MEMPHIS — As is the case with many a University of Memphis fan, orange almost invariably makes Ed Smith see red.

An exception being the full-body Tiger suit his wife made for him, and which Smith wore to last week's football game against UAB.

The source of Smith's antipathy toward such an otherwise fine color, of course, is the — ahem — unscrupulous, irredeemable and just downright evil University of Tennessee.

"I hate Tennessee," Smith said with more authority than one might expect from a man dressed like a Tiger. "Why? I don't know. Tennessee fans are arrogant, and they can't accept defeat. They always blame it on someone else. They blame it on the officials, they blame it on the coaches. Sometimes you lose because you just get beat."

Kingsbury High School football coach Duron Sutton, part of the first and only Tiger team to beat Tennessee in 1996, would love to see his alma mater repeat that singular feat Saturday when the Tigers travel to Knoxville for the teams' first meeting since 2001.

"When we get ready to play Tennessee, we get that much more hyped," Sutton said. "It's an in-state rivalry. It's not that great of a rivalry, but to us it is. You want to beat the team that plays every game on national TV.

"The guys who played with me hate Tennessee because they think they're a superior team and that they don't need to come onto the field to beat you."

Phil Owen encapsulates Memphis fans' feelings toward their cross-state rival when he says, "I hope Tennessee never wins another game."

It's a safe bet, then, that Tiger fans will not be singing Rocky Top en masse anytime soon.

But do Memphis fans really loathe the Big Orange as much as they do, say, Ole Miss?

No way, says Bartlett High baseball coach and Memphis alum Phil Clark.

"I want to beat Ole Miss worse than I do Tennessee," Clark said. "We didn't play Tennessee in baseball, didn't play them much in basketball over the years. We always played Ole Miss. To me, that's the biggest game ... It's constant bragging rights changing over in different things."

While Clark suspects that more Memphis fans dislike Ole Miss than Tennessee, he concedes that "the people who do, truly hate Tennessee."

Tennessee's position as the state school, its status as a perennial football power in perhaps the nation's strongest conference, its employees, its colors, its location — all of those things, and many more besides, serve as irritants to Memphis supporters.

"We always get looked down upon by people over on the Hill," said Don Glosson, a kicker for the Tigers in the mid-1980s. "It was always a bigger game for us than it was for Tennessee. For Tennessee, it was just another win or a homecoming game."

Ole Miss, on the other hand, sits just an hour to the southeast, some four hours closer by car than UT.

As former Highland Hundred treasurer Michael Hawkins says, "We just tend to play Ole Miss more. Ole Miss doesn't cancel contracts with us like Tennessee when they think there's a chance we might beat them."

Having played the Tigers on the gridiron regularly since 1949, "Ole Mrs." could be described as a far bigger rival, at least in football terms, than UT.

The Vols have faced Memphis just 19 times in all, losing just once. The Tigers have 10 wins to their credit against the Rebels.

Lest anyone think Hawkins' hate meter swings more toward Tennessee than Ole Miss, consider that Hawkins lives in a Nesbit, Miss., subdivision called Grove Meadows, where the streets have names like Manning Circle and McAllister Cove.

"It's more envy of Tennessee than dislike. You've got to respect what they've done no matter how you feel about them. They're where we'd like to be," Hawkins said. "Ole Miss fans still think it's the '50s and '60s, when they were good. They're living in the past."

Said Tiger fan Sheri Mosby of the Rebels, "I think Memphis fans dislike Ole Miss. I think they feel inferior to them. They don't look at us as competition the way we look at them."

Glosson was president of the Highland Hundred in 1996 when the Tigers claimed perhaps their most famous victory: a 21-17 win over the Vols.

But, like Hawkins, it's Ole Miss that really gets his blood boiling.

"Because we play Ole Miss every year and we're an hour away, I'd rather continue to beat Ole Miss than I would Tennessee," Glosson said. "Now that the game is played the first game of the year, that game really does have a lot more meaning.

"But when we do play UT, that's definitely a game we want to win ... It's a David vs. Goliath thing."

All of which leads back to Smith, who keeps a deep, dark secret tucked away in his Tiger suit.

"It's fun to say you don't like Tennessee," Smith said, veering toward shaky ground. "But when they were competing for the national championship (in 1998) I would pull for them because they're from Tennessee."

The same can't be said about the school in Oxford.

At any rate, it appears there's more than enough ill will to go around.

"The truth," Memphis supporter Jackie Whitefield said, "is that we don't like either of them."