SAN ANTONIO — The cultural divide in college basketball between young and old, the street and ‘burbs, is drawn starkly in bold, black ink.
Tattoos cover these 38-1 Memphis Tigers. Love ’em as the irreverent party- crashers at the Final Four. Or loathe them as another wild bunch of NCAA hoop renegades.
Hey, we all jump to conclusions as naturally as Memphis star Chris Douglas-Roberts dunks.
In bold cursive, “Judy” is tattooed on CDR’s neck.
“Somebody asked, ‘Why would he get the girlfriend on his neck?’ ” said Douglas-Roberts, trying not to show contempt for the stereotype.
Judy is his mother.
The dominant color in the Tigers’ uniforms is blue, the same as 36-3 Kansas, their opponent in the championship game.
So why do so many scribblers at the Final Four want to portray Memphis as wearing black hats?
“I’m pretty sure there’s a player on Harvard or Yale with a tattoo somewhere,” said Douglas-Roberts, an All-America guard who leads Memphis with 18 points per game.
The Tigers play a style that makes basketball traditionalists squirm. Does it surrender too much power to the athletes? They talk smack, with Douglas-Roberts boasting he has never lost a game of one-on-one. The Memphis offense is a free jazz blur of lob passes and isolation sets, rather than the X’s and O’s of Phog Allen that made America great.
No lie: On Sunday, Memphis coach John Calipari was asked to compare and contrast himself with Jerry Tarkanian, the former UNLV coach notorious for winning with a band of basketball rebels.
“I’ve always been about access and opportunity,” said Calipari, setting off alarms for anybody who believes college sports should be more about education than money. “Every once in a while a kid will do something that’s just dumb, like my own children, and I deal with it. I don’t throw them under the bus the first sign of trouble.”
OK, here’s my guilty plea. I thought Memphis was too individualistic on offense and too unreliable at the foul line to advance to the Final Four, much less win a national championship. I read the rap sheets that listed youthful transgressions from players such as Shawn Taggart and Andre Allen, then wondered if Calipari had too many basketball outlaws who could not color within the lines at North Carolina or Kansas. But the Tigers look in the eyes of their doubters and do not roar in anger. Instead, they enjoy the last laugh.
While Tigers have been arrested (charges were later dropped) in connection with a nightclub altercation or been kicked off the team at tourney time, there is also the undeniable little miracle of forward Joey Dorsey, 24, who has made the grade in college after being the first person in his family to graduate from high school.
“Everyone back home thought I would be the first one to get kicked off the team,” Dorsey said. “It will be great to walk across that stage and get my degree.”
On the road to the Final Four, Douglas-Roberts discarded the tight T-shirt he had worn all season underneath his No. 14 jersey to reveal ink that stretched from his right shoulder nearly to his elbow.
If you cannot embrace the Tigers because of the tattoos, maybe it’s because you’ve never gotten close enough to inspect them carefully. Reserve guard Chance McGrady permanently wears a quotation from Nobel Peace Prize winner Bernard Lown, developer of the defibrillator, that tells the world: Men capable of seeing the invisible can achieve the impossible.
“Our tattoos are all meaningful,” Douglas- Roberts said. “I have a Bible Scripture on me.”
And Psalms 37, etched proudly in CDR’s arm, declares:
“Do not fret because of evildoers,
Be not envious toward wrongdoers.
For they will wither quickly like the grass,
And fade like the green herb.
Trust in the Lord and do good . . .”
Defeat Kansas? The Tigers could do that, win the national title and nobody would consider it a major upset at this point.
But beat the stereotypes?
It’s probably easier to erase a tattoo.
Mark Kiszla: 303-954-1053 or mkiszla@denverpost.com
