Raleigh Egypt, and White Station will all be in action in the regional tournament, with a likely final pairing involving two of them. But the games will take place at Hamilton’s gym. That is an unfair home-court advantage for Hamilton and a poor showcase for all that talent. So was last Friday’s district finals at Wooddale High School — a situation which featured a power outage, cars parked all over a residential neighborhood, and fans spilling over onto the floor in the final minute of the game. Instead of cramming a few thousand people into badly ventilated high school gymnasiums and parking them on wooden bleachers for the tournaments, why not use the Mid-South Coliseum, with acres of parking and 10,000 comfortably padded seats? With a little promotion, the finals would probably outdraw most University of Memphis games. It’s a fair bet that more Memphis basketball fans have heard of White Station’s Ernest Shelton and Raleigh Egypt’s Scooter McFadgon than whoever happens to be starting at guard these days for the Memphis Tigers. Give the preps a decent place to play their tournaments and maybe some of the interest will carry over next year to The Pyramid. Down and Dirty Although it is certainly possible, even as we write, that circumstances could change the fall lineup of presidential candidates, it is much better than even money that we’re looking at a battle royal of Gore vs. Bush vs. Buchanan. And even if Pitchfork Pat, the likely nominee of the splinter (and splintering) Reform Party, isn’t allowed into the national televised debates, we’re still going to be in for it. Both Al Gore and George W. Bush are talented, driven men who represent the majority sentiment of the Democratic and Republican parties, respectively. Each has enough canned slogans to stock the shelves with stale rhetoric from now till Kingdom Come. And each, in his battle with an insurgent of his own party, has demonstrated a willingness to Do What It Takes to overcome an opponent, even if that means the blatant distortion of his record. (Bush, or at least his network of surrogates, has amassed the worst offenses —notably, for a barrage of telephone calls to South Carolinians telling them, among other things, that rival John McCain had been set up with concubines and a family during his captivity by the tender, loving North Vietnamese.) Even if McCain or Democratic challenger Bill Bradley should, by some unforeseen reversal, win out, they, too, have been forced to hone their weapons and adopt the slice-and-dice philosophy of campaigning. We take this consolation. Arguably, no cause, however noble — from the spread of the Great Religions to the exploration of America to the expansion of the Internet — has ever succeeded without a mean streak in the middle of it. Why should presidential campaigning be any different?