So this is what $751,000 buys these days in Memphis: a big house or the Raleigh Springs Mall.

Even in a real estate crisis, some numbers jump out at you. At that price, you might think the mall on Austin Peay Highway is closed or bulldozed, like the old Mall of Memphis.

But the doors of the main entrance were open at 8 a.m. this week, and the woman mopping the floor said walkers can come in at 9 a.m. and shoppers at 10 a.m. There are about 30 tenants listed on the building directory, including fast-food restaurants, sporting-goods stores, jewelers, and a Malco 12-screen theater with five screens currently in use. A Sears that was not part of the sale remains open. But Dillard's and JC Penney are gone, their signs stripped off the anchor stores, leaving only the shadow of their names. An expressway-style flyover provides quick access from Raleigh's main drag to Interstate 40 and newer suburbs.

The mall is a symptom of what ails Memphis. There are vast empty spaces from Raleigh to Hickory Hill to the fairgrounds to Overton Square to the Pyramid looking to hook up with Bass Pro, Target, Trader Joe's, or some other retailer. But planners say there is a simple reason why there's not much action.

"There is way too much retail for this community to support," said Robert Lipscomb, head of the Memphis Division of Housing and Community Development. "There is not enough demand to support all these malls."

Less than a mile from the Raleigh Springs Mall on Austin Peay Highway there is a Kmart store and a Walmart. Lipscomb, along with the Greater Memphis Chamber of Commerce and neighborhood leaders, tried to get the Walmart to move into the mall, but Walmart could not find a user for its current building, so it is staying put.

Dexter Muller, senior vice president of community development for the chamber, said Memphis malls have been cannibalizing one another for years as the population moves east and south.

"The beginning of the end for Raleigh Springs was when Wolfchase Galleria opened," he said. "The next new mall blows out everything behind it."

Muller and Lipscomb said Raleigh's "fundamentals" are still good. There are more than 100,000 people who live between Frayser and Raleigh. The Raleigh Community Council is one of the strongest neighborhood groups in the city.

"Raleigh is a diverse community with stable incomes and good neighborhoods," Lipscomb said. "We've got to make it work."

The city has hired a planning firm, Looney Ricks Kiss, to help research the market and figure out what to do. Federal stimulus money could play a role. Muller said Southland Mall in Whitehaven has survived the loss of key anchors, but battling decline and attracting new businesses "is like trench warfare." If neighborhood residents don't "buy everything they can within the neighborhood" then retailers fail, he said.

Several remedies already have been tried, including the movie theater, which was lured by an $11 million investment by the mall's previous owner. Lipscomb notes that multiplex theaters have had crowd problems recently that can drive away more business than they attract. The current mall owner, Whichard Real Estate based in North Carolina, has not announced its plans. A Memphian who is familiar with the company from when it owned Southland Mall calls them "speculators."

"I don't know what the best prospects are," Lipscomb said. "Probably some kind of retail unique to the area. That's one reason to bring in the outside expertise."

Kevin Brooks, president of the neighborhood council, has lived in Raleigh since 1997. He and his wife raised three children there. He hopes the new owners, whom he has not yet met, can attract an anchor tenant. The mall is "beautiful on the inside" despite little patronage.

"Something like a Target store would conform with the status of Raleigh," he said. "We don't have a whole lot of low-income areas, and we don't have many high-income residents. We are pretty much a good representation of Memphis in the middle class. We do have the perception of being a violent area, but if you look at police reports, they actually pulled police out of our area and sent them to other areas. I hate to see the news pointing fingers at Raleigh."

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Ole Miss fans figured it out a long time ago. Good football teams and great quarterbacks come and go, but an excellent picnic spread in the Grove never disappoints.

The rest of us are catching on. Food is the new football. Me and my remote control used to live in ESPN Land. We hung out with Boomer, Matt, Tom, Dan, Sterling, Mike, Jimmy, and lantern-jawed Bill Cowher. We talked about Tom and Peyton and "length" and "athleticism" and the fine points of the nickel D. We lived for the play of the day and those lists of the 50 greatest of all time.

Something happened. My wife set the remote on Channel 69, miles and miles from ESPN Land, in a place called the Food Network. The superstars were perky Rachael Ray, blabby Paula Deen, gorgeous Giada De Laurentiis, spiky Guy Fieri, and Memphians Pat and Gina Neely. Every time I came home, the Barefoot Contessa was smiling at me and whipping up a tasty plate of something or other for her grateful slouch of a husband and, vicariously, for me and the wife.

Last weekend, we crossed the Rubicon, reached the tipping point, made the break. It helped that our favorite football teams, Michigan and Tennessee, recipients of our children and our treasure, lost and did it nearly simultaneously. Michigan's loss was especially painful, because it clearly won't be the last one this year and the weather in Ann Arbor was cold and rainy. Half the crowd in their maize-colored slickers looked like they would much rather have been warm and cozy inside somewhere eating a corned beef sandwich from the famous Zingerman's Deli.

As for us, we were pigging out on a tasty pork shoulder from Corky's and a side of homemade slaw, so the pain of defeat was, well, practically painless. At the party we went to that night, nobody was talking about UT's blocked field goals or Michigan's demise. Why would they when there was a dining-room table heaped with a spread of baked cheeses, cakes, sausages, and dips that would have made Martha proud? When the talk turned to movies, Where the Wild Things Are was widely panned but foodie-favorite Julie & Julia was still getting raves.

On Sunday, the lower channels were packed with pro football from noon to nearly midnight, but it was too pretty to stay inside and the Titans were off and, so far this year, awful. While the NFL was drumming up fans by playing a game in London, we were wondering what David Thornton, the executive chef at Miss Cordelia's, would do with a piece of Alaskan salmon we had given him to cook for three couples. He did not disappoint us, burying the salmon under a pile of apple salsa and resting it on a bed of parsnips. The man deserves his own cooking show, as do the estimable food bloggers for this and other publications. In the age of YouTube, they could instantly save us from the stultifying boredom of those political talking heads, preachers, and sales pitches in the television ghetto between Fox and ESPN where WKNO and WYPL deliver what passes for local programming.

On Monday Night Football, the Washington Redskins were featured despite their losing record. The Washington Post reported that morning that the Redskins are failing to sell out their stadium for the first time in years. They lost again, and the game reportedly was a bore.

But what a night it was on the Food Network! You should have seen the battle of the Dr. Seuss cakes in the form of Horton, the Grinch, and the Cat in the Hat. The suspense was unbearable when the Cat in the Hat cake had to go back into the kitchen for repairs — and under the 15-minute rule, no less! If they had dropped that sucker, it would have been all over. Talk about a clutch performance. It was better than the battle of the Iron Chefs.

An hour later, Guy Fieri was in Cleveland, where a grill cook was preparing smoked salmon BLTs and barbecue nachos. The artistry was amazing, the commentary superb, the photography almost pornographic in detail.

I was struck by a sudden desire for more salmon and, against all logic, a road trip to Cleveland.

Final score: Food, 4; Football, nothing.

Elsewhere in this issue, we Flyer staffers offer our two cents' worth to the new mayor. Dick Hackett and Jim Rout are former mayors who moved out of Memphis after leaving office but whose political instincts are still sharp. What do they think the next city mayor should do?

By way of introduction, Hackett, 60, is head of the Children's Museum of Memphis. He was elected mayor of Memphis in 1982 in a special election when he was just 33 years old. It was the end of the era of white men in suits. The majority of city council members were white males old enough to be his father, and none of them had active mayoral aspirations.

Rout, 67, is head of the Mid-South Fair. He was elected mayor of Shelby County in 1994 as the consensus Republican candidate in a crowded field of Democrats and independents in a Republican landslide year. He succeeded charismatic Bill Morris and preceded lawyerly A C Wharton, the odds-on favorite in Thursday's election.

The political landscape is different today. We have more mayoral churn than ever — probably three different city mayors in three months this year and possibly three different county mayors between next week and next September. We have more media exposure, debates, and commentary than ever. But fewer people care. Both Hackett and Rout predict Wharton will win and that the turnout could be half the 254,000 who voted in the 1982 special election. Memphians, says Hackett, "are apathetic about their own city." To Rout, Willie Herenton's resignation was the big story, and the election is anticlimactic.

Flyer: What advice would you give the next city mayor?

Hackett: "I think the interim mayor has the authority to start over and create their own staff and their own identity. Normally, you want to be aggressive with an abundance of caution. But these are not ordinary times. I had to be cautious. I was young, and if you really mishandled something you didn't have time to recoup. Now I don't think we have the time. It has to be a bold two years. We have to be aggressive, and I think that will be rewarded."

Rout: "If there was ever a time in the history of Memphis that we need a particularly strong vision, it is now. It is not business as usual. The problems of the economy, taxes and finance, crime, and school dropouts going to prison call for a clear vision of where somebody thinks they can take this community."

What is the easiest mistake for a new mayor to make?

Hackett: "Getting too wrapped up in the fanfare of being the mayor. Some people just can't handle that."

Rout: "I had 16 years on the county commission. I knew the budget inside out, but I had to learn to think like a mayor and not like a commissioner, to shift gears."

What was the best advice you got?

Hackett: "It came from [former Memphis mayor] Wyeth Chandler. Keep your sense of humor and be yourself. Don't let the job or the people around you change you. It sounds simple, but it's easy to allow that job to consume you in such a way that you try to be everything to everybody. I did not like the entourage part of being mayor. I was a husband and a dad too."

Rout: "You will never ever be as popular again as you are the night of the election, because when you start showing leadership and making decisions there are going to be people who are not going to go along with you."

Does consolidation have a chance in the next few years?

Hackett: "No. I don't think it can be pulled off. You almost have to write two years off because the unknown is the next county mayor and where they will stand on the issue."

Rout: "Not in the next few years or in my lifetime. As long as the law requires it to carry in both the city and the county outside the city of Memphis, it is going to be very difficult before credibility is reestablished. It is a huge waste of time and resources to continue to deal with this issue at this time given the other problems that we have."

It's becoming clearer every week that by his fourth term as mayor of Memphis, Willie Herenton was in it for the money.

In May 2004, five months into his fourth term and embattled on many fronts, Herenton asked finance director Joseph Lee to process his request for a payment of $72,000 for 108 "carryover vacation days not taken during the last term due to the nature of my responsibilities as mayor for the city of Memphis."

If you're scoring, that's 27 days of unused vacation a year for a mayor who boasted of being on the job every day and never taking vacations, although many Memphians would have loved to have sent him on an extended one.

Herenton made similar requests each year for the next five years to be paid amounts ranging from $7,333 to $14,291 for unused vacation. In all, he collected $132,000 in extra pay on top of his salary.

All of this and more came to light and to saturation television coverage Tuesday at the Memphis City Council, including copies of the former mayor's W-2 Wage and Tax Statements to the Internal Revenue Service. It's a new day at City Hall for public disclosure, and the trend is likely to continue no matter who wins the special election this month. The lights are on, and the cat is out of the bag.

Herenton's W-2 forms show that he earned $139,148 in 2003. In 2004, he bumped that to $230,853; in 2005 to $165,428; in 2006 to $169,672; in 2007 to $171,019; and in 2008 to $184,143. It is not clear why the amounts vary beyond the sum of the mayor's salary and payments for unused vacation or what the other sources of income were.

Herenton's fourth term was a turning point for the worse. He kicked off the year with an angry speech at a New Year's breakfast. He denounced members of the City Council. He openly worried about an FBI investigation of an MLGW bond deal. The Commercial Appeal and Jack Sammons, then a council member and now chief administrative officer for interim mayor Myron Lowery, called for a Watergate-style investigation. In June 2004, Herenton succeeded on his second try in replacing Herman Morris with Lee, only weeks after Lee, as finance director, signed off on Herenton's vacation-days bonus.

And the mayor, who had trounced John Willingham three to one in the low-turnout 2003 election, apparently thought he was underpaid. The burr under his saddle was Morris. Herenton appointed Morris in 1997 and recommended that his salary be increased to more than $200,000. It was set slightly below that. Former councilman Rickey Peete proposed raising the mayor's salary to $200,000, but the council, including Lowery, balked.

In 2003, Morris and Herenton fell out and the mayor declined to reappoint him. In the aftermath, Herenton disclosed the details of what he called the "vulgar" severance package Morris proposed for himself, saying it was more appropriate for a corporate CEO than a public employee.

What the public and the City Council did not know until this week was that while Herenton was pointing his finger at Morris, he was secretly padding his own bank account with vacation pay. The payments to the mayor and CAO Keith McGee were known only to the finance director and a few others but did not come before the council for approval.

"I'm sure this is not the case, but if you wanted to hide it from scrutiny you could not have done a better job," Councilman Jim Strickland told personnel director Lorene Essex and finance director Roland McElrath, who were not in those jobs in 2004 when the payments began but did sign off on the later ones.

Herenton was not the first mayor to sweeten his paycheck, although he is apparently the first to seek it retroactively while he was in office and only for himself and his CAO. Former mayor Dick Hackett got paid for unused vacation days after he left office in 1991. Hackett collected $50,000 for vacation days plus $1,269 in "bonus day" pay and $20,623 for unused sick leave. His division directors and chief administrative officer got smaller payments. Shelby County government adopted a policy of paying the mayor a salary and nothing else beginning with Bill Morris some 30 years ago.

In a Monday editorial titled "Sucker Punch," The Washington Post said the Herenton-Cohen 2010 congressional race "gets ugly" and Willie Herenton is "jumping into the gutter with low-road tactics that divide rather than enlighten."

The editorial took Shelby County commissioner and Herenton supporter Sidney Chism to task for saying the 9th Congressional District seat "was set aside for people who look like me. It wasn't set aside for a Jew or a Christian. It was set aside so that blacks could have representation." The Post says "someone forgot to tell the district's free-thinking voters" who sent Cohen to Washington in 2006 and 2008.

Or maybe them big-city Yankee editorial writers ought to take off their rose-colored glasses. Chism got sucker-punched for plain speaking. If his statement is not literally correct, it is essentially correct, and history backs him up.

Whatever it is today, Memphis was no racial utopia in the events leading to the tangled creation of the 9th district.

Race has been at the core of every major Memphis redistricting, annexation, and runoff-election decision for at least 50 years. The 9th is the only district in Tennessee located within one county and the only one ever to have a black representative. It was eliminated in 1973 based on the 1970 census.

In the 1974 congressional election, white flight from school busing, the Watergate scandal, and a big increase in black voter registration allowed Harold Ford Sr. to beat a white Republican opponent by only 774 votes out of 135,000 votes. A tweak of the district lines here or there and it might have been different. The district was recreated as a majority-black district with a preponderance of Democrats in 1983 based on the 1980 census.

Prior to Ford's election, it was common knowledge that in a racially mixed city like Memphis, elections could be rigged in favor of white candidates by carefully drawing district lines, selective annexation, and runoff elections. In 1966, civil rights pioneer Vasco Smith, who died this week, said, "We don't stand a ghost of a chance in this town when it comes to running at large." Eventually, the federal courts agreed and, in the process, officially acknowledged the impact of racial bloc voting. In 1991, at the urging of the U.S. Justice Department, a judge in Memphis struck down runoff elections for the specific reason that they penalized black candidates in mayoral and at-large city council elections. Which was what blacks had been saying for decades.

The immediate beneficiary, of course, was Herenton, who won the 1991 election with 49.4 percent. An indirect beneficiary was Steve Cohen, who won the 2006 Democratic primary with about one third of the vote before winning the general election with 60 percent.

The former mayor and educator knows better than anyone the impact of race on elections, annexations, housing patterns, and public school enrollment. As a principal and superintendent, he witnessed white flight from the school system and did what he could to slow it down by supporting optional schools. He also took the heat for closing several black schools.

He believed in integration, and he knew public support would dissipate for an all-black system. In one of his first interviews as mayor in 1992, he told me the same thing about the city as a whole, if it went the way of Detroit, and he correctly predicted that white enrollment in the schools would drop below 10 percent. It is now 7 percent.

Herenton the unifier has been forgotten by most people, including, it often seems, himself. His horrible decisions and word choices had a lot to do with it.

In an interview quoted in The New York Times, which like The Washington Post has taken a fancy to this story, he said "to know Steve Cohen is to know that he really does not think very much of African Americans" and that Cohen "has played the black community well."

Cohen fired back in a letter to the Times published last week, noting that he was reelected in 2008 with nearly 80 percent, foreshadowing, he wrote, the election of Barack Obama.

"We've come a long way in Memphis, and ours is a story of post-racial politics."

We'll see, and the national media will be watching.

Jackie Welch sold a lot of suburban real estate for other people during the real estate boom. Now he's selling his own office in the heart of Germantown.

Harold Byrd and Bank of Bartlett were big lenders to blue-chip builders. Now they're scrambling to raise private capital in hopes of avoiding intervention by federal regulators.

Fed chairman Ben Bernanke said last week that the recession is probably over, but the predicaments of Welch and Byrd show that the aftershocks will continue for some time in Memphis and its suburbs. Welch Realty has been in business for 46 years; Bank of Bartlett for 29 years. Welch and Byrd are hard-minded, politically active businessmen. Byrd plans to run for county mayor in 2010. Welch has raised money for the last three county mayors, including A C Wharton, who is running in the special election for Memphis mayor in October.

Welch Realty has been a big player in the commercial and residential real estate market in Germantown and southeast Memphis for nearly 30 years. Welch sold several school sites to the county board of education, thousands of land parcels to homebuilders, and commercial sites along Winchester and Germantown Parkway. His personal loans to former city councilman Edmund Ford's funeral home were the focus of a federal criminal investigation in 2008. Ford was acquitted.

Last week, Welch put his office building on Wolf River Boulevard near Germantown Road on the market. The asking price is $1.6 million. He hopes to stay in it as a tenant for three more years. He said two things prompted him to sell: "One, we're not doing any business, and two, the doctors and their offices have run the prices up out here."

The office is near Campbell Clinic and other medical facilities. Welch said "one or two patients a day wander in here."

Welch said his company will stay in business, but he doesn't expect things to improve much until 2011, and he sees no return to the high-flying days of a few years ago. In an interview, he ticked off several names of builders he worked with who have gone out of business — Beezer, Matthews, Sweeney, Bronze, Vander Schaaf, Edwards.

"The ones who are left are working out of debt," Welch said. "Really, what we're doing is working for the banks."

He said the underlying problems were subprime loans, loose lending standards, and packaged mortgage products.

"Thieves got us into this situation, but we all benefited from it," he said.

Bank of Bartlett, a $435 million family-run bank, was listed last week as being in the "danger zone" in a report issued by msnbc.com and the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University and first reported in The Memphis Business Journal. The bank is in the bottom-10 percentile in its peer group of 1,200 banks in several categories of the FDIC's latest rankings, including net income and capitalization.

"That article caught us by surprise," Byrd said. "We are not under any federal action, but we do recognize that we need to raise capital."

Byrd's mayoral candidacy has a prominent group of supporters, including former county mayor Bill Morris, Anfernee "Penny" Hardaway, Maxine Smith, and Welch. Byrd, head of the University of Memphis Rebounders booster club, was hosting a benefit with basketball coach Josh Pastner on Monday. Byrd said the bank will rebound. It lost $8 million last year and projects a loss of $2 million or less this year. The loans that led to the losses were made in 2006. Of 28 foreclosed homes in the bank's portfolio, 17 have been sold, as has a 90-lot subdivision.

"We're a local bank that lent money to the top folks in the Memphis community," he said. "As they have been stressed, so have we. We've taken our hit and are on the way back up."

Local banks like Bank of Bartlett face special challenges.

"We're all in a tough business right now," said homebuilder Jerry Gillis. "The big banks got TARP money to save the banking system, but the little guys have got to raise capital privately."

A West Tennessee banker who asked not to be identified said finding investors isn't easy.

"They can stand around and wait for the FDIC to close you and get the bank for free," he said. "The Byrds probably have time to work it out because there are so many other banks out there with problems as bad or worse."

Henry Turley has been called a visionary developer in his 40-year career in real estate, but his vision of the old Mid-South Fairgrounds is looking increasingly less likely.

An alternative option — call it the public option, in today's parlance — would have many of the sports elements as Turley's proposal but with a quarterback combo of architect and former city councilman Tom Marshall and Housing and Community director Robert Lipscomb.

On Monday, Turley conceded that he has "no votes" on the Memphis City Council, which will have the final say on which proposal, if any, moves ahead. Among other problems, Turley was out-politicked. Council members and city division directors are friendly to boards and agencies such as the Riverfront Development Corporation and the Center City Commission on which they have representation.

Turley's proposal, called Fair Ground LLC, was chosen as developer last year by the city's appointed fairgrounds reuse committee chaired by Cato Johnson. Former Mayor Willie Herenton confirmed the selection, but his endorsement was never clear even before he left office in July.

In other words, Turley has the half-blessing of an unpopular former mayor and an appointed committee. Backing like that, along with $1, will get you a cup of coffee in Memphis.

Marshall, on the other hand, is a former colleague of interim Mayor Myron Lowery and chief administrative officer Jack Sammons. He had a reputation as an adept compromiser during his nearly two decades on the council. Lipscomb and Marshall have worked closely together on the stalled Bass Pro/Pyramid proposal, and Marshall's firm had a contract with Memphis City Schools under former Superintendent Carol Johnson to do a facilities needs study and design new schools.

Last week, FedEx CEO Fred Smith gave his blessing to the Marshall-Lipscomb fairgrounds plan, and The Commercial Appeal gave it front-page coverage. Turley was "stunned."

Turley (a stockholder in the investment group and member of the board of directors of Contemporary Media Inc., the parent company of the Memphis Flyer) is the co-developer of Harbor Town, South Bluffs, Uptown, and other downtown projects. His Fair Ground partnership includes Art Gilliam, Robert Loeb, Derrick Mashore, Eliot Perry, and Mark Yates.

Both proposals envision a grand entrance on East Parkway, add acres of grass, and keep Liberty Bowl Memorial Stadium. Turley would use any sales tax increment in stadium revenue above a base number for general fairgrounds improvement. If attendance remains flat or falls, there would be no increment.

The public option includes housing on the fairgrounds property but the kind and amount are not specified. Turley's plan has no housing "because we do not want to compete with housing in the surrounding neighborhoods and because we believe the entire Fair Ground should encourage public use."

Turley's proposal includes at least $50 million in "national brand" hotels and retailers such as Target. Small-scale retail, he said, would harm existing Midtown stores and restaurants. Under a financing plan known as a Tourism Development Zone (TDZ), the sales taxes from new development would be used for $75 million in public improvements. Target already has several stores in greater Memphis, and dedicated tax streams mean less tax money for someone else in the recession. The financing of the Lipscomb-Marshall plan is vague, but Lipscomb has backed a TDZ for Bass Pro at the Pyramid and Triangle Noir south of Beale Street.

Youth sports and athletic facilities are central to both proposals. The Kroc Center, financed in large part by a grant from McDonald's founder Ray Kroc, has a piece of property on the west side of the fairgrounds. Neither proposal makes a strong case that additional sports facilities beyond that would be competitive with new mega-fields for soccer and baseball or older playing fields like the ones at the fairgrounds and behind the board of education offices nearby.

The Coliseum eventually comes down in both proposals. Turley said two weeks ago he would replace it with an indoor multi-sports building. Marshall's firm, O.T. Marshall and Associates, drew up futuristic plans for an indoor stadium and covered facilities on the fairgrounds more than 30 years ago. The current plan is to make the fairgrounds greener and cleaner as soon as possible.

Turley said he and his partners have invested $277,000 cash and 5,000 hours of work so far. He said the last city-developed public space was Mud Island River Park, which loses money and is closed half the year. Lipscomb (and now Herenton) said Turley's fees are too high.

College football doesn't need more hurry-up offense. It needs more hurry-up games.

Sunday's nationally televised game between the University of Memphis and Ole Miss started at 2:30 p.m. and ended shortly before 6 p.m. If you parked, walked, arrived on time, stayed for the final ticks of the clock, and battled the traffic jams — admittedly a welcome problem to have at a football game — you put in a five-hour afternoon, six if you tailgated.

The French eat lunch, go home, make love, and smoke a cigarette in less time than that, and there's more action.

The busiest guy on the field was the one in the red shirt charged with halting and starting the game around the commercials. Nothing like 22 finely tuned athletes and a team of officials standing idly at the line of scrimmage for two minutes several times a quarter to shift the crowd's attention to their cell phones. Blessedly, neither team used all of its timeouts in the first half or the game might have ended in darkness.

Hockey and soccer, two sports that get their share of criticism for being un-American and low-scoring, at least keep the puck or ball moving for several minutes at a time. Soccer is basically two 45-minute halves with a 10-minute halftime. Hockey has three 20-minute periods of up-and-down action and two Zamboni breaks.

Televised college and pro football has become the glacier of spectator sports. Nobody watches just one game on television, of course. They switch back and forth between kitchen and television(s), watching two or three or four different games, while keeping an eye on the scroll at the bottom of the flat screen to see who's doing what to whom somewhere else.

The University of Memphis is in a tough spot. There are no more nationally ranked or Southeastern Conference teams on the home schedule this year. Ole Miss fans in red clustered in the north end zone appeared to be outnumbered at least three to one by U of M fans in blue, but 10,000 or so visitors is still a nice bump in a stadium that seats 60,000 and change.

Super-fan Harold Byrd and the Bank of Bartlett hosted 3,000 people for blues and barbecue at a pre-game party at the old cattle barn. "On a Sunday when it was hot as the devil and the game was televised, I was proud of that," Byrd said.

The stadium staff did a good job of getting people in and out. We were out of range of the scalpers and outside the crowded Gate 1 off of Hollywood by 2:15 p.m, through the turnstile at 2:20 p.m., and sweating profusely in our sunny-side seats by 2:25 p.m. (and moved to the abundant empty seats on the shady upper west side by the middle of the first quarter). The concourse was clear, the rest-rooms reasonably clean, and there were plenty of concessions if you didn't want Hawaiian shaved ice. Beer was on sale for the first time at $7 a can, which tends to tamp down on overindulgence. The marching bands did the first of what will surely be 1,000 tributes to the music of Michael Jackson, and the U of M golden girl was the best of the baton twirlers.

The "jumbotron" screen at the south end zone, however, is as outdated as a 24-inch television set. Most of the skyboxes on the east side had tenants, but they're a long way from the field. My colleague Greg Akers, who covered the game, said the press box did not have wireless, and the revamped media room looks like it used to be a visitor's locker room with old wood cubbies and folding chairs. The Americans With Disabilities Act-mandated handicapped seating, the focus of much attention and expense, was at most one-third full. The stadium surroundings leave much to be desired. There are still remnants of the fairgrounds and not much green until you get over to East Parkway. A walk through the Grove (or the very attractive U of M campus) this was not.

Memphis, even if it can't execute a quarterback sneak, has some good players like running back Curtis Steele and defender Deante' Lamar and a decent team. But decent won't be good enough to draw anything close to 45,000 with Tennessee-Martin, Marshall, and UTEP next up on the home schedule. The scalpers' profits will sink like a subprime mortgage, and we'll be bemoaning the lack of traffic jams soon enough.

Memphis police are trying to figure out why an unusually big crowd of teenagers gathered at Malco's Paradiso movie theater in East Memphis Saturday night, causing a swarm of police cars to respond and rattling patrons and neighbors.

The incident has prompted Malco to change its policy toward underage teens being dropped off by their parents. They will no longer be allowed in the building.

Police spokesman Karen Rudolph said an initial report that three squad cars responded was wrong. In fact, 23 cars responded, including every available car in three substations, plus special units. She said the crowd in the parking lot numbered at least 500 people between 7 and 10 p.m., when police began closing entrances on Mendenhall, Sanderlin, and Poplar Avenue.

The Paradiso is a something-for-everyone multiplex that shares the parking lots west of Clark Tower with Houston's, Ben and Jerry's, Whole Foods, McAlister's Deli, and other popular businesses. The center is common ground for different ages, races, high schools, and neighborhoods and is especially popular with teenagers. Patrons are accustomed to lines, traffic snarls, and crowds of kids hanging around outside, but Saturday was different.

Rudolph said one possibility is that two horror movies showing that night were sold out, leaving hundreds of teens with nothing to do and time to kill. But Ann Forbis, who was there for a 7 p.m. movie, is skeptical.

"It takes a lot to rattle my cage, but that rattled me big-time," she said. "We could not go out the exit door, the lobby was packed, and there was an ocean of kids outside and cars cruising in the parking lot. They were not in line and were not there to see a movie. If I had been a parent trying to pick up my girls, I would have been mortified."

As she and two friends walked to their car, they saw a group of young men kneeling on the ground and thought that someone was hurt or performing CPR. When they got closer, they saw "six or eight guys were shooting dice."

Rumors began spreading Saturday night and Sunday. Cyndi Blair, who lives in East Memphis, said people on her neighborhood watch have been talking about a "fight club" outbreak. A man leaving the theater broke up a fight between two girls that was being videotaped. He reported that three security guards were "trying in vain" to tell people to disperse. A police report that night says 10 teens were charged with misconduct for fighting.

Jane Williams, an East Memphis resident, said there's a lot of buzz among neighborhood groups.

"We are now being urged to e-mail Mayor Lowery to see if we can get him to make a public statement and take action. What upsets many of us is that incidents like this in the Paradiso and Ben and Jerry's area have gone unreported for at least six weeks. This is dangerous."

Malco spokesman James Tashie said the crowd was drawn by a promotional flyer sent out by a local disc jockey touting the R-rated horror movies Halloween II and Final Destination.

Malco employees are instructed to card young people and deny them a ticket if they are underage, but teens skirt the policy by having someone else buy a ticket for them.

The flyer from "G. Webb & S.O.H.K." touts "Hanging With The Stars Part 2" at Paradiso "08.29.09."

"We were aware of it [the promotional flyer] and beefed up our security but had no idea it was going to bring in such a large number of underage kids," Tashie said. "Parents are dropping kids off and they are not old enough to go to the movie, so they are out there for two or three hours with nowhere to go."

Malco executives have been meeting about the incident for two days. They say they believe the Paradiso is drawing some of the rougher segments of the crowd that went to the Muvico theater downtown in Peabody Place before it closed. "We are going to hit [the situation] with all the firepower we have, because our investment there is so great," Tashie said. "We don't have car break-ins or muggings. The perception is worse than the reality."

The meeting that sealed the fate of the University of Memphis basketball program with the NCAA cops took place in November 2007.

Basketball fans and the public know only that former Tiger Derrick Rose was questioned about his ACT and SAT scores at that meeting by university officials and coaches. Earlier that year, Rose took the ACT three times in Chicago and the SAT once in Detroit, where he finally made a score that gave him eligibility to play basketball.

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The university took Rose at his word that he didn't have anyone take the test for him, even though entrance test performance over four tries in a short time is as predictable as a bench press, sprint time, or vertical jump. The 2007-2008 season had not started. There was still time to keep Rose off the team, but he played, and the rest is history.

Coach John Calipari, athletic director R.C. Johnson, and President Shirley Raines are taking the heat for the NCAA's decision to strip Memphis of its 38 wins and championship game banner. But Rose is the one who should be on the hot seat. The university's appeal of the NCAA decision has about as much chance as an 80-foot heave. The person who should take the last shot is Rose.

Rose knows what scores he made on the SAT and ACT even though those scores are blacked out in public documents and cannot be released by the testing services without his permission.

Rose knows whether someone took one or more of the tests for him, causing the score to be canceled, which happens to only one out of 6,000 tests.

Rose knows why he took the SAT in Detroit.

Rose knows what Calipari and U of M coaches told him after he had failed to make a high enough score on the ACT three times.

Rose knows what any outside adviser told him about this problem that could make or break his college career, which was his audition for his professional career.

Rose knows what his own handwriting looks like. He knows he could easily disprove or prove the findings of forensic document examiner Lee Ann Harmless in a September 2008 report that concludes he probably had someone else take the SAT.

Rose knows what he was asked and what he answered during that meeting in Memphis in November, which, like the SAT score and the handwriting analysis, has been completely eliminated from the publicly available university response.

Rose knows why he refused to take part in any investigations by the testing service or the NCAA on six occasions in 2008 and 2009.

Rose knows why he didn't answer certified letters from the Educational Testing Service that were sent to his home in Chicago in April and May of 2008 offering him three ways to clear his name. Rose knows why he declined to meet with NCAA investigators in June of 2008, August of 2008, January of 2009, and March of 2009 — all dates before the NCAA sanctions were imposed.

Rose knows that his cooperation, if he has nothing to hide, could have taken the heat off the University of Memphis. And he knows that if he does have something to hide, his cooperation could identify others who deserve blame or vindication.

Rose knows why his only "explanation" to date consists of a few brief comments saying he took his own tests.

It would be wildly inaccurate to call the University of Memphis Rose's alma mater and a stretch to suggest he was a student athlete in any meaningful sense of the word. He was an entertainer who made a lot of money for the university and himself.

But he is a man, too, who, like the rest of us, has to face himself in the mirror every day. If he does nothing, no matter how great a professional ballplayer he becomes, he will always be known as the ineligible player who cost Memphis a season that branded its basketball program as an outlaw.

If he fully explains himself, it won't be easy. It will be harder than making those free throws at the end of the Kansas game.

But superstars want the ball at crunch time.

Come on, Derrick, you're the man. Tell what happened before the clock runs out on the appeal. A lot of damage has been done, but you can still clear it up. Take the ball.

• Steve Keltner

In 1982, the City of Memphis, under the highly unusual circumstances of an interim mayoral administration, signed a Beale Street deal within a deal with Elkington & Keltner.

John Elkington and Steve Keltner were bright, young thirty-somethings who had attended law school at Vanderbilt and Memphis, respectively. Their real estate partnership name had a nice polysyllabic ring to it, but it didn't last. The city and a bunch of lawyers are still fighting over Beale Street. (See related story on page 10.) Elkington became the dominant personality, but Keltner has a remarkable story as well.

Sometime between 1963 and 1965, Keltner realized he could fly. In his senior year of high school at MUS, he broad-jumped 23 feet, 6 inches, which was a local and state record. MUS is a wealthy private school with some of the best coaches and facilities in Memphis. It attracts more than its share of athletes who train harder, lift longer, and specialize in one sport from the time they are 8 or 9 years old. But 44 years later, Keltner still holds the school record in the long jump. His 1965 leap would have won the 2009 Tennessee State Division II championship by almost two feet.

Keltner, 62, still lives in Memphis and works in real estate. He is still fit but has Parkinson's Disease and has not run in a race or jumped a hurdle in 40 years, when he ran track at the University of Tennessee and helped set a short-lived world record.

Plagued by doping scandals, track has fallen in the amateur and professional pantheon. It enjoyed a brief resurgence last weekend when Usain Bolt of Jamaica set a new world record of 9.58 seconds in the 100 meters. In the 1960s, however, track meets drew big crowds in Memphis at the fairgrounds and at high schools like Manassas, where Keltner's rival, Bill Hurd, now a Memphis eye doctor and jazz musician, was the fastest man in town. In the low hurdles in the 1965 state meet, Hurd took first and Keltner third. Hurd went to Notre Dame and set a world record in the 300-meter indoor dash. The two Memphis contemporaries both set world records in track within a year of each other.

At Tennessee, Keltner found himself in fast company. "World-class" beats "very good" as surely as a Corvette beats a Mustang.

"One second equals nine yards, and that's a hell of a lot of difference," says Keltner. "I could see my competitors' times. I knew my limits."

The physics of broad-jumping can be brutal. Working out in a tobacco barn, Keltner felt his Achilles tendon explode in his push-off leg. That was the end of his career as a long-jumper, two years before Bob Beamon staggered the sports world by leaping 29 feet 2 inches in Mexico City, a record that would stand 23 years.

But Keltner had his moments. In the Modesto Relays, he ran against O.J. Simpson. In the 1967 Penn Relays, he helped set a world record in the shuttle high-hurdle relay at Franklin Field in Philadelphia in front of 35,000 people. Maryland broke it later that year. Madcap event, rarely run race, short-lived record. Say what you will, it's a big world, and for a few months Keltner was on top of it.

"I didn't dwell on it after UT," he said last weekend. "After college I never ran more than a mile. I liked playing basketball at home more than going to track meets or practice. I think I trained to my limit in high school. More strength training in college would have helped me."

His 23-foot, 6-inch broad jump was the overall state record for 13 years. For its place and time, it was a Beamonesque leap and a Bolt-like bolt from out of the blue.

"I am the farthest thing from a racist that you can be," he says with a laugh, "but I may still have the state record for white boys."

Life goes on, even in an interim mayoral administration. There's small but significant progress to report on a couple of nagging issues.

A meeting was scheduled Tuesday, August 11th, with the Riverfront Development Corporation (RDC), Tennessee Department of Transportation, and the Corps of Engineers to discuss the $6.6 million cobblestones revitalization plan. The project is adjacent to but separately funded from Beale Street Landing, which is under construction at the north end of Tom Lee Park.

The cobblestones, to the uninitiated, are big smooth rocks, some with chain links embedded in them, that date from the heyday of Memphis as a cotton port for steamboats. As the RDC says, they're "amphibious" and hard to walk on — not that that stops people from trying or from parking cars on them. The RDC plan, which is not, uh, set in stone, envisions stabilizing them, restoring them, and improving access.

Spending $6 million on cobblestones at a time when the city is cutting school bus routes instead of grass may seem odd, but there are many pots of money involved, and that is Memphis and the RDC for you.

"Access for whom?" is a question that likely came up at the public meeting. Recreational boaters would like to land their canoes and kayaks at the cobblestones, but fear they will be excluded from them and Beale Street Landing. Expect to hear a lot about riprap in the coming days.

One recent boating event did not go well. The powerboat regatta hosted by the RDC July 31st through August 2nd was plagued by bad weather and spotty marketing. There was also the matter of a barge, owned by the Memphis Yacht Club and used for parties and Memphis in May activities. A spokesman for the club says the RDC borrowed a blacktop barge, approximately 30 feet by 12 feet, for the powerboat people to use as a platform to take pictures and movies. It was moved to the south tip of Mud Island, a muddy sandbar suitable for landing a barge. But for some reason, possibly to get a better vantage point, the barge was moved by a police boat to the other side of the harbor, along the riprap and cobblestones.

There it sat, until wave action pushed it over some sharp rocks. The barge sprang a leak and sank. No one was aboard. As of Monday afternoon, it was still at the bottom of the harbor. The yacht club is trying to work out responsibility for salvaging it with the RDC, the powerboat people, and the police department.

"There are so many hands in this darn thing that it's hard to figure out responsibility," said the yacht club spokesman. "All we know is that it wasn't us. We know how not to sink our barge. We're probably talking $5,000 to float and fix the thing."

The incident illustrates the difficulty of balancing historic preservation and public access to the river and cobblestones for extreme athletes, little old ladies in tennis shoes, and recreational boating on a working river subject to sudden fluctuations in water level. Look at it this way: If we're debating over rocks, then things could be worse.

On another front, Liberty Bowl Memorial Stadium is getting some $5 million in improvements to locker rooms, existing ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) seating, the media room, concessions, and women's restrooms.

It's not clear whether this puts the potentially expensive ADA issue to bed for good or not. Cindy Buchanan, head of the Memphis Park Commission, said "continuing upgrades over the next four to five years" will bring the stadium into compliance.

The ADA improvements add permanent companion seats to existing seats, which are more than adequate to meet demand, according to information previously provided to the city council by Buchanan and to the Flyer by officials at the University of Memphis athletic department.

The 61,000-seat stadium has 133 pairs of wheelchair seats and companion seats. That is well below the strict ADA 2-percent standard, but enough to meet demand. The U of M sold 48 wheelchair seats all last season and no more than 8 for any game. The most wheelchair seats sold in the last three years was 50 for the 2006 game against the University of Tennessee.

Likening the next two and a half months in Memphis to an outdoor carnival — and why not? — Beale Street club owner Bud Chittom said, "It's going to be a six-ticket ride."

The last interim mayor of Memphis had the job for a couple of weeks. Myron Lowery has it for nearly three months. He does not intend to sit quietly in his room.

And why should he? Suppose somebody handed you the keys to a car you wanted to drive all your adult life but told you to keep it in the garage. Wouldn't you look under the hood, start it up, and take it out on the road to see what it can do?

So will Lowery, despite the attempts by the car's previous driver to disable some of the parts and tamp down the horsepower. The six-ticket ride through the Memphis summer of 2009 includes:

Mayor Myron. Calming voice, procedural expert, media savvy, with nearly 18 years experience in Memphis politics. Hard-minded in the crunch and sets the facts straight in interviews like the one he did Monday on Drake and Zeke's radio show. Herenton gave him the keys and Lowery intends to keep them.

A C Wharton. He has the campaign money, but Lowery has the job until mid-October and the free publicity money can't buy. Lowery and freshly appointed CAO Jack Sammons will co-star in a black-white buddy movie that will cut into Wharton's support among white voters in East Memphis.

Sammons, a Herenton enemy and former councilman, will be counted on to find out where the bodies are buried and exhume them, communicate with the council, and wrest a key vote or two. Which won't be easy with a council divided six whites and six blacks and every member a potential tie-breaking vote.

The mayoral wannabes. Councilwoman Wanda Halbert beat the Rev. Kenneth Whalum Jr. and Robert Spence in a school board election and would like to be the first female mayor. Whalum got more than 83,000 votes in the 2006 school board race. Former Councilwoman Carol Chumney got 35 percent of the vote and finished second in the 2007 mayoral election and would also like to be the first female mayor. Campaign strategist Charles Carpenter, now candidate Carpenter, carries the Herenton flame. Jerry Lawler, who got 12 percent of the vote in 1999, can play the outsider.

The city attorney sideshow. City attorney Elbert Jefferson must not have gotten the memo. He resigned, but Herenton didn't accept it, knowing full well the value of having a pawn in the legal department. Now he's whining about being mistreated. Jefferson signed off on the lucrative deals for Spence and Ricky Wilkins, turning the office into their ATM card. If Jefferson insists on playing hardball, Lowery could suspend him or assign him to count the seats in the Liberty Bowl or some other drudge task. Lowery's choice for the job is Veronica Coleman Davis, a former United States attorney has the toughness and integrity to end the shenanigans but needs council approval.

The Mid-South Fairgrounds. Prospective developer Henry Turley is still backed up near his own endzone after failing to connect on a long one to Herenton. Housing and Community Development director Robert Lipscomb could take the field as quarterback, in partnership with former Councilman Tom Marshall, and run a play similar to Turley's but without a big-box store and with the city acting as developer.

Beale Street. Chittom and club owner Preston Lamm are scheduled to meet with Lowery this week. An 11th-hour effort to finalize the removal of John Elkington as manager of the historic district failed, even though Herenton signed off on it. Among the sticking points are Handy Park advertising revenue, payments to the city under long-term agreement, a protracted trial starting as early as next week, and the role of Wilkins and Lipscomb. Barring a trial, attorney Marty Regan could take over for Wilkins in a post-Elkington Beale, with merchants doing the marketing and the city providing sanitation and security.

"Keeping It Real." Herenton's campaign and T-shirt slogan for his 2010 congressional race, which Wilkins will manage. The Urban Dictionary offers several definitions ranging from "staying true to yourself" to "more or less a black-on-black racist expression." Let's assume it doesn't mean playing patty-cake with Steve Cohen.

All this plus the normal fight against crime and red ink and a new school year that starts next week. A six-ticket ride for sure.

• john branston
• Catherine Harrison

The Racquet Club of Memphis has been around for more than 30 years, and thousands of good tennis players have come through its junior development programs.

But Peter Lebedevs, who has been a teaching pro at the club since 1983, can count on two hands the ones who made it to even the lowest level of the pros in the last 25 years.

There was Audra Keller from Bartlett and Susan Gilchrist from Tuscaloosa, who both won some matches on the pro tour in singles or doubles. On the men's side, Keith Evans came within a point of beating one of the top 10 players in the world. Lewis Smith starred at Vanderbilt and tried the satellite tour for a month before telling Lebedevs "this is so hard it's ridiculous."

That's why there's some buzz this week over 15-year-old Catherine Harrison from Germantown, who advanced Tuesday to the third round of the National 18-and-under Clay Court tournament at the Racquet Club.

After beating the 17th-seeded player, Catherine said she has a chance to make the finals if she can get past her next match. Her opponent, who is seeded fourth, beat her last year in a third-set tiebreaker.

"Last year I completely mentally freaked out when I was up 4-1 in the tiebreaker," said Catherine. "I'm a lot stronger mentally now."

It takes a village and about 10,000 hours of practice to make a professional athlete.

Catherine started by choosing her parents well. Her father, Kent, is an executive with International Paper and a competitive runner and tennis player. Her mother, Jan, is a multi-talented musician and tennis player who gave up her high school teaching career to advance Catherine's career and accompany her to roughly 20 tournaments a year from coast to coast.

When she was four years old, Catherine started hitting balls with Racquet Club pro Rob Cadwallader, who would coach her for the next nine years. She still hits with two hands from both sides, as she did when she was barely strong enough to hold a racquet.

"She was impatient when she was younger and hit too hard," Cadwallader said. "But in the long run that pays off. They start to go in."

At 13, she and her mother moved to south Florida where she enrolled in former touring pro Harold Solomon's tennis academy. Five days a week, she did drills for two hours, played matches for two hours, and worked on conditioning for another hour. Jan says that in a typical week, Catherine would be on the court for 25 hours. This year they moved back to Germantown, where Catherine is home schooled and works out daily with the mens and womens teams at the University of Memphis. She also has two coaches and a strength trainer. If she does well in the nationals this week, she'll have to decide whether she wants to turn pro next year or settle for some of the estimated $14 million in college scholarship offers represented by the 74 schools and coaches attending the event.

"Catherine's potential is very high, but potential and talent means you've done nothing," said Lebedevs. "It's getting harder out there. Young players are training at the semi-professional level. The European mentality is that there is no college, you train to go pro."

With the exception of Florida and California, American training has not caught up with Europe. Part of the problem is real estate. A compact nation like France can bring all of its top junior players together easier than the United States can. European athletes who aren't ready for the pros often wind up on American college teams.

"All the college teams are better now," said Lebedevs, an Australian who played for Memphis from 1983-1987. "I didn't start playing until I was 12 years old. I kind of had to play catch-up, and I never quite caught up."

Neither did the rest of us, and that's why we're pulling for Catherine Harrison to live the dream.

It's gotten where you can't read an article online about politics, sports, the local economy, schools, termites, or hangnails without somebody blaming Mayor Herenton in the comments.

His departure might be a good time for the rest of Memphis to clam up and do some soul searching. We've got at least three months until the next election. Football season doesn't start for more than a month. John Calipari is gone. Dean Jernigan was ousted from the Memphis Redbirds. Newspapers are shrinking or going away. Foreclosures are piling up. The old order changeth.

This troubled city isn't suddenly going to get better, no matter who is the next mayor. If it does turn around, it will be because of small, steady, unremarkable changes that tens of thousands of people make in their everyday lives.

On that note, I plan to do my part while we're in this summer hiatus. This newspaper space is valuable real estate, and I'm not giving it up yet, but I will gladly begin the moratorium on WWH stories in August, assuming he follows through on his promise.

I wish I could have done it years ago, but a mayor is a mayor. Jackson Baker and I did one of the first interviews with the new mayor in 1992, and we both felt compelled to stay the course. It's the office, not the person holding it, that commands attention — a fact that sometimes seemed to elude Herenton as he toyed with the media pack nipping at his heels. News conferences, New Year's Day prayer breakfasts, Rotary and Kiwanis lunches, big announcements that came to nothing — hey, it wasn't good for us either. We were all going through the motions for years.

One of the things I plan to report and write more about is participant sports. Our sports keep us healthy, sane, and part of a community. I want to explore the line where people get hooked, how and why, and what they do about it. I know more than a few people who go to sleep fantasizing about perfect drives, backhands, strides, and laps more often than some other things commonly associated with dreams and beds.

I couldn't care less about the Grizzlies or Tigers, but I'll play a sport or watch a friend or family member play one any day. I have a hunch that more people are intensely interested in their 5K time, vertical leap, handicap, or tennis rating than another nickel on the property tax rate or the second reading of an ordinance passed by the Memphis City Council or Shelby County Commission. I recently learned there is something called competitive yoga and hot yoga. I plan to check it out.

Good politics and good journalism are about connecting with people. If you're not doing that you've got a problem. Some of us have not exactly been geniuses when it comes to figuring that one out. What the next generation of Memphis leaders needs right now is not headlines and cameras but time and some breathing room.

When Richard Nixon lost to John F. Kennedy in the 1960 presidential race, he said, "You won't have Nixon to kick around." Actually, we did, because he came back eight years later and stayed for six more. City Hall is soon going to be someone else's problem. Maybe some day someone will get elected to an important office in this town who's not eligible for AARP membership.

Meanwhile, I'm going to go play a game and watch someone else play their game while things settle down.

As the two-billionth person to start a blog, I've learned you don't hide your light under a bushel basket. The blog is called Get Memphis Moving. It will appear in the paper a couple times a month and on the Memphis Flyer website a couple times a week.

Times change, and we have to play it where it lays. We hope blogs will drive some traffic to our site and keep us in business for another season or two of sports and politics and the other things we write about.

Right now, it's awkward as hell, sort of like learning to dance and a whole lot like jumping in the lake and telling the guy in the boat it's okay to leave because you can swim to shore.

Then you'd better start paddling.