Paterno's Role in Cover-Up Forever Stains PSU Football

What I’d like to know is how Joe Paterno could even look at Jerry Sandusky for 14 years, let alone be a friend and confidante.

Oh the questions I’d like Paterno to take a crack at, if he were here to do so, instead of buried six feet under, along with his conscience.

Where was the little voice in your head, Joe? Where were all this character and leadership and purity that your former Penn State players insisted you had?

How could you work along side a predatory monster? Where did all the righteousness go?

Did you drive home on certain nights and ponder Sandusky and the atrocities he was doing to children within your hallowed halls? Did you wonder how you could wake up and face Sandusky’s phoniness for another day?

Did you think of your own grandchildren, Joe? Did you wonder what you’d feel if it were your grandkids who were getting penetrated up the rectum by a sick old man?

Were you at peace with yourself and your carefully plotted campaign of misdirection and concealment, going way back to 1998 when you were first informed of Sandusky’s acts of horror in your hall’s showers?

Forget how you could look at Sandusky, Joe—how could you look at yourself?

Paterno, the long time Penn State football coach who comes out smelling like the opposite of a rose in former FBI director Louie Freeh’s recently released report on the sexual monster and assistant coach Sandusky, is dead. The man who was endearingly called JoePa has taken to his grave the answers to my questions and many others.

Paterno, in death, will forever haunt us. Never again can we speak of him, look at a photo of him, or even watch another PSU football game without our minds shooting back to the sexual predator Sandusky and how Paterno—according to Freeh’s report—was at or near the top of ringleaders who chose to protect one man in the name of also protecting a bleeping football program, instead of all those kids who were being raped and otherwise abused.

Prior to Freeh’s report, especially since Paterno had passed away, there was that old benefit of the doubt that was being offered to the coach’s legacy. You know, that thing of not speaking ill of the dead.

That sheath of impunity is gone now. Paterno and his legacy are fair game. Take your shots. It’s your turn to have impunity.

There’s little that one can say about Paterno in the wake of Freeh’s report that could be considered gauche or inappropriate.

If Paterno was Bob Knight, or Woody Hayes, or hell even Nick Saban, there’d be a bunch of us who would gleefully participate in his ruination. It would be “ding dong, the witch is dead.”

But there was not really anything to dislike or to hate on when it came to Penn State football.

Paterno did not inspire anyone to say an ill word about him. He was that old man with glasses and a big nose who coached the team with the plain blue and white uniforms in a place called Happy Valley, of all things.

Penn State did not win enough to be the Yankees of college football, so rooting for them was not like rooting for U.S. Steel, as comedian Joe E. Brown once said of being a Bronx Bombers supporter.

Penn State was just…there. Theirs was a traditionally solid program, yes, but they were hard to hate, impossible, really. They won eight or nine games a year and went to some sort of bowl but rarely played for anything of value.

Penn State, under Paterno, was known for two things, mainly: the ridiculously simple uniforms and spitting out NFL-caliber linebackers.

The Nittany Lions would occasionally send a star running back (Franco Harris, Curt Warner) or a quarterback (Todd Blackledge) to the pros, but linebacker was their position of pride. Guys like Jack Ham, Greg Buttle, Shane Conlan, LaVar Arrington and yes, even our old friend Matt Millen are just a few of those who came from “Linebacker U.”

Who can hate a school that produces linebackers?

Paterno and his football program were not ones to despise or be jealous of. This was especially true as the coach got older and the voice got raspier and harder to hear without straining your ears.

Paterno moved through his 60s and 70s and as he did, there was not a whiff of scandal or cheating or anything that suggested anything untoward was happening on campus, as it related to the football program.

He got older and he became every college football fan’s grandfather. Paterno hit his 80s and by that time he, at worst, was pitied for his advanced age; at best he was lionized—no pun intended—for being a living legend.

None of us could have suspected the disgusting, filthy acts taking place in the place called Happy Valley.

Paterno’s big nose came in handy for Sandusky, because under it was happening, for 14 years, the abuse of children and the ensuing cover up.

A cover up that Freeh says included Paterno as more than a wingman—more than a pathetic, Mr. Magoo-like character.

This was Paterno being shockingly rotten to the core, devoid of character and without scruples. Freeh’s report portrays Paterno as a sort of football Godfather who was not to be trifled with and who wielded more power in his pinky than the entire Penn State administration appeared to possess in their whole, cowardly bodies.

And Sandusky—let’s not forget he was the convicted perp, not Paterno—kept drawing a check as a member of Paterno’s wise guys, even while the head man knew that Sandusky had a thing for young boys.
This is tragic to the nth degree. At once, a football coaching legend, his legacy and the school he represented have all come crashing down under the weight of the worst kind of sexual scandal.

This now follows Penn State, just as Watergate followed Nixon and as steroids follow Bonds. Right or wrong, the football players who don the blue and white at PSU will forever be linked to a coach who put “the program” in front of child welfare and who protected a predator over the helpless.

Happy Valley, eh?

For Once, Red Wings + $$ Don't = Free Agent du Jour

Since when did Hockeytown turn into the Second City?

What is happening here? The Red Wings being left at the altar? GM Kenny Holland having to return Mike Ilitch his checkbook?

No press conference? No blood red jersey with the name SUTER or PARISE stitched on the back in that very Red Wings font?

What free agent says no to the Red Wings? Who looks at 21 straight years in the playoffs, four Stanley Cups since 1997 (and almost a fifth), more tradition than Christmas, a packed house every night and says, “Thanks but no thanks”?

Who looks at Pavel Datsyuk and Henrik Zetterberg and says there’s not enough to work with here? Who looks at Danny Cleary and Valtteri Filppula and Todd Bertuzzi and decides there aren’t enough role players?

Or is it what they’re looking for and not seeing?

Nicklas Lidstrom? Well, he’s retired. This is true.

Brad Stuart? Gone, to San Jose. California kid returns home.

Jiri Hudler? Twenty-five goal scorer, off like a cheap suit, to the netherworld of Calgary.


The Red Wings lost out on the top two free agents of the class of 2012—winger Zach Parise and defenseman Ryan Suter—after both of them chose to sign with the Minnesota Wild.

The Minnesota Wild?






Since when do the Red Wings lose out to the Minnesota Wild? Since when does anyone?

It’s like ice cream losing out to spinach. The high school quarterback losing the girl to the class nerd. The Israeli Army losing out to the Italians.


The headline should read “Sun to Set in East.”

The Red Wings would never say it publicly, but when Holland, special advisor Chris Chelios and owner Ilitch flew to Suter’s Wisconsin farm to give the official Hockeytown How Do last week, armed with a hefty contract offer and a diamond stick pen, they likely expected Suter to fly back with them.

Instead, Suter heard everything the Red Wings' brass had to offer, looked over the 13-year, $90 million job offer, and said, “I’ll call you.”

As for Parise, the Red Wings made a pitch to him, too, but it was Suter into whom they were putting forth their best effort and faith.

It should have been a red flag—no pun intended—when Suter wasn’t a Red Wing by the end of the first day of free agency (July 1). In fact, it should have been a red flag that the Red Wings had to board a plane.


In the salad days of acquiring other teams’ defects, the Red Wings looked at their watch, waited for 12:01 a.m. to hit and placed a phone call to the agent of their quarry.

Back then, the player boarded a plane, not the Red Wings.


Yet here were the Red Wings, flying out to Wisconsin—Wisconsin!—playing the role of Suter’s suitor to help them absorb the loss of Lidstrom. They brought it all except a dozen roses and a 10-pound box of chocolates.


Suter and Parise, both with family connections to Minnesota (Parise’s dad, Jean-Paul, played for the North Stars in the 1970s), went with the Wild.

“We lost out to family,” Holland said. “It’s hard to beat out family,” and you wondered if he was trying to convince the press or himself.

Ahh, family, shmamily.

Did Luc Robitaille, with roots planted in southern California deeper than the black hole, let something silly like family stop him from signing with the Red Wings in 2001? Lucky Luc, with a singer/model/wife whose career screamed Hollywood, considered one thing and one thing only: Where can I get a Stanley Cup?


That’s why they all came to Hockeytown.


That’s why Brett Hull came, the same summer as Robitaille. Hull won a Cup with the 1999 Dallas Stars and wanted that feeling one more time before he retired.

That’s why Curtis Joseph came, the superstar goalie who signed in 2002, trying to hoist hockey’s Holy Grail for the first time in his brilliant career.

The Red Wings didn’t need but a few hours of free-agent time to land big defenseman and hometown kid Derian Hatcher (Sterling Heights) in 2003, the 6’5” behemoth who left the Stars so he could win another Cup, in Detroit.


The list goes on and on.

The Red Wings didn’t have to work as hard, with all of them combined, as they had to work to get Suter. And they still lost out.


The family thing is a convenient out for Holland and the Red Wings organization when it comes to missing out on the two biggest fish in the 2012 free-agent sea.

But family hasn’t mattered in so many past free-agent signings the Red Wings have orchestrated.


The Red Wings, since appearing in the 2009 Cup Finals, haven’t been past the second round of the playoffs. This spring, they had the ignominy of being the first team drummed out of the postseason, lasting a measly five games against the Nashville Predators, of all teams.


They lost Lidstrom to retirement, Stuart to—you guessed it—family as well.

Players are retiring and fleeing the Good Ship Red Wing; are they doing it because they sense a capsizing?

Did Suter and Parise look at the Red Wings’ chances for a Stanley Cup in the near future and not see anything that they couldn’t see with half a dozen other teams?

The Minnesota Wild haven’t made the playoffs since 2008—and that was just their third time since joining the NHL in 2000. They have been, until signing Suter and Parise, one of the NHL’s most irrelevant franchises.


But the Wild beat the Red Wings in this free-agent frenzy. Dewey defeated Truman this time.

This is foreign soil for the Red Wings. They almost don’t know how to react. In the past, money + Red Wings has = player of their choice.

Not this time.

So cancel the press conferences. Hold off on the jersey stitching. Put the checkbook away—it won’t be needed.

The Red Wings put up a goose egg. Suter and Parise threw a shutout at them.

It wasn’t supposed to go down this way. Because, for two decades, it hasn’t.

Hey, Hey, Hockeytown—there are at least two stars who don’t think you’re so nifty. Stick that in your five hole.

NBA Draft Should Be Off-Limits for Teenagers

At first blush, it would appear that Tigers great Al Kaline and Pistons draftee Andre Drummond have about as much in common as Ann Coulter and Rachel Maddow.

But it’s very appropriate that Drummond was drafted this week.

For it was 59 years ago last Monday when Kaline made his big league debut, subbing late in the game at Philadelphia’s Shibe Park. It was so long ago, the Athletics were still two stops away from playing in Oakland.

The tie-in to Drummond? Kaline was all of 18 years and six months old when he spelled Jim Delsing in center field that day in Philly.

Drummond is 18. He’s yet another baby that the NBA allows to be drafted with impunity. And he’ll strive to be the first teenager to have any success in Detroit pro sports since Steve Yzerman, and Stevie was the first to do it since Kaline.

Kaline had just 28 at-bats as an 18-year-old, but as a 19-year-old “veteran,” Kaline had 504 at-bats and hit at a .276 clip. Not bad for someone who was just a few years removed from having his meat cut up for him.

In his first year as a non-teen, in 1955, Kaline became the youngest player ever to win a league batting title.

So there you have it. I’m comparing Drummond to Al Kaline. But what’s a little more pressure to put on a kid, eh?

Can’t be any more than what is heaped on these youngsters who are practically ripped from their mother’s wombs and deemed to be saviors of various NBA franchises.

The first two kiddies plucked off the board Thursday night were both from Kentucky—which continues to churn out NBA players like Penn State did with NFL linebackers back in the day—and both teenagers: power forward Anthony Davis and the very appropriately named guard Michael Kidd-Gilchrist.

It was the first time in league history that the first two players selected both came from the same school. But it was hardly the first time that the first two were barely old enough to vote. In this year’s draft, the top three picks were teens.

The NBA Draft used to be as intriguing as its NFL counterpart, because there was actually a time when the league drafted young men, not adolescents.

It was about a generation ago when the incoming NBA players were three or four-year starters in college. They still played at the Kentuckys and the Dukes and the North Carolinas, but they played there long enough for us to at least see them on a few Saturday afternoons on television.

We knew the incoming pro players because we watched them, we read about them and we saw their big plays on the 11:00 news highlights—for at least three years, if not four.

Kentucky—naturally—had a guard in the late-1970s named Kyle Macy. He was a starter on the 1978 national championship team. But since Macy was a transfer, we heard about him, and because the rules mandated that he sit out one full year after his transfer, by the time he graduated you would have sworn that Macy was college basketball’s first six-year player; that’s how much and how long it seemed we saw of Kyle Macy playing for Kentucky.

So when it came time for these young men to be drafted into the NBA, there was some familiarity. There was some attachment. We knew their strengths, their weaknesses.

But above all, we knew their freaking names.

Full disclosure: I’m not a hard core NBA guy, to the degree that I can keep tabs on prospects one year removed from attending fourth hour and remembering locker combinations along with half court plays. But I suspect I am far from being the Lone Ranger in this area.

I picked up a few names as the draft grew closer. I knew of Davis, of course, and North Carolina’s John Henson, because he was projected as a possible Pistons choice. And a few others, Drummond included. It was like I had to do a crash course—pull an all-nighter or two to get marginally up to speed.

The feeder schools didn’t change; still the usual suspects who have been birthing NBA players since the days of the four-corner offense. But oh, those player names.

But that’s the way it is nowadays; colleges are lucky to get more than one year out of their superstars, before they take their basketballs and backpacks and crayons, for all I know, to the NBA.

Andre Drummond, a seven-footer from Connecticut, has been described as a freak. The people who know about such things say that Drummond, who skipped his last year of prep school to enroll at UConn, is a premier defender, shot blocker and, with a 7’6’ wingspan, a Pterodactyl on hardwood.

What they also say is, don’t expect big things from him for 2-3 years. Then, he will team with Greg Monroe to give the Pistons a frontcourt worth the price of admission.

Huh—don’t expect big things for 2-3 years? Then why draft him now?

Because the NBA allows it.

Here comes the old fuddy-duddy in me, bursting to the surface.

If I was David Stern, NBA Commissioner, I would insist that no one be eligible for my league’s draft until his 20^th birthday occurs no later than October 31 of the draft year in question—which is right around the start of most seasons.

This year’s draftees had to be born by December 31, 1993. Under my rules, the cut off would be October 31, 1992.

No more one-and-done in college. No more festooning teenagers with millions, just a year after their high school senior proms. No more using college basketball as a faux attempt at a bachelor’s degree.

You want to play in my league, son? Then put in at least two years of college ball, then we’ll talk.

You want to make millions? Then give me two years of college, at least, to put yourself on the path to a degree so you can be something after your basketball skills erode.

But if you want to use college basketball as nothing more than a hop, skip or a jump to the pros, we politely decline.

Don’t come at me with age discrimination or that I’m unfairly denying someone a right to earn a living. Playing in the NBA ought to be a privilege, not a right. And the commissioner ought to draw the line at teen players.

Not that 20 year-olds are bastions of maturity—but you have to start somewhere.

Meanwhile, the rules are what they are, and Andre Drummond will suit up for the Pistons this fall, like so many of his first round brethren, as a teenage “freak” making millions, more than two years away from his first legal sip of alcohol.

Drummond will know more about the pick and roll than economics; more about setting screens than U.S. history; more about the half court than the Supreme Court. And he’ll make a king’s ransom doing it.

Then one day he’ll be 33 years old and in the twilight of his career, at an age where most men are just finding their professional stride.

I wonder what that one year of college will do for him then?

Lions Suddenly Model of Consistency in Today's NFL

Roger Staubach stood at the rostrum at his Hall of Fame induction in Canton, Ohio in 1985 and addressed the crowd. He was barking out signals one last time.

But this was no football huddle, and the play that Staubach was calling moved him to tears.

Staubach, the legendary Dallas Cowboys QB, found his voice quaking and his lower lip trembling when his list of thank yous finally came down to his coach. “That man in the funny hat,” Staubach managed, before emotions overwhelmed him and he had to pause to regain composure.

Tom Landry, the man in the funny hat, was the only NFL coach Staubach had. Heck, Landry was the only coach any Dallas Cowboy had, if that player’s career spanned any period from 1960 to 1988.

The relationship between quarterback and coach in the NFL, if allowed to progress for any longer than a couple of years, is not unlike that of husband and wife. There’s arguing, rolling of eyes, tears and ecstasy. There’s name-calling, yelling and hugs. Then, eventually, there’s often divorce.

Staubach and Landry experienced all of the above, including divorce, albeit retirement-induced. Landry continued to coach the Cowboys for nine more years after Staubach hung up his right arm following the 1979 season.

After Staubach, Landry was married to Danny White. Before Staubach, the coach was hitched to Dandy Don Meredith. Before Meredith, Landry’s football spouse was tiny Eddie LeBaron, all of 5’7”, who needed a step ladder in order to read defenses.

The Cowboys’ continued success, after their growing pains of the early-1960s passed, was because of remarkable consistency in their organizational chart. The Cowboys operated for nearly three decades with Tex Schramm running the show from the top of the chart, Gil Brandt manning the scouting department, and Tom Landry coaching the players afforded him by the first two.

The Cowboys didn’t change anything when that trio formed the team’s football pyramid.

The helmets didn’t change; the blue Lone Star on silver was the same helmet worn from Meredith to Hogeboom, from Lilly to Jeffcoat, from Hayes to Pearson. The white jerseys didn’t change. The fact that the Cowboys were the only team to wear white for every home game didn’t change.

The philosophy on both sides of the football didn’t change. Landry’s famously intricate defenses especially didn’t change.

Yet all of that consistency met its match with the Green Bay Packers of the 1960s.

Landry’s Cowboys went up against Vince Lombardi’s Packers twice in the NFL Championship Game (1966 and ’67) and came up short both times. The latter came during the famous Ice Bowl game on New Year’s Eve, 1967.

The Packers had their own consistency going; Lombardi and QB Bart Starr formed another famous married couple, another relationship filled with head butting and challenges and respectful disdain.

In the AFL, the Oakland Raiders, in the latter part of the ’60s, were forming their own powerhouse platoon, led by their irascible, bombastic owner Al Davis.

Quarterback Daryle Lamonica, a discard of the Buffalo Bills, came to Oakland and Davis, through his coaches, turned Lamonica loose with an offense that was a precursor to the video games of today: have Lamonica fade back five steps and heave the football as far as he could. It was an offense that earned the quarterback the moniker of The Mad Bomber.

John Madden took over as coach in 1969 and he and Lamonica, then he and Kenny Stabler, provided the coach-and-quarterback consistency so vital to NFL success.

Davis, the Raiders’ common denominator all by himself, presided over one AFL Championship and four Super Bowl titles.

The cause and effect of franchise consistency can be found all over the history of the NFL.

The Pittsburgh Steelers of the 1970s had one coach (Chuck Noll) and one quarterback (Terry Bradshaw). The San Francisco 49ers of the 1980s had one coach (Bill Walsh, though George Seifert coached the 1989 team) and one QB (Joe Montana). The Cowboys returned to glory in the 1990s with one quarterback (Troy Aikman).

It doesn’t take more than a few minutes of research to ascertain that NFL teams who are changing quarterbacks and/or coaches like socks, are likely teams finding themselves at or near the bottom of the standings every year.

The NFL’s dynasties, starting in the 1950s with the Cleveland Browns, can be neatly divided into decades and further identified by coach and quarterback. Cleveland had Paul Brown coaching and Otto Graham quarterbacking. The Packers had Lombardi and Starr. The Steelers had Noll and Bradshaw. The 49ers had Walsh and Montana. The Cowboys had Jimmy Johnson and Aikman (Barry Switzer coached the team to its third Super Bowl win of the 1990s in 1995-96).

All this talk of consistency within a franchise’s org chart is probably making Lions fans’ eyes glaze over, like I’m writing of the components of nuclear physics. Yet it shouldn’t, because something fascinating is happening with the Lions right now.

The team that couldn’t shoot straight when it came to coaching and quarterback hires now has both of those positions locked up as tight as a drum. The 2012 season will be the fourth straight for Jim Schwartz as coach and Matthew Stafford as quarterback. You have to go so far back into the team’s history books to find such a streak that you’d need to blow the dust off before reading about it.

Four years in a row might not sound like a lot, but not since the Lions of the 1950s have they had the same coach and unquestioned starting QB for four straight years (Buddy Parker and Bobby Layne).

While the Packers ruled the 1960s, the Lions were shuffling quarterbacks and coaches. When the Steelers ruled the 1970s, the Lions were shuffling quarterbacks and coaches. When the 49ers ruled the 1980s, the Lions were…well, you get the idea.

It’s both pathetic and amazing to write this, but it’s been almost 60 years since the Lions have been so well set at coach and quarterback, at the same time, as they are now with Schwartz and Stafford.

Schwartz enters 2012 in the last year of his four-year contract, signed in January 2009, just weeks after the Lions finished the first 0-16 season in NFL history. Since then, Schwartz has led the Lions from zero wins to two, two wins to six, and six wins to ten (and a playoff berth). The progress the team has made in terms of wins and losses has been like a checker moving across the board.

Stafford missed large portions of his first two seasons due to injury, but he was still here and he was still the unquestioned no. 1 QB, hurt or not.

The consistency doesn’t end with Schwartz and Stafford. The Lions will begin 2012 also in their fourth straight year with Martin Mayhew as GM, Scott Linehan as offensive coordinator and Gunther Cunningham as defensive coordinator. That’s consistency not found in every NFL city, just so you know.

So far, the lack of football heads rolling in Detroit since 2008 seems to be working. The Lions seem to be getting better. Schwartz is on the last year of his contract, but that will soon be ripped up and an extension signed, I would imagine.

All of a sudden, the Lions are a model of consistency in today’s NFL. An improved won/lost record has been concurrent with that consistency.

Funny how that works.

Hometown Hero Hearns Lifted Detroiters In the Nick of Time

To the cynical, Joe Louis Arena is aptly named.

Name a hockey arena after a boxer?

Well, you’ve heard the old joke. “I went to a boxing match and a hockey game broke out.”

It’s thought of with a smirk to the old-timer—that the Red Wings play in a building with a prizefighter as its namesake.

Appropriate, also, for a city that has stood from its seats for Howie Young, Dennis Polonich, Dan Maloney, Bobby Probert, Joey Kocur and Darren McCarty. Fighters, all of them, and some of the best who ever laced on gloves—and skates.

And, Joe Louis, of course. Sans the skates.

But on August 2, 1980, they actually held a boxing match in the arena named for a boxer. That was the night that Tommy Hearns got ‘em off their feet.

Detroit roared that evening.

There wasn’t much to cheer about in Detroit sports from the mid-1970s through the mid-1980s, save the Tigers’ 1984 World Championship. It was mostly a dead decade. Playoffs were either not qualified for or experienced very briefly.

Starting in 1975, the Lions were perpetually .500 or worse. The Tigers were beginning a painful rebuilding project. The Red Wings were awful. The Pistons weren’t much better.

Then along came Tommy Hearns, and finally, there was something to cheer about.

Nothing like a guy with a lethal right hand to bring the city together.

On Sunday, they’re putting Tommy into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in Canastota, NY. It’s about damn time.

Hearns was a Tennessee kid, born in 1958, the youngest of three children, the product of his mom’s first marriage. Then, she remarried and it was like the Brady Bunch—six more children joined the first three as a result.

Tommy was five when Mrs. Hearns left Grand Junction, TN, and migrated north to Detroit. Note there's no mention here of Tommy’s biological dad.

Growing up in Detroit as an adolescent, Tommy started using his fists—but in the boxing ring. Fortunately, that ring was run by Emanuel Steward of Kronk Gym.

If I had a dime for every time boxing manager/trainer Steward has been referred to by his fighters as a father figure, I could buy Joe Louis Arena and put some money down on Comerica Park.

But it’s true. Emanuel Steward doesn’t just train boxers. He raises them, in some instances. He’s referred to as a father figure in the literal sense; it’s not really a metaphor.

I’ve been to the Steward home, and when I was there, it was the usual: young boxers coming in and out, house guests as well as trainees. Steward has opened his home to more pugilists than a juvenile detention facility.

Tommy Hearns became ensnared, as a teen, by Kronk and its prospects of fame and fortune as a professional fighter. And guess how Tommy describes Steward?

"Emanuel—he’s been like a father to me,” Tommy told Mike Brudenell of the Free Press this week.

“Emanuel to me is the next best thing to a daddy. He taught me everything I know about boxing and living right."

Correction: Emanuel wasn’t the next best thing to Tommy’s daddy—he was, in many respects, Tommy’s daddy.

Mrs. Hearns was a remarkable mom, but it’s too often when kids from the inner city who don’t have that father figure, go sideways. Hearns might have been one of them, if it wasn’t for Steward and Kronk.

"The Kronk has been my life for over 40 years," Tommy told Brudenell. "I have to say, if I wouldn't have got involved with the Kronk, I don't know what I would have done.”

It’s nice not to wonder that, and instead talk about what Tommy did do.

Hearns rose through the ranks as a teen fighting in Kronk’s basement gym with its air as stale as a week-old cigar.

Hearns kept sparring in that gym, slicing his lightning-quick arms through that thick, stale air, eventually capturing the the National Amateur Athletic Union Light Welterweight Championship in 1977. That same year, Tommy also won the National Golden Gloves Light Welterweight Championship.

All this while Detroit’s pro sports teams tripped over themselves, trying to be the worst of the four.

Joe Louis Arena opened in December 1979. A college basketball game featuring the University of Detroit was the initial event. The Red Wings christened it for hockey on December 27. They lost.

A tad over seven months later, on 8/2/80 inside “the Joe,” Tommy Hearns, with Steward providing support in his corner, took on Pipino Cuevas for the WBA World Welterweight belt.

Cuevas was only 22 years old, but he was already the 10-time defending champion in that weight class for the WBA. Cuevas won the belt as an 18-year-old in 1976 and then started making a habit of demolishing any and all challengers. Most of the bouts were so short, you could have bought an ice cream cone and still had some left over when Cuevas’s opponent was being counted out.

Until the night of August 2, 1980.

Hearns, fighting in his adopted hometown, with a full house shrieking their lungs out in JLA, had five inches of height on Cuevas (6’1” to 5’8”). And the extended reach of Hearns’ famously long arms proved fatal to the champ.

Hearns laid a right hand on Cuevas’s jaw that turned the champ’s legs to cooked spaghetti. Cuevas looked like one of those Weeble toys. As soon as the crowd saw what was happening, the roar was deafening.

Then, Tommy finished him off, dropping Cuevas to the canvas with a series of punches. It was only the second round.

Detroit finally had a champion! Not since 1968’s Tigers, some 12 years prior, had the city been able to boast a hometown champion.

Tommy Hearns gave them one, destroying the 10-time defending welterweight champion Cuevas.

That was the beginning, really, of Hearns’s hold on Detroiters, a fanbase that had finally been energized by the Motor City Cobra.

Hearns gave the good folks of Detroit—and by Detroit I mean the city proper and the surrounding suburbs—something to crow about and to stick their chest out about.

I mean, he was the Motor City Cobra.

Later, Hearns would be known as The Hit Man, as he captivated the boxing world on the national stage as well.

Hearns fought all the big names: Sugar Ray Leonard (twice), Roberto Duran, Wilfred Benitez and Marvin Hagler. The opponents were always the best that boxing had to offer at the time. Tommy didn’t always win, but even in defeat, he fought a hell of a fight. The Hagler bout is legendary for its fury.

He did all this mostly in the first half of the 1980s, at a time when Detroit needed a champion and a figure of respect in the worst way. The 1979 depression, which hit the Big Three automakers hard, had sapped a lot of the spirit out of Detroiters.

But then came Tommy Hearns with his long arms and his wicked right, and in a way, when Tommy kicked the ass of Duran (in 1984 with the hardest punch I’ve ever seen thrown, by the way), we felt like we were kicking ass, too. And when Tommy lost, most famously to Leonard and Hagler, we felt like we got slugged in the gut as well.

Tommy Hearns was more than a boxer. He bridged some of the gap between team champions (1968 to 1984) and made Detroiters proud again.

For that alone, he should be in the International Boxing Hall of Fame.