We take it for granted that we can go into a grocery store and choose the items we want. That wasn’t always the case. Before a chain of stores known as Piggly Wiggly, a shopper would come into a shop and have to ask a clerk behind the counter for the items the shopper wanted. It was a slow process, and it made the shopper be at the mercy of what the clerk chose for them.
Piggly Wiggly changed all that. Giving shoppers direct contact with the products–and a much wider variety of choices in items–the stores revolutionized grocery shopping. All of this was the brainchild of company owner, Clarence Saunders. The success of the stores led to Saunders opening over 2,500 stores in a few short years. And, with the success, came great wealth to Saunders. The Memphis, Tennessee resident built a large house in a wealthy neighborhood, a house known as the Pink Palace because of the reddish hue of the stone used in construction. He cashed out of the Piggly Wiggly stores and started another chain. It, too, was a success. And, almost on a whim but also as a way of generating publicity for his new chain of stores, Saunders created–are you ready for this?–his own professional football team.
Yes, the Clarence Saunders Tigers were a real thing. Saunders bought many of the best players money could buy. The Tigers were a juggernaut. They played any and all comers all across the United States, and they beat almost all of them to a pulp. Now, this was a time in the 1920s when the National Football League was only then getting started. Some of those early teams such as the Bears and Cardinals and Packers are still in the league today. But the new league was struggling, and they needed wealthy owners who had ready cash–men like Clarence Saunders. After Saunders’s Tigers beat the reigning NFL champion Green Bay Packers in an exhibition game, the owners of the league’s teams extended an invitation to the Memphis team to join the league as a full-fledged member.
But Saunders balked at the proposal. He felt he could make more money as an independent team. His rebuff stung the NFL at a time the league needed cash. But the joke was on Saunders. A year or so later, the Great Depression bankrupted him and his stores–and his team.
Fast-forward to the 1970s. Memphis wanted to join the big leagues both as a city and as the home of a big-league sports franchise. It entered the World Football League, a rival to the NFL, as an attempt to show the NFL that the city could support such a franchise. It built the Liberty Bowl, a pro football-quality stadium to accommodate such a franchise. The Memphis WFL team performed well on the field and at the gate. Surely, such success would show that Memphis would be an attractive NFL city. But the WFL folded due to other weak owners, and Memphis’s attempt to gain a pro sports franchise folded with it.
Then, in the 1980s, Memphis joined a new pro football league, the United States Football League. Again, the Memphis team outperformed most of the other franchises in play and in local support. And the USFL, led by one of the other team owners, a man named Donald Trump, sued the NFL for violating anti-monopoly statutes. The lawsuit seemed to be going well. In fact, it was announced that the NFL would settle out of court and part of the settlement would be that Memphis and three other teams would be allowed into the league. But the lawsuit reached a conclusion with a jury. And the jury award for damages was…$3.76. Again, Memphis was rebuffed by the NFL. Then, the city applied to be an expansion franchise in the 1990s, and it had the wealthiest ownership group of all the applicants, but the NFL chose Carolina and Jacksonville instead. It the city and its sports fans watched in shock and horror as the Houston Oilers franchise moved to Nashville, Tennessee instead of Memphis.
Why was Memphis rebuffed so often by the NFL?
Well, rumor has it that the NFL owners have a long memory. It’s said that the being an NFL owner is the most exclusive club in the world. Memphis longed to join that club.
But it appears that they never forgave Clarence Saunders for saying “No” to their proposal 70 years earlier.
The Rest of the Story 