The Lions Finally Roar

the visiting Cleveland Browns all in white except for the orange globes of their helmets, an incongruous suggestion of sunshine and citrus on a team from that gray factory town where the combustible Cuyahoga River discharges its toxins into Lake Erie.

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The final score is an astonishment: Lions 59, Browns 14. Tobin Rote has passed for four touchdowns and run for another. Though no one knows it, Rote’s performance will stand as the pinnacle of his seventeen-year career, much as this day will stand as the last hurrah for the Detroit Lions, who are about to embark on six and half decades of unrelenting futility.

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To top it off, there was Layne’s carousing and a growing chorus of whispers that his love of gambling didn’t stop at the poker table—that he gambled on NFL games, possibly on Lions games.

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On his way out the door, Layne may or may not have uttered words that were destined to become an urban legend in Detroit: This team will not win for another fifty years. And so was born the Curse of Bobby Layne.

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Nelson W. Aldrich Jr., an insightful chronicler of American wealth, noted that people of Bill Ford’s class neglect to ask the price of a Degas bronze not only because they know they can afford it but because any mention of money would tarnish the experience of acquiring it. Rich people don’t buy things, Aldrich wrote: “They ‘discover’ their treasures in antique stores or ‘find’ them in galleries. The process is one of ingestion, not purchase….

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Detroit police, who claimed the Lindell AC, a popular bar in downtown Detroit, was a hangout not only of sports stars and their fans but also of “known hoodlums.” (AC stood for Athletic Club, a wry nod to the tony Detroit Athletic Club, which stood nearby.) The Lindell happened to be owned by the Greek brothers Johnny and Jimmy Butsicaris and their buddy Alex Karras.

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“I never saw a game until I was playing in one,” he said. “I had no idea how to put my uniform on.” When Gilmer informed him the Lions had lost the coin toss before his first game, Yepremian rushed to midfield, got down on his knees and started searching in the grass for the lost coin. People stopped laughing when Yepremian kicked an NFL record six field goals in a 32–31 road win over Minnesota.

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Bill’s father, Edsel, died at home shortly before his fiftieth birthday, his stomach riddled with ulcers and cancer, his spirit broken by a lifetime of abuse from a domineering, erratic father who was convinced that his artistically inclined son lacked the “iron” to run the family business. Old Henry’s treatment of his only son went beyond pathological, all the way to filicidal.

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Bill was free, as he’d put it, to conduct board meetings in a phone booth. He could hire and fire at will. And because of the privileges he’d always lived with, he was free to judge people not on their merits but on their loyalty and, perhaps worse, on their likability. In the ensuing years, Bill Ford would surround himself not with people who were qualified to do their jobs but with people who were loyal and who made him feel comfortable. The Detroit Lions were on their way to becoming something that would reduce efficiency and development even more drastically than an autocracy.

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Detroit’s football team was already a one-man plutocracy. Which is to say it was engineered to fail.

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I’ve heard speculation from several sources, plausible but impossible to prove, that Thomas had covered for Bill Ford’s drinking mishaps more than once and that he’d had a hand in guiding Ford into rehab. If true, it was a debt that would be impossible to repay,

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Since its founding as a French trading post in the early eighteenth century, the place has always been about hard work, making things, taking risks, and either getting rich or barely getting by. It came to be known as “an eight-finger town,” thanks to the treacherous machinery inside its thundering factories. Not a place for the delicate or the faint of heart.

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The city’s name itself is an Anglicized French word, D’étroit, “by the straits,” a reference to its riverfront location, pronounced DEE-troyt by many natives.

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George Plimpton’s bestseller, Paper Lion,

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Marvin Gaye, the would-be Lion, released the single of “What’s Going On.” It opens with the sounds of a boisterous party. Mel Farr’s and Lem Barney’s voices cut through the hubbub,

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And so the idea of the Renaissance Center was born. Henry II brought in the architect John Portman, whose mammoth Peachtree Center was being touted as the savior of musty downtown Atlanta even though it contained many design flourishes that walled out the surrounding city. It was less “a city within a city” than “a suburb within a city,” a cluster of towers linked by sky bridges that removed pedestrians from the streets, a hermetically sealed world of shops, galleries, offices, meeting spaces, and hotels that wanted no part of the city it was supposedly saving. Many of these design flourishes were destined for Detroit.

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Black Bottom, a lively, largely black neighborhood on the East Side of Detroit that was erased to make way for the Chrysler Freeway, which wiped out 10,000 businesses, displaced 40,000 residents, and greased the exodus to the suburbs.

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Michigan is a state where people tend to stay put—only Louisiana has more native-born residents—

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Detroiters—people who “survived everything America can dish out,” in the words of the poet Philip Levine—have learned to handle adversity with an iron brand of fatalism, with no hint of chest-thumping or complaint. This is true of all Detroiters, but it’s especially true of the long-suffering Detroit Lions fan.

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You would think a smart guy like Bill Ford would learn from his past mistakes. But you would be wrong.

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among the skeptics was Pete Rozelle, who asked, “Who the heck would want to watch the NFL draft?” Which was another way of asking, Who in his right mind would tune in to watch a bunch of middle-aged guys talking for hours into telephones in a smoky hotel ballroom?

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Paul Zimmerman, a man with a gift for pushing people’s buttons, went on national television to say that Super

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Bowl week in Detroit reminded him of the Moscow Olympics with one difference: “the security guards in Moscow were nicer.”

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It was hard to argue with his central point. The wind-chill factor in Pontiac on game day was 21 degrees below zero,

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