Pro football – conquered by the Detroit Lions, in a time when they played in silver-painted leather helmets. Hockey – ours, the Red Wings skating in much the same attire that they wear today. Baseball – on top of the world, the Tigers famously in the same creamy whites and Old English D as the modern ballplayer.
In the middle of a Great Depression, Detroit had three sports champions in her midst. It was circa 1935-36. The Lions, Red Wings, and Tigers all walked (and skated) away with the whole enchilada in their respective sports. And the boxer Joe Louis – Detroit’s own – wore a title belt in those days, too. City of Champions, indeed.
It’s not a fit of boosterism, or the concoction of a slick marketing genius, to suggest that we may now be returning to those glory days of some seven decades ago.
Today, there are again three teams cooking in town, all at once, just as there was when the heroes were Dutch Clark and Glenn Presnell, Charlie Gehringer and Hank Greenberg, and Syd Howe and Normie Smith.
Dutch Clark (top) wearing his retired #7; Syd Howe once scored six goals in one game for the Red Wings
The Pistons, Red Wings, and Tigers are making this city go daft. The Tigers are reigning American League champions. The Pistons and Red Wings currently toil in their conference finals – the Final Four of their sports. And all three are strong, serious contenders to go all the way.
I wonder sometimes if we truly appreciate and understand what it is that we’re experiencing right now. New York doesn’t have three teams with such high expectations. Chicago doesn’t. Los Angeles doesn’t. Nor does Houston. Or Denver. Or Atlanta.
But Detroit is awash with first place squads and deep playoff runs and painted faces and team slogans and jersey-wearing fans. It’s a city that heaves and exhales with every ebb and flow that playoff competition produces. It’s a time when Saturday can mean the Red Wings and Tigers in the afternoon, and the Pistons in the evening. Or vice-versa. The bloggers can’t type fast enough; the callers to sports talk radio are at the peak of their schizophrenia.
A couple weeks ago, driving home from a Red Wings playoff game, I heard a cranky, pessimistic fan of the Pistons on one of the radio’s blabbermouth shows. He was unhappy about coach Flip Saunders’s rotation, his coaching decisions, the team’s play. He couldn’t be consoled by the exasperated host. And this not more than an hour after the Pistons completed a sweep of the Orlando Magic. I can’t imagine that poor fan after the Pistons lost a couple to the Bulls last week.
The peaks and valleys that go with all this hysteria are quite fascinating. The Red Wings, if you choose to recall, were 33 seconds away from trailing the San Jose Sharks, 3-1, in their conference semifinals series. But then Robert Lang, a frequent target of the hand-wringers, snapped a shot thru Sharks goalie Evgeni Nabokov’s pads, and the Red Wings went on to win in overtime. Just like that, the series was tied. A couple games later, the series was over.
There are people who watch sports with a decidedly objective eye. They are the ones who take the big block of facts and statistics and with their sharp chisel, break it down into bite-sized nuggets. They use formulas and precedent and tell us what we can all expect, according to their unbiased views. The fact that they are often about as right as a broken clock matters not, for they are the experts.
These experts are already saying, with about 25% of the baseball season played, that the Detroit Tigers, once they return to good health, will be a likely representative of the American League in the 2007 World Series. The non-biased experts of hockey peg the Red Wings as likely Stanley Cup champions. And in basketball, the Pistons are starting to convert some who would anoint any Western Conference team the champion over any team in the East.
City of Champions, if you add it all up.
I did a little research. After those high-stepping days of 1935-36, there hasn’t been a time when three of Detroit’s teams could call themselves legitimate championship material. The closest, I suppose, was in 1987, when the Red Wings and Pistons each made the conference finals, and the Tigers won their division. But the Red Wings were an overachieving team that finished below .500 in the regular season. The unbiased folks didn’t figure them as Cup contenders.
This is a grand time to be a Detroit sports fan. Two teams making a late-spring assault to be crowned champions in June. A third gearing up for what should be another fun summer, the spoils of the fall awaiting them – if the unbiased ones have gotten it right. But do we truly appreciate it?
I think it’s something that you look back on and remember fondly, more than you reflect on it while it’s happening. There’s no time to stop and smell the roses now. We’re in such a hurry and
things are so frenetic right now, we’re likely to get jabbed by the thorns, anyway.
If you’re an old-timer like me, you remember the vast wasteland of the 1970s that was Detroit sports. You remember when the Red Wings were called the Dead Things, and existed under Darkness With Harkness. You remember when the Pistons lost 66 games in 1979-80 thanks to the ruins left by Hurricane Vitale. You remember when the Tigers lost 19 in a row in 1975. Back then, the notion of those three teams contending for anything other than court jester was a mere fantasy. We’d have given them a parade down Woodward Avenue for finishing .500, for goodness sakes.
Speaking of parades, they say everyone loves one.
So just think how crazy they’ll go for three.
No comments:
Post a Comment