Memphis Sounds
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The Memphis Pros was the name of a franchise in the American Basketball Association. The team had begun as the New Orleans Buccaneers, and after three seasons in New Orleans, Louisiana moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where it had occasionally played some home games in the past to reasonable crowds. The Pros played their home games at the Mid-South Coliseum, which is adjacent to the Mid-South Fairgrounds and what is now Liberty Bowl Memorial Stadium. Their first season in Memphis was 1970-71.
After two seasons as the Pros, the team was bought by Charlie O. Finley, who also owned at the time the Oakland Athletics of Major League Baseball. The winning entry in a "Rename the Team" contest was the Tams, perhaps one of the few entries that could be said to have been even less likely than "Pros." Ostensibly the nickname was an acronym for Tennessee - Arkansas - Mississippi, and the logo was a tam o'shanter-style hat in white, green and gold, which were also the new team colors, copied from baseball's Oakland Athletics.
It soon became apparent that the Tams were not high on the list of Finley's priorities. Amenities like programs began to disappear, and morale suffered as players began to wonder if they would receive paychecks and if they would clear the bank when they did. After two seasons of this, the ABA stepped in and former Commissioner Mike Storen came in to run the team. He renamed it again to the Memphis Sounds and developed a new color scheme and logo, which were good enough that when the ABA became defunct and the copyrights on its properties were allowed to lapse, a minor league baseball team in Nashville adopted them and continued to use them to the present day. The league wanted outside ownership, however, and sold the team after the 1974-75 season to a group in Maryland, who proposed to move the team to Baltimore as the Baltimore Claws. But the team folded in October 1975 without ever playing a regular season game there.
Memphis would not host another professional basketball game until the NBA's Vancouver Grizzlies arrived in 2001.