Charitable Tigers

Charitable Tigers
Posted by Dan Wolken

The Memphis basketball team spent Saturday morning at the Colonial Park United Methodist Church, helping the Angel Food Ministries put together bags of food, as it does on the last Saturday of every month.

In a nutshell, the program (which is nationwide) puts together a month’s worth of frozen and non-perishable food items in a bag that costs just $30. Though anybody can buy the bags, it’s obviously targeted for those with severe restrictions on their income. It takes a lot of labor to make up the bags — from unloading the large boxes of food off a truck to setting up “stations” for each of the 20 items to actually putting one of each item in a bag and then cleaning up the mess afterwards. The players participated in each step of that process and appeared to have a good time doing it. One of the Tigers’ student managers, Paul Sutton, participates in the program every week and initiated the team’s involvement.

“What I’m hoping is, by these players being here, it brings light to a great program,” coach John Calipari said. “For our guys individually, I hope they get the idea. It’s hard for a 19, 20 year old to think about giving and others because he’s still trying to figure out who he is. It’s hard for them. I just hope it touches them a little bit and our program can bring light to great things like this.”

(Side note: Initially, Calipari didn’t want any publicity to come out of this venture. In fact, I didn’t hear about it until early Saturday morning and showed up kind of unannounced. This isn’t unusual. In fact, when Memphis hands out toys to underprivileged kids at Christmas, Calipari doesn’t allow the media to come along.)

Posted Saturday, September 29th, 2007 at 4:28 pm