Source: USA TODAY

MEMPHIS — As the basketball world descends on this city this weekend, when the Memphis Grizzlies host the Western Conference Finals for the first time in their history, many will discover that this event is not as much a novelty as it is the next logical step.

In a community whose love for basketball has often been its greatest currency, this playoff run is just the most recent layer in a civic history that has perhaps been underappreciated on a national scale. The story of how Memphis became one of America’s top basketball destinations is now 40 years in the making. But perhaps it is best told through those who came to appreciate it from the outside.

Here, in the little basketball Mecca on the banks of the Mississippi River, three generations of fans have grown accustomed to those sleepy summer days when people of all races and socioeconomic strata pack sweaty inner-city gyms to watch superstar pros, college players and street legends play glorified pick-up games and cheer with the intensity of a Final Four matchup.

Here, there is nothing unusual about needing a scalped ticket to squeeze into high school games or for the local university to sell out FedEx Forum (capacity 18,119) on a Wednesday night against a program nobody has heard of.

And here, from the grassroots on up, it is considered a formality that Memphis — a metro area of 1.3 million — will produce more talent every year than cities three times its size, adding to a legacy that began when a team led by local players cracked the national consciousness at the 1973 Final Four.

“I didn’t fully understand it,” said University of Memphis coach Josh Pastner, who first arrived as an assistant in 2008. “There’s no other place in America like it where it’s such intense basketball passion and enthusiasm. It’s the DNA of the city — the intensity, scrutiny, passion, emotional investment from all levels. It’s just special.”

And, in many ways, it’s why the Grizzlies came to Memphis in the first place despite a middling television market and significant skepticism that the population could economically support an NBA team.

NOW VIEWED AS LEGITIMATE

Though Memphis’ infatuation with the sport hadn’t been chronicled in movies like Indiana, nor did it have the mystique of New York, former owner Michael Heisley was convinced that a culture was in place for a team to succeed. Though other factors were involved in the move from Vancouver in 2001 — primarily, the construction of a new arena financed by public bonds — the city’s predisposition to the sport was a factor in the NBA’s support of the move.

“It’s a sophisticated basketball town that’s very passionate about all things basketball,” said ESPN analyst Tom Penn, who worked as the team’s assistant general manager when it made the transition to Memphis. “With the rich history of the University of Memphis and all the players that came from the Mississippi Delta region, there was this vision of having a team that could really capture the whole region and bring them together. We’re seeing it play out now.”

The Grizzlies have not always been able to tap into that, missing the playoffs in six of their first nine seasons in Memphis and not winning a single postseason game, much less a series, until upsetting the San Antonio Spurs in 2011. That lack of success made them second-class citizens in their own building for awhile, especially with the University of Memphis becoming a top-10 fixture toward the end of the last decade.

“When I took over, the stands were empty, nobody was talking about us, you didn’t see any Griz apparel around town,” coach Lionel Hollins said. “I used to tell the team, we have to create the excitement; you can’t expect the fans to do it.”

That won’t be a problem this weekend. The Grizzlies regularly fill FedEx Forum now and tickets for Games 3 and 4 of this series were sold out in less than an hour. After fighting for years to shed the image of expansion-era futility, Memphis is now viewed as a legitimate, if not glamorous, NBA enterprise.

Who knows how long it will last? Success is difficult to sustain for any franchise, especially with the NBA’s salary cap structure and the inherent disadvantages of operating in a small market. Appearances in the Western Conference finals aren’t to be taken for granted.

But for this window in history, at least, it has completed the self-image Memphians have held more tightly than any other, as the gatekeepers of a basketball oasis in the middle of an area where football is king.

“No matter race, religion, beliefs or whatever, basketball has always been the one thing that brought everybody together as one,” said Hank McDowell, a Memphis native who played six NBA seasons in the 1980s. “It’s a long-lived story.”

A SIGNATURE ACCOMPLISHMENT

For McDowell, like most in the city, it began in 1973 when two kids from the Orange Mound neighborhood led then-Memphis State to the national championship game against mighty UCLA. Though the Tigers lost a title game remembered mostly for Bill Walton’s 21-of-22 shooting performance, it represented something much bigger than a signature basketball accomplishment for the local college program.

To that point, both the city and the university had been defined to a certain extent by its difficult history of race relations, which escalated in 1968 when Martin Luther King was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel in downtown Memphis. Despite the simmering tension, and the fact that few of the city’s great black players had gone to Memphis State, Larry Finch and Ronnie Robinson — teammates at nearby Melrose High — enrolled in 1969 and unwittingly changed everything. By the time they had led Memphis State to the national championship game, a cultural identity had formed around basketball and there was no going back.

“Memphis stood up for one thing and one thing only, and I don’t know how long it had been since that happened,” said McDowell, who would follow Finch and Robinson to Memphis State a few years later.

Without a major-league professional team — three ABA teams quickly came and went, as did a USFL franchise — college basketball (and, by extension, the high school scene that provided those players) became the biggest show in town.

After a few bad years in the late 1970s, Memphis State became NCAA tournament regulars again in the 1980s under Dana Kirk, reaching the Final Four again in 1985 with homegrown players: Andre Turner, Baskerville Holmes, Vincent Askew, John Wilfong and Keith Lee, who grew up just across the river in West Memphis, Ark.

Kirk was later found to have committed NCAA violations and tax fraud, but the program never got wiped out because the local players never stopping coming, from Sylvester Gray to Elliot Perry and eventually Penny Hardaway.

“Memphis has had a reputation of producing great players but unlike New York City and Chicago and places like that where they say basketball is king and queen, our great players weren’t being crowned, per se, in Memphis (prior to 1973),” said Verties Sails, who won 709 games as head coach at Southwest Tennessee junior college.

“Those guys had to leave and go someplace else in order to establish how good they were until we finally got everybody going to the same area and the same university and that’s when people found out how good basketball was in this town. In the ’60s and ’70s, there were so many great players who never had an opportunity to play in the NBA or big-time college basketball. There were Penny Hardaways nobody knew about.”

INFLUENCE IN COLLEGE HOOPS

Sails laments that the talent level in Memphis is not what it once was, and it’s true that since Hardaway the city has not produced an NBA all-Star. (Philadelphia 76ers forward Thaddeus Young, who went to Georgia Tech, is arguably the most successful current pro from Memphis.)

The influence of Memphis high schools, however, is strong throughout college basketball: Minnesota, North Carolina and Ole Miss all had starters from Memphis last season and the Memphis Tigers, who went 31-5, had four local players among their top-five scorers. Next season, consensus top-100 recruits will enroll at Memphis (Austin Nichols, Nick King, Markel Crawford), Marquette (JaJuan Johnson) and Missouri (Johnathan Williams) and Louisville’s starting point guard is expected to be transfer Chris Jones.

The local culture is so competitive, the last six champions in the state’s largest division in are all different schools, but all within the Memphis City School system.

“I think those kids play with a chip on their shoulder,” said Steve Forbes, Jones’ coach at Northwest Florida junior college and a former Tennessee assistant.

“You go to those are bigger metropolitan areas but year in and year out I’d put Memphis up against any of them player-wise. Those kids are just tough, and they like to play. It’s an unbelievable culture and if you’ve never been there to see it you probably wouldn’t understand it. Kids are brought up at a young age to appreciate the game and be competitive. They love high school basketball, love Tiger basketball and now they love the Grizzlies.”

Copyright © 2013 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

Source: USA TODAY

Since the creation of a task force nine years ago to address gambling issues among college athletes, the NCAA has made some progress in curbing potentially dangerous behavior, according to data from its quadrennial survey on gambling behaviors and attitudes.

But several trends revealed in the survey, released Tuesday, are troubling for the NCAA’s enforcement division, with one sport in particular emerging as a major concern: golf.

According to the NCAA’s data, 21.3% of male college golfers in Division I admitted to gambling on sports at least once a month, a rate more than double any other sport. That number is up from 14.4% in the 2004 survey and stands in contrast to other sports where the numbers have either decreased or remained stagnant. By comparison, 5.9% of Division I men’s basketball players and 4.6% of football players admitted to gambling on sports at least once per month.

NCAA rules prohibit all forms of sports betting for players and coaches, with eligibility penalties for anyone caught violating them.

“It’s certainly an issue because the numbers are just so high across the board (for golf) in any gambling activity, not just sports wagering,” said Mark Strothkamp, the NCAA’s associate director of enforcement on sports gambling issues. “It’s the culture within that sport. In any country club in America, you can go see that type of activity going on. That’s the norm within that sport, and we need to combat that norm.”

But it’s a major challenge for the NCAA, especially given the increasingly friendly environment for gamblers both in youth culture and on the Internet. One-third of men and 17.8% of women said their first gambling experience occurred prior to high school, both up significantly from the 2008 survey.

“It’s difficult to make inroads sometimes when you have entrenched behaviors,” said Tom Paskus, the NCAA’s principal research scientist who analyzed approximately 23,000 responses to the survey across all sports and divisions.

Percentage of male student-athletes that wagered on sports at least once a month

***

Those behaviors seem are particularly entrenched in golf, where casual betting on the course is an accepted and often encouraged part of the culture. Realistically, that’s a difficult mindset for college coaches to combat: 56% of men’s golfers admitted to gambling on “games of personal skill,” which would include on-course wagering, within the previous year.

“Go into any country club, that stuff is going on,” University of Memphis coach Grant Robbins said. “Guys going go out there in the summer and playing for five bucks a hole or something like that, that’s tough to police. I’m sure that goes on. When we’re in control of them, we try to make sure nothing happens on our watch, and it’s communicated to them constantly. They’re hammered with it by our compliance department.”

What the survey reveals, however, is that college golfers are far more likely than other athletes to engage in all forms of gambling, including the lottery and casinos (which aren’t against NCAA rules). The troubling number is that 44% of men’s golfers said they had bet on sports within the past year as opposed to 24.9% of male athletes in all the other sports. Moreover, 13% of golfers admitted knowing a bookie, compared to 5% for all other male athletes and 1% for female athletes. Seven percent of men’s golfers in Division I had gambled on their own team.

“I don’t know why (the culture) leads golfers into other types of gambling,” North Carolina coach Andrew Sapp said. “I even have a rule that whenever we go to a tournament where there’s a casino, you can’t go in for that very purpose. It’s legal, but the image of going into a casino isn’t necessarily the image of what we want to portray for our student-athletes.”

The why aspect is “a question that needs to be asked,” Paskus said, as the NCAA builds a strategy for increasing its educational efforts in the college golf community. Though some would point to socioeconomic factors in golf, Paskus said the NCAA’s research suggests athletes in tennis are more affluent than golfers but significantly less likely to gamble on sports. In fact, just 3.4% of Division I men’s tennis players gamble on sports at least once per month, down from 9.9% in the 2004 survey.

Whether the reason is cultural or socioeconomic, it concerns the NCAA that golf’s trend lines are going the opposite direction. Because even though you won’t typically find college golf odds in a Las Vegas sports book, and it’s not a likely place to find a point-shaving scandal, the NCAA is also concerned about gambling as a function of student welfare. More than 8% of male athletes who gambled in the previous 12 months reported a single-day loss of $300 or more.

“I don’t see why golf should be higher than tennis or a couple other sports you could put in there,” Kentucky coach Brian Craig said. “You can’t hold somebody’s hand 24 hours a day, but the kids 100 percent know that you can’t do that. All you can do is trust their integrity that they’re going to do the right thing and protect the program and themselves, because otherwise you’re putting yourself and your teammates at risk. It’s not worth it.”

Wagering behaviors among men’s golf student-athletes

***

Although the numbers specific to golf are staggering, the NCAA is also concerned about general attitudes toward gambling that emerged from the survey. Among athletes who wagered on sports in the past year, 57% of males and 41% of females believe it’s acceptable as long as they bet on sports other than the one they play. Also, 59% of male and 49% of females in that category said they believe people can consistently make a lot of money betting on sports.

“Student athletes are a little different on sports wagering; they seem to gravitate to it a little bit because they feel they know sports and they have some sort of inside knowledge that can give them an advantage,” Paskus said. “They have interest in sports and enjoy betting on sports, so that’s an interesting number. … They tend to overestimate the abilities of themselves and others around to be able to win at sports wagering.”

Other notable findings from the survey:

Though the NCAA understands it can’t curb all sports betting, one thing the survey made clear is that it needs to do a better job of educating athletes. Just 72% of males and 76% of females in Division I said they had been explained sports betting rules in 2012 compared to 77% of males and 83% of females four years earlier.

“Those things are increasingly of concern,” Strothkamp said, “and from our educational point of view we need to start hammering home some of those things that are becoming a little bit more normative.”

Dan Wolken is on Twitter @DanWolken

Copyright © 2013 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

Source: USA TODAY

PASADENA, Calif. — Only a day old, the College Football Playoff has already found itself in the middle of a controversy.

Officials for the new playoff structure, whose name was finalized Tuesday, said their website was hacked less than 24 hours after revealing four potential logos for an online vote.

Logo No. 4, described on the website as “A star, created by a compass with a football at its center,” was at the center of the hacking controversy with 50,251 votes tracked to an IP address in Austin.

“Our contracture running the logo vote has informed us that it has caught a cheater,” according to release from playoff officials.

That brought down the vote totals for the fourth logo from over 50% to just 9%, the release said. Now, instead of updating vote totals constantly, the site will announce the state of the contest twice daily at 3 p.m. and 9 p.m. to “prevent any further irregularities from occurring.”

“While we’re all pleased to know how popular our site is, this individual’s IP address has been blocked and all his votes have been removed from logo four’s tally,” the statement read. “We have been pleased with the excitement that has been created with the contest. In this particular case, there was a little too much excitement.”

Copyright © 2013 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.