Sisu

SISU

As Lions fans, we eat a lot of shit. We are constantly driven to the brink of madness and despair, and, hell, let's face it, sometimes we are pushed over. It isn't fun. Sometimes, it can be entertaining in a perverse sort of way, and I'm sure that's what some people think when they look at my absurd brand of bullshit, but fuck all that. I'm a Lions fan, and I will gnaw on your wicked bones.

Joseph Paquette is another Lions fan, and like me he has probably been driven over the brink and now rests in a sort of weird limbo between wholesome pride and depraved insanity. After all, the dude just walked - yeah, walked - over 400 miles from his home in the Upper Peninsula to the Lions practice facility in Allen Park. Hey, why not?

I mean, Goddamn, that's a fan, you know? Look, in case you haven't noticed, I can be an asshole from time to time. It's just in my nature. But I am also an optimist at heart, and so when I read a story about some old man saying to hell with it and marching on Detroit so that he can tell those fuckers to get their shit together, it moves me a little bit.

The Upper Peninsula is an awesome place. My grandfather was born there and my family used to camp up there every summer. I still have a lot of relatives up there and those people are pretty hardcore. They are still like pioneers, all hardy and raw and vaguely Canadian. I even have relatives who live in a fucking log cabin up there. It's different, but it's also weirdly relaxed and intense at the same time. People don't move so quickly, but they do move and when they move it means something. It's exactly the sort of place that spurs an old man to get up and start marching towards a city over 400 miles away.

I've been to Joseph Paquette's hometown, Munising, many times. It's not a big town - none of them are up there - but it's a charming little town with good people who will smile at you and act all Yooperish and make you feel comfortable and good with the world. That's not an easy thing to find, but for a Lions fan it can be a necessary thing to find. I imagine that old Joe Paquette has spent many years going to breakfast at some tiny mom and pop restaurant, the kind where everyone knows everyone else, and talking about the Lions. I imagine that, like with most things, he and the people up there approach it with a sort of healthy optimism. I imagine that talk starts to drift to Bobby Layne and old stories about when the Lions were actually worth something.

Then again, it's the Lions, so it's not out of the realm of possibility that on occasion, some old geezer loses his shit, tosses his coffee cup against the wall, strips naked and begins howling and running feral through the streets, mad as hell and not gonna take it anymore. These are good people, but there is only so much that even a good man can take, you know?

Something snapped in Joseph Paquette. It had to. No matter how basically good or optimistic you are, you don't just get up and start marching on a city that's over 400 miles away just so you can holler at some football players unless you have flipped your lid. It's okay, though. It's cool. I understand. Believe me, I get it. This team can make you say and think and do some pretty weird shit. Witness the last two years of this blog. At some point, Joseph Paquette got tired of the losing, got tired of the waiting, got tired of wandering in between hell and purgatory. The old man lost his shit, stood up and decided to do something about it.

But what the hell could an old man do about the Lions being, well, the Lions? I mean, there is a certain sort of powerlessness in being a fan. We've all felt it, sitting on our couches or hollering ourselves stupid in the stands. We just have to watch and take what fate gives us. We have absolutely no power over any of it. Now imagine feeling like that for half a fucking century. Imagine watching these shitbirds for 50 years and constantly being beaten and mocked by the Failure Demon. That will drive a man utterly out of his mind. You can be an asshole and start calling into talk radio shows and ranting and raving. You can lose your shit and start composing weird and rambling screeds about hope and pain and Failure Demons and vampire apes. Or, you can do what Joseph Paquette did, with his native Yooper optimism, and undertake a massive journey just to impart a message of hope and strength and determination to a bunch of young millionaires who inexplicably mean something to him.

Sisu - the simple message Joseph Paquette felt it necessary to impart in person - is a Finnish term that, according to my vast research into the matter (aka a quick google search) vaguely translates into "strength of will, determination, perseverance and acting rationally in the face of adversity." Or, as my compatriot Raven Mack, who hipped me to this story in the first place, said, it's a Finnish word "for fighting spirit or some shit."

Right on. Fighting spirit or some shit. That's what we need. And this old dude knows it and he was going to do something about it, by God. No matter that he is an old man with arthritis in his knees and no matter that assholes like me would probably make fun of him, and no matter that the chances that this would mean anything to anyone other than as some freakshow oddity to laugh at, he got up and started walking anyway. Sisu, motherfuckers. Learn it, love it, and never forget it.

It may seem weird to some people that the word that we would all end up embracing before the season started would be some random, obscure Finnish phrase, but really, it makes an odd sort of sense. There are a lot of Finns in the Upper Peninsula. Like I said, my grandfather was born up there and his mother was 100% Finnish and when I was little, she used to get all worked up and started gibbering in Finnish. It's a weird as fuck language. There are a lot of vowels and every word sounds like a damn tongue twister. Vaanakaalakaana. I just made that up. It's not a word, but that's the sort of thing you see in Finnish. It's a language that is basically unlike any other in the world. It is officially considered a Finno-Ugric language, which means that on some level it's related to Hungarian, and there are also links that can be found in the Karelian and Siberian languages in Russia, but really these links are tenuous at best and there are those who believe that those links are so tenuous - occurring many thousands of years ago, when people were all living in caves and hunting wooly mammoths and shit - that they are almost meaningless.

The point of that weird little linguistic digression is that Finns are a unique people, and culturally, they are a very significant part of the Upper Peninsula, which is, as I explained, kind of a unique place on its own. You combine those two things and then you throw in Lions fandom and you have a recipe for some extremely weird and hard to understand shit. This is the sort of thing that produced Joseph Paquette.

In truth, I am vaguely surprised by this. But not because I wouldn't expect some crazy old man from the Upper Peninsula to do this - I would - but because a lot of the people who live up there are filthy Packers fans. It's true. It's shameful as all hell, but it's true. My relative who lives in a log cabin up there has a damn Packer flag flying outside his place. If you look at a map it makes sense. Green Bay is almost right there. It's in Northern Wisconsin, and the Upper Peninsula rests right up against that. Meanwhile, Detroit is in the southeastern Lower Peninsula, so far away, both culturally and in terms of distance, that it might as well be in another universe. There is little that ties Detroit and the Upper Peninsula together with the exception of the name Michigan. The fact that there exists Lions fans up there at all is a testament to the weird power of fandom. Somewhere in his family tree, Joseph Paquette has someone who became a Lions fan and passed that shit down. It's very old, dating back to a time when the Lions were actually good and when it was acceptable to pick them instead of the Packers as your team of choice.

The fact that it has survived so long in Joseph Paquette is a testament to the very word Sisu. His own existence as a fan proves his own dedication to the meaning of Sisu. This is a dude who knows what he's talking about.

Of course, in the end, most people will just sort of shake their heads at Joseph Paquette and laugh and think that he is just some crazy old man, and on one level they are right. I laughed too. I thought the dude sounded fucking insane, but so what? He wanted to march to Detroit, look the Detroit Lions in their eyes and explain to them the meaning of Sisu in the hopes that somehow, someway, they could use it to turn around whatever rotten fortune they had been stuck with for so long. And I commend him for it.

Joseph Paquette may have gone completely overboard with this whole thing, and his family probably should have tackled him and put him in a home or something, but Jim Schwartz knows who he is. Matthew Stafford knows who he is, and at some point in the last day or so, they have at least contemplated the meaning of Sisu. It has rattled around their brains and meant something, you know? Maybe not a lot, but something. Joseph Paquette made that happen. He channeled a lifetime of pain and misery as a Lions fan into that something. He's just an old man who can't change whether his favorite team wins or loses, but he took everything inside of himself and he made such an uproar that his voice was at least heard. He walked over 400 miles because it was the only way for him to be able to look Jim Schwartz and Matthew Stafford and all the rest in the eyes and tell them one word: Sisu.

Will it make any difference at all? Probably not. But to hell with all that. Joseph Paquette tried, man. He really, really tried. If he would have tried any more, he probably would have dropped dead or been stuck in a mental hospital. That is a man who cares. That is a man, who despite it all, who despite 50 years of suffering still believes that much. That is a man who is a champion in his heart and a proud Lions fan. I salute him and so should you. He is very likely completely crazy, but so what? These are strange and terrible times and we're all a little nuts. Who am I to judge? Sisu, motherfuckers. Sisu.