by Craig Colby
“I like that you cheer for two football teams, and one is perennially good and the other is terrible.”
My football partner Larry is telling me this as we go through our picks for another week in a pool.
I do have two football teams, breaking sports fan etiquette. However, there is another guideline that makes this possible.
If you cheer for the Detroit Lions, you get another team too.
Most sports loyalties are based on geography, often handed down over generations. I grew up in Thunder Bay, Ontario but my family is originally from Michigan. All of us cheer for the Lions, but it hasn’t been easy. It’s not just the losing. Sports fans understand their team will go through some bad stretches. But teams need to supply some winning seasons, and they must win some games in the playoffs. It’s the sex in the relationship. If you cut off fans for an extended period they are going to stray.
That’s why Lions fans are in an open relationship with their team.
Are You Even Trying?
Detroit last won the NFL Championship game in 1957, a decade before the first Super Bowl and two days after my parents got married. Since then they have lost 12 playoff games and won just 1. I’m 57 years old. The Lions have won just 1 playoff game in my lifetime. That single win was 29 years ago, before people learned what e-mail was and grew cell phones in their palms.
The Lions have managed this ineptness while employing some of the best players in the history of the NFL. Barry Sanders, perhaps the best pure runner the game has ever seen, retired in 1998 with 4 years left on the richest contract in NFL history to that point and was a season away from breaking the NFL rushing record. He’d had enough. Calvin Johnson, who set the single season record for receiving yards, retired in 2015 after 9 seasons. He has nothing to do with this former team.
Not bad enough? How about this? In 2001 Lions owner William Clay Ford Sr. hired former linebacker and broadcaster Matt Millen, who had no front office experience, to be the CEO of the Lions. Millen told Ford he wasn’t qualified for the job. Ford replied “you’re smart. You’ll figure it out.” He didn’t. Millen took a team that just missed the playoffs and turned it into one of the worst in NFL history. The Lions averaged 4 wins a season and went three years without winning a road game. For doing such a terrible job, Ford made Millen the second highest paid general manager in the NFL.
Millen was fired after the third game of the 2008 season, all losses. I went to the next game. The Chicago Bears stomped the Lions 34-7. As I walked out of the stadium, heads down, a Bears fan, drinking a beer and all smiles, said to us “it’s going to be all right Detroit. It’s going to be all right.” It wasn’t. The Motor City Kitties lost every game that season.
This is just the short list of reasons Lions fans get another team.
I cheer for the Steelers, my favourite football team. My older brother, Jim, cheers for the Giants. My younger brother, Scott, cheers for the Vikings. My dad, Pete, cheers for the Patriots. He’s been a Lions fan since they started play in 1934 so he’s earned a spot on that bandwagon. Every Lions fan I know has another team.
So why do we cheer for the Lions at all? My brother Scott asked Jim and I that after the Lions lost the first game of the season when a Detroit running back let the winning touchdown pass go through his hands. There’s a couple of reasons.
Why!?
Fandom isn’t rational, it’s emotional. The euphoria of a win, even one playoff win three decades ago, stays with you. Sports fans feed on championships for decades, like camels in the desert. Fandom also brings you into a fellowship of likeminded enthusiasts. The bond is not just with the team, it’s with your peers too.
Our fandom of the Lions is also the result of generations of indoctrination. We sit with our parents who cheered for the Lions, who sat with their parents who cheered for the Lions. The Honolulu Blue and Silver of the Lions become part of the filter through which you experience family bonding. It’s not just your team. It’s our team. Cheer long and hard enough and it becomes part of your identity.
Sports franchises share those characteristics with other monolithic social entities - religion, and politics. Religion is introduced at infancy and reinforced so thoroughly, people rarely switch. Being Catholic, Hindu, Muslim or Jewish isn’t just something you do. It’s something you are. Political ideals and values are introduced and reinforced in the home too. You rarely hear people describe themselves as agreeing with certain left-wing ideas or appreciating some conservatives’ thinking. More often you hear “I’m liberal” or “I’m conservative.” Once those labels become part of your identity, they are difficult to challenge. The monoliths demand our loyalty. But they shouldn’t get our blind loyalty.
The Limits of Loyalty
If you give unqualified fealty to a religion, political party, or football team, you become easy to manipulate. This leads to discrimination against other faiths, dismissing people labelled “heartless conservatives” or a “libtards”, or fist fights with opposing fans in stadium parking lots.
If a religious organization harms children, a political party supports a leader who undermines a country’s values for his own gains, or a football team hands over the reins to an incompetent blowhard who trashes the franchise, we can and should re-define our relationship with them. We need to question anything that wields the power of indoctrination and emotional attachment over us, even if it means breaking traditions and straining friendships. Every cafeteria Catholic, Lincoln Project member and Detroit Lions fan knows this.
Loyalty isn’t a blank check. It needs to be earned and maintained. The Detroit Lions haven’t done that. When it comes to football, Lions supporters are polyfanorous.
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Craig Colby is a television executive producer, producer, director, writer and story editor. He runs a storytelling consulting and production service for businesses. He can be reached at craig@colbyvision.net.