Liberty Bowl Memorial Stadium

Liberty Bowl Memorial Stadium is a sports stadium in Memphis, Tennessee. It is the home venue of the University of Memphis football team, the Tigers. Additionally, the University of Tennessee contested one home football game there annually from the 1960s until the 1980s. In recent years, it has been the site of the annual Southern Heritage Classic, a collegiate football game between two historically black universities, Jackson State University of Jackson, Mississippi and Tennessee State University of Nashville. It is also home to a post-season collegiate football game, the Liberty Bowl, and has hosted several failed attempts at professional football as well, detailed below. Other events which have been held occasionally at the Liberty Bowl include religious gatherings and concerts. Also, high school football games are played there each season, in part because Memphis public high schools have traditionally not had their own on-campus stadiums. It is located adjacent to the Mid-South Fairgrounds in the city's Midtown section. The playing surface itself is officially known as Rex Dockery Field to honor the memory of a former Tigers coach who was tragically killed in an airplane crash.

The stadium was built in 1965 as Memphis Memorial Stadium at a cost of approximately $4,000,000. In its original configuration, it seated approximately 53,000. It is a truly bowl-shaped stadium, but the ends are lower than the sides. As originally built, the east side was noticeably lower than the west side. Shortly after its completion, the then-struggling Liberty Bowl post-season college football game, which had been contested in Philadelphia since its inception in 1959, was relocated to Memphis, where it has been contested annually ever since, and the stadium's name was eventually changed to honor this event. The stadium is designed in such a way that all of its seats have a relatively good view of at least almost all of the entire playing surface. This is due primarily to two design factors, one being that the stands are relatively steep for a one-tier, true bowl stadium, and the other being that there is little space between the side and end lines of the playing surface and the stands. The stadium is also somewhat unusual in that it has always had a natural grass playing surface, which is not typical of most stadiums constructed in the same era.

In 1974 and 1975, the stadium was the home venue for the Memphis Southmen (aka "Grizzlies", but otherwise unrelated to the current NBA team) of the World Football League. The Southmen drew fairly well, at least by WFL standards, in part due to the presence on their roster of some well-known players recruited away from the NFL at considerable expense. Much, perhaps too much, was read into this relative success at the gate, and when the WFL folded, over 40,000 people made deposits toward season tickets on the basis of the team being admitted into the National Football League, with a telethon even being staged for this purpose. Despite this seemingly-overwhelming show of support, the NFL ignored Memphis' pleas and the Southmen folded.

The next attempt at playing a relatively major professional sport in Memphis at the Liberty Bowl was football of another kind, the Memphis Rogues of the North American Soccer League in the late 1970s. The playing surface is somewhat smaller than that generally favored by soccer, but that sport adapts to smaller playing surfaces better than some others. The Rogues were owned by a Canadian businessman, Nelson Skalbania, and somewhat like the Southmen, seemingly did fairly well in a league that wasn't doing all that well as a whole. The Rogues competed in the 1978-1980 NASL seasons. Skalbania eventually moved the Rogues to Canada, where they folded after competing for one season as the Calgary Boomers.

Another serious attempt to play football on the professional level in Memphis came in 1984, when the United States Football League announced that it was bringing an expansion team to Memphis. The Memphis Showboats, coached by flamboyant Memphian Pepper Rogers, played for the next two seasons at the Liberty Bowl, qualifying for the league's final playoffs in 1985. This team also seemed that it could have been a viable venture had the league that it was part of been better managed and financed.

After the failure of the USFL, Memphis political and civic leaders decided that the only realistic way to have professional football in Memphis was for the city to apply for and receive an expansion franchise in the National Football League. To this end, a major renovation at an announced cost of $12,000,000 was undertaken. The east stands were built up to the same level as the west ones, adding about 12,000 seats, and a "skybox" of luxury suites was added to the top of those stands, almost identical in appearance to the press box on top of the west side. A preseason NFL game involving the then-St. Louis Cardinals was a complete sellout in the renovated stadium. This failed to impress the NFL sufficiently, however, and the expansion franchises were instead awarded to teams which became the Carolina Panthers and the Jacksonville Jaguars, located in cities which had promised, and later delivered, new stadiums built from the ground up (albeit in Jacksonville's case on the exact site of a former one, the Gator Bowl), not merely renovations of ones built earlier.

Unwilling to give up on professional football, the next professional football venture to be hosted by Memphis and the Liberty Bowl was the ill-fated attempt by the Canadian Football League to enter U.S. markets rejected by the NFL. The Memphis team was christened the Memphis Mad Dogs, and played one season, 1995, the final year of the CFL's largely unsuccessful attempts to compete south of the border. Attempts to play Canadian football in most U.S. venues are somewhat hampered by the need for a far larger playing surface. The field of play is 10 yards longer and 35 feet wider than in the U.S. version, and the end zones were then 25 yards deep (now 20) rather than 10; few U.S. stadiums are designed readily to accommodate a playing surface of this size. In the Liberty Bowl these changes were necessarily largely ignored, due to the design features noted earlier. Had the attempt to play the Canadian game included an attempt to use the full width of that game's field, players not participating in the game and the coaching staffs would have to have been seated in the stands as was often the case in the early years of Arena football, which ironically was attempting to establish itself in the Memphis market simultaneously with the Mad Dogs. Likewise, 25 yards past the goal line at the Liberty Bowl puts one several rows up into the end zone stands. The only real concession to the Canadian format that was feasible at the Liberty Bowl was the moving of the goal posts to the goal line, where they are in the Canadian game, as opposed to the end line. The result was a hybrid game, mostly played by Canadian rules on essentially a U.S. field.

Despite these limitations, the Mad Dogs drew fairly well during the early part of the season (the CFL plays July-November so as to conclude its season before games in outdoor venues in markets such as Edmonton, Alberta and Regina, Saskatchewan become unbearably cold for players, coaches, officials, and especially spectators). The stadium became a virtual ghost town on home game days, however, once the U.S. collegiate season started, with crowds under 10,000, and it soon became apparent that the Mad Dogs' first season would also be their last.

What could have been temporary redemption came shortly afterward when it was announced that the NFL's Houston Oilers would be leaving Houston and relocating to Tennessee. Although their eventual destination was Nashville it was announced that the Oilers would play their home games in Memphis at the Liberty Bowl for two years while a suitable stadium was being constructed in Nashville, as the largest stadium in Nashville at the time, the one at Vanderbilt University, seated only 41,000, a number that was considered to be totally inadequate for an attraction at the level of the National Football League in the late 1990s. Pepper Rogers was named the Oilers' "Director of Memphis Operations". The team was to live and practice in Nashville, commuting to Memphis only for games, a frustrating arrangement that made every game seem like a road game to the players.

This setup proved to be a miscue on the part of all involved. Perhaps burned a few times too many, perhaps embittered because they felt that Nashville was getting the team that they had deserved, perhaps unwilling to get either financially or emotionally involved due to their knowledge that the Oilers were only slated to be in the Memphis market for two years, Memphians largely ignored the team and the 1997 Tennessee Oilers season in the Liberty Bowl was a near-disaster. Another major problem was that Interstate 40, the major highway between Memphis and Nashville and hence the route most potential Nashville-based supporters would be taking to the games, was under major reconstruction just outside of Memphis at the time, sometimes increasing automobile travel time between the two cities from the normal three hours to four and a half or five, and occasionally even longer. It is telling that the team's overall 8-8 record for this season consisted of going 6-2 on the road and 2-6 at "home". Playing before some of the smallest home crowds seen in the NFL since the 1950s for most games, the visiting team often seemed to have more supporters than the Oilers among the crowd, and in the case of the only game to draw considerably more fans than could have comfortably been accommodated in Nashville at Vanderbilt, the year's final game against the Pittsburgh Steelers, all unbiased observers noted that at least two-thirds of those present, perhaps even more, were Pittsburgh supporters, a fact which disgusted Oilers' owner Bud Adams so much that he shortly afterwards announced that he was terminating his Memphis arrangement a year early and that the 1998 season would be contested in Nashville at Vanderbilt after all, which it was. (In 1999 this team relocated to a new stadium, now called The Coliseum, located on the banks of the Cumberland River across from downtown Nashville and became known as the Tennessee Titans.)

It would seem that the frustrating history of professional football at the Liberty Bowl in Memphis had finally come to an end. But it had not. Shortly after the dust had settled from the departure of the Oilers/Titans, the NBC television network, in conjunction with professional wrestling impressario Vince McMahon, announced the formation of the XFL, a new professional football league to play in the spring, as the USFL had, with no intention of ever moving to the fall directly in competition with the NFL, one of the things which had contributed to the USFL's demise. Another difference was that the XFL was to be an entity league, meaning that the entire league was owned by one organization rather than being comprised of franchises which were in some respects business as well as athletic competitors. This new team was named, to considerable consternation, the Memphis Maniax. The Maniax competed in the XFL's sole season, held in the spring of 2001. Again, as seemed by this time to be the pattern, the Maniax did better than the league as a whole, but not well enough to save it. Ratings for the games on NBC began fairly well, but by the end of the season were absolutely the lowest for any program that had ever appeared on any of the traditional three major television networks since Nielsen Ratings began shortly after the inception of network television in the late 1940s. Even the presence on the broadcasts of former wrestler and then-governor of Minnesota Jesse Ventura was of little help, at least as soon as the novelty wore off.

As of this writing, there is little chance that the Liberty Bowl will ever again see any professional football on a regular basis, or be significantly upgraded in the foreseeable future. The Liberty Bowl is more than adequate as a venue for the University of Memphis Tigers, who are generally not much of a gate draw unless competing against another area school such as Tennessee, Ole Miss, or Mississippi State. And the Liberty Bowl game itself, while a better audience draw in recent years since it became the destination for the regular-season champion of Conference USA, still is almost never a sellout. But the Liberty Bowl shows its age, and would be considered by most knowledgeable observers of major professional sports to be functionally obsolete. The seats are mostly bench-style, not the chairback seats that fans of major professional sports have long come to expect. Restroom facilities and concession stands seem relatively antiquated compared to those of newer facilities. The facility itself generally shows the nearly four decades of use and Mid-South weather that it has endured. And perhaps the greatest hindrance is the one thing about its design that originally had made it so attractive to many. The one-deck, open bowl design precludes the construction of true "club seats", the luxury seats located between the main lower and upper decks of most modern football stadiums which are a major source of additional revenues to ownership. It would probably be less expensive to demolish the Liberty Bowl and start over than it would be to attempt to retrofit it with such seats at this point in its history.

The final factors almost insuring that Memphis will not have major professional outdoor sports in its immediate future, at the Liberty Bowl or anywhere else, are threefold, and have to do with other sports teams and venues in the area. Firstly, there is the success of the relatively-nearby (approximately 200 miles/320 km away) Tennessee Titans. Then there is the arrival in Memphis of the Memphis Grizzlies of the National Basketball Association, and the massive capital outlay needed to build their new arena, the FedExForum, in downtown Memphis less than 15 years after the previous downtown arena and their former home, the Pyramid Arena, was completed. Finally, there is the successful minor league baseball team the Memphis Redbirds, the St. Louis Cardinals' affiliate in the Pacific Coast League. Their home venue, AutoZone Park in downtown Memphis, cost over $80,000,000 to construct, several times more than has ever been spent on the Liberty Bowl, and is the most elaborate and expensive stadium ever built for minor league baseball. All of these factors combine to make it highly unlikely that the Liberty Bowl will be replaced in the foreseeable future, and likely that Memphis will not have any further major professional sports. Both Memphis' market area population and per capita income are considerably less than what is now customary for consideration for expansion or relocation by major professional sports, especially markets which are already hosting a team in a different sport.

Both the annual Liberty Bowl game itself and the stadium bearing its name have been integral parts of the Memphis community for almost four decades, and it can be argued that, unlike the cases of massive amounts that have been spent on many luxurious sports venues for professional sports teams in other cities in recent years, the citizens of Memphis have received a reasonable return on the capital invested in the stadium in the economic activity resulting from all of the events that the stadium has hosted over the years. The failure of the Liberty Bowl to become the long-term host of a successful professional football team has been more a result of the poorly-planned and executed sports leagues that have attempted to operate teams there than any inherent fault in the stadium, which was superior to many hosting major sports teams at the time of its construction, or the Memphis market, although it must be admitted that Memphis and the Liberty Bowl have seemed to have been almost a magnet for such ventures and that Memphis has endured more of them than any other U.S. city. Unfortunately, in the minds of many, Liberty Bowl Memorial Stadium has been defined by what it is not – not the home of a successful professional football team, not the home of a "major" college bowl game, not on-campus at the University of Memphis but not far from it either, not located downtown, but not in the suburbs either.

Nonetheless, the stadium must be deemed to have been largely successful. It has provided the University of Memphis football team with a far larger and more impressive facility than could have ever been justified by the Tigers' success on the field or at the gate (or relative lack thereof), and the City of Memphis a venue for other large events and an annual attraction that may not be in the top echelon of collegiate sports but nonetheless provides crowds at Memphis hotels and restaurants annually at a time when they would ordinarily be lacking, the last week in December. The Southern Heritage Classic, usually played near the beginning of the football season in September, has become one of the premier events in black collegiate sports and always brings a large crowd. (Usually the SHC and not the Liberty Bowl game itself is the source of the facility's largest crowd of the season.)