A SPECIAL HERO OF THE DAY!
Age: 95
Occupation: football team
Last Seen: Detroit, Michigan
Awarded For: trying
The year was 1957.
Elvis dominated the music world with "All Shook Up". TV sets were tuned to Gunsmoke while teens were tuning in to American Bandstand with Dick Clark. Michigan's Mackinac Bridge opened and the Little Rock Nine was allowed to attend school.
That year, we lost Humphrey Bogart, Oliver Hardy, and MGM founder Louis B. Mayer. However, Steve Harvey, Katie Couric, Vanna White and Melanie Griffith were all brought into this world.
Several things happened in Detroit in '57: Ford introduced the flop known as the Edsel and the Lions won the NFL Championship. A few years later, Edsel's son, William Clay Ford, Sr., purchased the Lions.
WCF made some good moves for the team, such as moving them out of rickety Tiger Stadium and to the then-state-of-the-art Silverdome north of town in Pontiac in 1975. With 80,000 seats, at one time, it was the largest stadium in the NFL. It was also lauded for not being a cookie-cutter stadium where baseball and football were played (although the Pistons played there from 1978-88 when they moved to The Palace of Auburn Hills.
But as that old saying goes, "Ya can't polish a turd".
The Lions were to football as the Cubs and the Red Sox were to baseball. The team was a laughable curse that made the day for late-night talk show writers and meme creators. In the fifty years Ford owned the Lions, the team only won one playoff game, and it was in 1991. Under his aegis, the team only won two out of five games and quite often, the games were never shown in Detroit area television due to NFL blackout rules. It might have played a role as to why their current home, Ford Field only has 65,000 in capacity, 15,000 less than the Silverdome, which was demolished in 2018 after being abandoned for sixteen years.
It was George Harrison who once boasted that "All Things Must Pass", and that meant the legacy of WCF, who died in 2014. His widow, Martha quickly took control of the team and made drastic improvements . One was the hiring of Jim Caldwell as head coach. Everything considered, Caldwell was the best leader the team had in over five decades. But, he was still fired on New Year's Day, 2018 only because the team missed the post-season despite a 9-7 record.
Because the Lions hired former New England Patriots scout Bob Quinn as general manager, it created a false hope that the team could indeed go to the next level. Quinn hired Pats' assistant coach Matt Patricia as the Lions' new head coach. Just because a film wins an Oscar and becomes a box office smash doesn't guarantee that some of the guys behind it will produce another hit. After all, there were many #1 songs on the pop charts that were the sole hits for their artists (i.e. "Judy in Disguise (With Glasses)" by John Fred and his Playboy Band, C.W. McCall's "Convoy" and, dare I say, "Macarena" by Los Del Rio).
Well, the Matt Patricia days in Detroit were not well-received. He and Quinn were both fired after the team lost their 2020 Thanksgiving Day game. In two-and-a-half seasons in Motown, Matt had a puny 13–29–1 record.
It was that same year that the Lions switched hands again when Martha Ford transferred ownership of the team to her daughter Shiela. She knew that things would be shaky in the beginning, especially in 2021 when they hired a former Lion to coach the team: Dan Campbell.
Yes, year #1 for Campbell and Co. was not a nice one with a 3-13-1 record. The trade between the Lions and the Rams for their quarterbacks was also not well-received in the beginning, especially when Matthew Stafford helped his new team win the Super Bowl. Before he became the new head coach, Campbell made a quip about "scaping the other team's kneecaps". Well, he had a lot to learn.
And then, a bit of a miracle happened. In the 2022-23 season, the Lions returned to winning, finishing the season with a 9-8 record. Under Campbell, the Lions of old were moot. The bad 'ol days of Matt Millen, Marty Mornhinweg, Rod Marinelli (who gave the team its infamous 0-16 season), and those late-night gags were becoming a thing of the past. Campbell - who played on that 0-16 Lions team - was serious about winning.
This past year, the Lions went 12-5, its best record since 1991. The team won their wild card against (surprise, surprise) the Rams and Matthew Stafford. They beat another Super Bowl-winning team, the Buccaneers in the Divisionals. But despite starting the game 14 points ahead of them, they were barely beaten by the 49ers in the NFC Championship. Had they won, it would have been the equivalent of winning the NFL Championship in 1957. Of course, the creation of the Super Bowl in 1967 and the NFL-AFL merger changed things.
With the Lions' loss to the 49ers Sunday, the Lions still have that unlikable record of being the sole football team in NFL history to not appear in the Super Bowl. Both the 49ers and the Chiefs - which the Lions beat in Week #1 - have been Super Bowl winners.
If there's anything to cheer us Michiganders up, it's the fact that the Lions have drastically improved under Dan Campbell and owner Sheila Ford Hamp. From embarrassment during year one to winning record year two to winning playoff games this year shows that Sheila is not her father. She's to football what Rocky Wirtz was to hockey. WCF was all about the Benjamins while Sheila wanted to show the world that Detroit can be good at winning. With too many years of under-.500 records with all four teams, she helped to build a team the city and the world could be proud of. And it's considering that the Lions never won a Super Bowl. The Tigers last won the World Series in 1984. The Pistons last won the NBA Championship in 2004 while the Red Wings' last Stanley Cup was in 2008. Currently, the Wings are playoff-bound while the Pistons are proving to the world that owner Tom Gores is a fucking twat who should have never bought the team from Bill Davidson's gold-digger wife. In 13 years, Gores has only one winning season with the Pistons under his belt. Currently, the Pistons are the worst team in the NBA. As for the Tigers, time will only tell once the season begins. They were damn near .500 last year, and this year could be pivotal.
In all, there's no shame that the Lions didn't quite make it to the Super Bowl this year. But at the end of the day, the world is still turning. At least Sheila isn't her father, or worse yet, classless Carolina Panthers owner David Tepper, who threw a drink all over some Jacksonville Jaguars fans and was fined a paltry $300,000 by the NFL (he's worth $20 billion, BTW).
So now, we get to root for another team that's not the Lions for the Super Bowl. And for me, it's an easy choice: the Chiefs.
For starters, I'm still pissed at the 49ers for beating the Lions, but my hatred for that team rums a little deeper. I hate the fact that they dropped Colin Kaepernick for kneeling during the National Anthem. He had every right to do so as a protest against a country that has long spat on black folks like himself. Plus, the team's former owner, Eddie DeBartolo was pardoned by Drumpf. Methinks it's a thank you from the big orange douchebag for firing Kaepernick.
Granted, KC's owner, Clark Hunt is a Rethuglican. But, the Chiefs do have an unofficial cheerleader who stands for a lot of things that Drumpf is against, and it's their beloved mascot, K.C. Wolf.
Just kidding, it's Taylor Swift.
Granted, you might not like her music, but you love what she stands for. I'll betcha that the NFL loves how every time she's in a stadium skybox, it boosts morale among their female fans, plus those who are now knowing what a First Down and a Pick is. For many, being in the same building Tay-Tay is in is like being in the same building God is. It's just too bad that Eminem is likely going to be watching the game at home like many of us Lion fans still heartbroken over the situation from last weekend.
But, all we can do is cheer up. The Lions have shown drastic improvement year after year and there's always next year. Let's remember: just because we've sucked at football forever doesn't mean that we suck at everything. Detroit gave us the automobile, Motown, a prototype of punk rock that includes acts like The MC5 (RIP Wayne Kramer), delicious pizza, Faygo, Vernors, Soupy Sales, Bill Bonds, Madonna, and the list goes on. Every city and small town in America will always have their pluses and minuses.
And for Detroit, a good football team is definitely a plus.
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