Tiger Players Believe Media Misrepresents Team Versus Individuals

Tigers' duo: Incidents don't represent team
Anderson, Douglas-Roberts state: 'We're all good guys'

By Dan Wolken
October 22, 2006

Twice already during the first week of basketball practice, University of Memphis sophomores Antonio Anderson and Chris Douglas-Roberts have seen teammates' names in the news for off-court incidents. Saturday, in an interview with The Commercial Appeal initiated by the players, Anderson and Douglas-Roberts expressed concern about the image of the team and said they felt they were being viewed in the wrong light because of the actions of others.

"(The media) is addressing it as if the entire team was doing it, but it's a certain few people or one person or two people," Anderson said. "Coach (John Calipari) deals with that, and we want people to know that me, Chris and the rest of the team, we're all good guys. Even the guys who did it are good guys. "We're respectful to the city, to the university, the coach, the program and everybody else. We're approachable guys. We're not harmful, none of that. We just want everybody to know we're good guys. We're very respectable. When things like that happen, Coach is going to deal with the guys who are in the incident ... (The public perception) is making it seem as if we're all doing it. They're putting it on everybody."

Anderson and Douglas-Roberts were responding to media accounts of an alleged incident at a dorm Wednesday that caused two female students to call the campus police and file a complaint against junior Joey Dorsey and another player they didn't recognize, later identified as freshman Hashim Bailey.

In a phone interview Friday, one of the women claimed that Dorsey poured the contents of a water bottle over her head and said the other player threatened them and threw a full water bottle at them.

Last Saturday, Dorsey was arrested just before 3 a.m. for running a red light while driving with a suspended license.

"The headline (in Saturday's edition of The Commercial Appeal) was 'UofM ballplayers ...'" Douglas-Roberts said. "But the headline didn't say who it was. We're not trying to put it on those guys. We're all a team, but it said 'UofM ballplayers,' and that's not the case at all. It was certain people, and that makes us as a team look bad as a whole, and it's not even like that. We give back to the community. We're good people. We're real approachable and we just wanted to address that. It isn't the whole team."

Said Anderson: "Why can't the players' names be in the headline? We took that in. As a team, that hurt us, but we have to live with it. But we respect the city and they should respect the rest of the team."

Calipari said Douglas-Roberts and Anderson first came to him and asked if they could voice their concerns through the media.

"They said, 'Coach, we've got a bunch of guys doing everything right. If a guy or two screws up, that's not us,'" Calipari said. "And I said, 'Well, that's how it appears to people,' and they said they wanted to say something.

"They're not trying to hurt a teammate. They're just saying, 'Hey, we do screw up sometimes, but the reality is we're a bunch of good guys.' I don't think they wanted to indict the other guys."
-- Dan Wolken: 901-529-2365