Modern college basketball fans can be forgiven if they associate the hoops history of the University of Memphis (formerly Memphis State) with Anfernee “Penny” Hardaway or Derrick Rose instead of Larry Finch. But in the early 1970s, as Keith Wood explains in Memphis Hoops, Memphians saw Finch, a star player for the Tigers, as a hometown hero able to unite a racially divided community. White and Black fans alike cheered on Finch and his teammates as they advanced to the 1973 NCAA title game, where they lost to the powerhouse UCLA Bruins squad. This biracial coalition, however, was short-lived and could not be replicated by other local basketball teams in the 1970s or 1980s as city leaders struggled with issues of race.Finch and the ’73 Tigers certainly merit their positions at the center of the story, but Memphis Hoops explores the city's basketball past through other avenues as well. While Finch propelled the Tigers through the NCAA tournament, the Memphis Tams, a professional team playing in the American Basketball Association (ABA), drew few fans after relocating in 1970 from New Orleans. One reason, Wood posits, is that Memphians perceived the ABA as a Black league and, as such, gave little attention to the squad, even when they added both Finch and Johnny Neumann (a local “great white hope”). In 1975, the Tams (by then renamed the Sounds) left town and tiny LeMoyne-Owen, a local Historically Black College, captured the Division III National Championship. Like the ABA squad, LeMoyne-Owen remained “hidden behind the veil of segregation” (71), unable to capture the heart of the city as Memphis State did two years earlier. Again, basketball was unable to live up to its billing as an avenue for “racial equality on the court and an opportunity to unite the city off the court” (1). Fittingly, in 1986, Finch became the first Black head basketball coach at Memphis State, where he remained until 1997, providing a strong chronological bookend for Wood's work.Perhaps the most important contribution of Wood's work is his understanding of how the seeming color-blindness brought about by the early ’70s Memphis State teams masked deep-seated racial unrest in the city. In fact, as Wood argues, Finch “became emblematic of the myth that basketball healed the wounds of the city” (30). For even while celebrating their star player's on-court accomplishments, the “white establishment used the team's success as a political tool to divert attention from the racially divided reality that existed outside the arena” (35). Finch and the Memphis State Tigers were powerful symbols but ultimately were not able to permanently transcend Memphis's battle against racism.In conducting research for Memphis Hoops, Wood interviewed nearly two dozen people to gain a first-hand perspective of the era while scouring scores of local newspapers and archives to bring this story to life. If anything, additional interviews—perhaps with white civic leaders—might have provided support to Wood's understandings of the motivations of those who created and perpetuated the use of Finch as a “new construct of blackness” (50). Likewise, the strengths of the book are certainly most revealing of the 1970s—six of the seven chapters are almost entirely about that decade—so readers seeking an in-depth dive into the 1980s or 1990s might be disappointed. These, though, are minor quibbles. Memphis Hoops is a must-read for anyone interested in Memphis basketball or those looking to better understand the city's racial divide in the wake of the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.