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Two summers ago, I lunched with author Bill Morris in Lower Manhattan at a place called “Paul’s Da Burger Joint.” Although long a resident of New York City, Morris grew up in suburban Detroit and never forgot his roots.
Among them is to root, root, root for the Detroit Lions, and Morris told me then he wanted to write a book about more than a half-century of ineptitude and heartbreak from a team its own depressed fans scornfully called the “Same Old Lions.”
“My original idea was to write a story about futility,” Morris said recently. “America is built on success and this organization was terrible. My original working title was Natural Born Losers.”
I told Morris then the book might sell well in Michigan but maybe not so much beyond the Great Lakes State. Then came a strange turn of events. After Morris signed a deal with Pegasus Books, the Lions got good. First, kind of good. Then, real good.
As he finished reporting his book and began to write it last fall, the Lions had turned into one of the best stories in American sports, winning two of three playoff games and almost reaching the Super Bowl.
“All of a sudden, they turned it around,” Morris said. “And I thought ‘Holy wow!’ This ending is really changing.”
Spoiler alert: Although the Lions lost that last playoff game to San Francisco, the book The Lions Finally Roar (that’s Morris’s new title) still has a happy ending for both the readers and the author. It will be published in hardcover in July and can be ordered in advance from pegasusbooks.com.
With a new season looming and a team on the upswing, Morris’s timing couldn’t be better.
“It never hurts to be lucky,” Morris said.
The cover alone might draw eyes. Most of it is Honolulu Blue, the Lions’ primary color, with a sky of smoky silver (sort of their other team color) as a backdrop to a sketch of the Motor City skyline. The subtitle is: The Ford Family, the Detroit Lions and the Road to Redemption in the N.F.L.
Morris is also the author of Motor City Burning, a novel about the riot and rebellion in 1967. He grew up in Birmingham, attended Brother Rice high school, and worked as a caddy at Oakland Hills Country club.
At the time, his father — Dick Morris — was the executive assistant to William Clay Ford, Sr., the grandson of the original Henry Ford and the owner of the Lions who took control of the team from a group of partners on Nov. 22, 1963 (the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated).
This occurred a few years after Ford had been edged from power at Ford Motor Co. by his brother, Henry Ford II. The Lions were seen by some as Bill Ford’s consolation prize. When Ford bought the team, he offered the general manager’s job to the senior Morris, the book says.
After Morris turned down the job because he felt himself unqualified, Ford hired Russ Thomas, the boogeyman of coaches, players, and frustrated fans for decades. Before his father died, Morris interviewed him extensively and recorded the conversations.
Although the book uses few direct quotes from his father, its point of view is clearly informed by his dad’s perspective. He didn’t like Henry Ford II (Morris never calls him “the Deuce”) who called his younger brother, Bill, “the Kid.”
“What an Irish peasant at heart,” the young Morris said of The Deuce. “He was a horrible man. He could be a monster.”
As the subtitle suggests, the team’s ownership and management is the most intriguing through line.
Much of it discusses the alcoholism of Bill Ford, Sr., and the role of Dick Morris as official drinking buddy. After work at the auto company, Ford would join cronies to booze it up at the Dearborn Inn before maybe sideswiping a few cars on East Jefferson while driving back to his mansion in Grosse Pointe.
“As the losses piled up, Bill Ford’s drinking went from dark all the way to black,” Morris writes. “Like most alcoholics, he now existed inside an impenetrable bubble of self-absorption … No one could get in and he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, come out. Bill was in a permanent fog and he was killing himself.”
Warned by his family to straighten up, Ford joined a support group, gave up alcohol, and stayed sober for the rest of his life. For years, it was assumed that his son, William Clay Ford, Jr., would take over the team. However, when Ford died in 2014, his widow — Martha Firestone Ford — assumed control.
In 2020, she turned over the car keys to her daughter, Sheila Ford Hamp, who led the housecleaning that brought in general manager Brad Holmes, Coach Dan Campbell, and a whole bunch of good players to try to win Detroit’s first league championship since 1957.
Unfortunately, the author got turned down for interviews with Sheila Hamp and Bill Ford, Jr. He relies on informed speculation to suggest that the transition was due to family bitterness over the way Sheila’s husband, Steve Hamp, had been treated by Bill Ford, Jr., when Hamp was fired as the chief of staff for Bill Ford, Jr., during a major corporate shuffle.
Perhaps Sheila’s takeover of the team, Morris suggests, was payback by his mother against Bill, Jr., for sacking Hamp.
“The precise thinking that led Martha Ford to elevate her daughter instead of her son is unknowable because the Fords, as noted, are private people who are disinclined to air their business in public,” Morris writes, adding, “Martha Ford must have found something wanting in her son.”
All this is not to suggest The Lions Finally Roar ignores the actual football players and coaches toiling under the Ford family. Not at all. There’s plenty about “The Curse of Bobby Layne” and how the trade of this hard-living quarterback to Pittsburgh in 1958 created bad karma that lasted into the next century.
Outsiders might not be aware of all the hoary Lions’ lore that has accumulated since they washed up on these shores in 1934. They may be surprised and amused at the misadventures of a colorful history. But much will be familiar and perhaps nostalgic to locals.
There’s that anecdote about Joe Don Looney refusing to take a play to the huddle because he wasn’t “Western Union”; and Alex Karras brawling with Dick the Bruiser at the Lindell AC; and “Another One Bites the Dust”; and the bloody bar brawl between two Lions’ roommates, one a quarterback, the other his blocker.
On the more serious side, there is the death of Chuck Hughes on the field at Tiger Stadium in 1971 and the paralysis of Mike Utley at the Silverdome in 1991; and the death of Coach Don McCafferty before the 1974 season; and the hurt feelings upon departure of stars like Barry Sanders, Calvin Johnson, and Charlie Sanders; and this candid insight from Morris’s interview with Joe Schmidt, the captain in their three-championship era of the 1950s at Briggs Stadium.
A Hall of Fame linebacker, Schmidt was one of their greatest players ever and one of their better coaches. But he was happy to leave the patriarchal grasp of the dynastic family that owns the team.
“The Fords were very kind to me and very good to me,” Schmidt told the author, “but I felt like I was being released from prison.”
In retrospect, near the end of the book, Morris points to October of 2022 as the turning point, the moment when a new type of Ford family leadership inspired the franchise. The Lions were 1-5, worst in the league. Hamp had been booed loudly at Ford Field the previous year during a ring ceremony for Calvin Johnson.
Hamp showed up at practice and spoke words that proved prophetic.
“I know this is difficult,” she said. “I know this is hard …. We’re going to turn this thing around the right way … It requires patience. Am I frustrated? Absolutely. Are the fans frustrated? Absolutely … But I think we really are making progress … I just don’t want everyone to push the panic button.”
Since that day, the Lions are 22-9, including the three playoff results. There is no panic, although happy hearts are producing joyous palpitations. If this keeps up, a lot more authors will write many more books about these Different New Lions.
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Joe Lapointe
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