Throughout this dumb Joycian (Joyecian? James fucking Joyce,
alright?) preview filled with characters both banal and sublime (I salute thee
Great Willie Young and your dude Heimie) I have made repeated reference to
spiritual and karmic energies, blithering about cultures and so forth, and to
most people, especially in this debased age, such gibberings are akin to
sorcery, the bleatings of a stupid man of superstition who probably still
believes in alchemy and a literal hell. To be fair, I am a Lions fan, alright? And
yes, I do believe in these things. Well, spiritual and psychic energies,
anyway. I think they have a power that can’t really be quantified by stats, and
if you want to say I’m an idiot, that’s fine, but 60 years of Lions history are
sneering right in your soulless face and so am I. Get fucked.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to get so defensively hostile. The
point I’m trying to make is that it’s impossible to truly preview the Lions
without acknowledging the obese pregnant elephant in the room, it’s fat nuts
(look, it’s both pregnant and has nuts, don’t be a bigot, it’s 2018) dragging
across our faces as we weep and pray for a merciful death that never comes. 60
years. 60 fucking years. How do you contextualize that? You can’t. It doesn’t
make sense. Maybe if you’re 75 years old, you can do something with that in
your brain, but probably not. After all, anyone who’s actually had to suffer
through all 60 years of that is surely melting away in some home, mind
shattered, pudding dribbling from the perpetually downturned corners of the
mouth, tear-ducts burning, burning, burning because they haven’t been able to
make any more tears for years now. Horrible, horrible.
It is simply not enough to make reference to individual
moments, to those “random” skull-fuckings by the league, to Process of the
Catch or 10 Second Runoffs or Dallas, just Dallas man. They are just fragments,
horrid moments of time that shatter like glass when we think of them, sending
tiny shards of fear and loathing into the darkest corners of our mind, moments,
slivers, that haunt us but never tell the whole story because to do so would
require us to put all those slivers back together into one gruesome and
terrible picture which would take our whole minds with it into a screaming
chasm of despair, trapped like fucking General Zod and the gang in Superman II as they hurtle into the Phantom
Zone.
You can’t explain it. I can’t explain it. I have spent I don’t
know how many million words by now trying. It’s not possible. I suppose all you
can do is lay it all before you and try to take it decade by decade, era by era
and see where this shit went so horribly wrong. So let’s do that, or at least
try. Maybe we’ll get closer to understanding this thing, or maybe we won’t. I don’t
fucking know.
In 1957 the Lions won the NFL championship. It was their
third championship in six years (can you even imagine such a thing now?) and
their fourth championship game appearance during that same stretch. This was a
dynasty, the sort of thing people convince themselves will last forever because
that is how it is today and today is all we have and tomorrow is just today’s
reality reinterpreted either optimistically or pessimistically depending on
your own nature. It’s not actually real, so whatever is happening Right Now is
reflected in how we imagine the future. Anyway, that future must have seemed
limitless, full of beauty and glory to Lions fans. At what point do you think
they began to realize it was all going horribly, horribly wrong?
The coach of that 1957 team was George Wilson. It was
actually his first season as head coach and he must have thought “shit, this is
easy” as he prepared his Hall of Fame speech. He lasted eight seasons and never
won anything again. But at that point, it must have just felt like a waiting
game, that eventually the Lions would get there again. I mean, they weren’t
awful. They had four more winning seasons in seven years including an 11-3
record in 1962. Alex Karras was running wild, and things must have still seemed
Alright. I mean, can’t win every year, right?
Wilson was done after the 1964 season. The Lions went 7-5-2
and it must have been nice to have actual standards. Harry Gilmer took over for
two years, two losing seasons in which people must have started to get at least
a little antsy, right? But they were still only a decade removed from their
third championship and that buys a lot of time and a lot of good will. Lions
Disease wasn’t really a thing yet. They were just a formerly great and proud
team trying to work their way back. That was it.
Of course, I have to mention the whole Bobby Layne curse
thing, where he famously said the Lions would never win again after they traded
him (well, at least for the next 50 years, which just proves that Bobby was a
forgiving optimist, I guess.) At the time, that was probably pretty easy to
brush off though, the ravings of a bitter veteran. Time is the only thing that
can make a curse “real” and time was still on the Lions side.
The Joe Schmidt era took the Lions into the 70s. As one of
the greatest players in Lions history, it must have brought a lot of goodwill
and good feelings, and the Lions were never horrible under Schmidt. His last
four seasons were winning seasons and he even took the team to the playoffs in
1970. They lost, naturally, but still.
At this point, the Lions still weren’t “the Lions” and all
that means to us today. They were 15ish years removed now, and I imagine Hope
had turned into something more like a wistful sigh, like two lovers whose fire
had gone out but were still comfortable and happy together. It’s not like it
was, but it’s still a decent life, right?
After Schmidt came a run of mediocrity, as the Lions won 6
or 7 games every season until 1978 under four different coaches. By now, it had
been twenty years, and those wistful sighs had probably begun to turn into a
quiet but savage desperation, nibbling away at the soul year after year, the
memories of youth now faded and twisted into something sad. The love was gone,
but so too now was the happiness and the comfort. Left in its place was probably
a sort of unspoken resentment. Things had begun to turn poisonous.
In 1979, the year of my birth, the Lions finally bottomed
out, finishing 2-14. They were “the Lions” now, but if you told fans then they
still had another almost 40 years to endure, and that those 40 years would be
even worse, they would have rebelled against their own minds, their own souls.
They would have smothered their wife in her bed and then Benoited themselves
from a weight machine.
That 1979 season was also the culmination of a decade of
horrific pain, both for America as a whole and Detroit in particular. I won’t get
into a whole Nixonian cultural hangover discussion because that would take
another 10,000 words (or more), but that was there, certainly. The 70s were a
decade in which Americans lost Hope, in which they stopped believing in the
American Dream. It had turned into something like poison to them, a cruel
mockery of all that they had once believed themselves to be, of what they knew
they could never be again. Their Glory Days were over. Everything after would
be a convulsion, a death rattle in which one could see the entirety of their
life, of the American life, in their final breath. This was the decade that saw
the Lions truly fall from grace. As metaphors go, it’s pretty fucking obvious.
But more than that, it was a particularly horrific decade
for Detroit. The riots of the late 60s tore the city apart, and then the
recessions and decline of the auto industry in the 70s fucking broke it. It
became a city of utter desperation, people clinging to their rapidly fading
memories of what life was supposed to be like, of the promise of a good union
job and a spirit of We’re In This Together. It had all become twisted, distorted,
ruined as the backbone of America broke and left us all spiritually and psychically
paralyzed. Detroit was that backbone, and it’s snapped vertebrae are still
trying to be fused and rebroken and fused again by desperate dreamers and believers
in the power of the human spirit if not America.
This was the city in which the Lions found themselves
breaking, breaking, breaking with each passing season until, finally, in 1979,
they broke for good. It was fitting, I suppose, because in addition to all the
grand cosmic metaphors, the rest of Detroit’s sports teams – the Tigers, the
Red Wings and the Pistons – were also mired in a lost decade of despair. It was
truly the Worst of Times for everyone.
And that’s how the Lions entered the 1980s, a decade which
was even worse than the one that preceded it. The Lions never won more than 9
games (they did it twice, in 1980 and 1983) and the moment I became aware of
the Lions, sometime in the mid-80s to 1987ish, they were in the midst of losing
11 games or more 4 times in 5 seasons. This was a terrible world to be born
into.
By now, it was Known. The Lions were “the Lions,” but wait!
Hope was on the way.
That Hope was named Barry Sanders, and there was a moment,
in 1991, when the Lions went 12-4 and beat the shit out of the Cowboys in the
playoffs (their lone playoff victory in the last 60 years) when it seemed like
they had finally climbed out of their hole, that they had finally shaken off
whatever psychic Failure Demons had attached themselves like parasites, and
were ready to run into a new era. It was the 1990s, America was back, baby! And
so were the Lions.
But not really. The whole thing was a cruel mirage, just a
prologue to the horrors that were to come after. It was like one long con of
the soul, a brutal setup for a punchline that only the worst devils could laugh
at. Barry Sanders ran and he ran and he ran but it never meant anything. He ran
and Wayne Fontes looked stupid on the sidelines, and then Wayne Fontes was
finally fired but it was too hard to believe anymore. There was only a sort of
wearied cynicism, well earned, that ate at the Lions like some great, hideous psychic
rot. It had been 40 years now, and the last ten had seen a player of impossible
talent, of transcendent beauty and grace, lead a team that had dudes like
Herman Moore setting records at receiver, and none of it meant a goddamn thing.
What do you do with that? How do you tell yourself that it will ever get
better, that it can ever be any better?
Bobby Ross was hired to replace Fontes, and there was
perhaps a glimmer of hope. After all, Ross had won a national championship at
Georgia Tech of all places and had led the fucking Chargers to the Super Bowl.
He was the Real Thing. Naturally, within two seasons he had utterly broken Barry
and he never won a goddamn thing again. Barry retired, disappearing into the
horizon like Bruce Banner or Anton fucking Chigurh, and what can you say, man?
How do you explain something like this? How did it feel? It felt like nothing.
That’s because there reaches a point where pain isn’t enough, where desperation
doesn’t matter. There is just . . . nothing. A senseless and meaningless
nihilism that takes over because it’s the only thing left.
And the Matt Millen showed up.
Jesus Christ! Somewhere Cormac McCarthy is furiously scribbling
all this down. The Millen era was of course gross and horrific and by this
point “the Lions” and all that was loaded into that term became a vicious
parody of itself. Jay Leno was using it for cheap jokes. Jay Leno! It doesn’t
get any lower than that. Meanwhile, the rest of the world finally cracked and
burned.
2008 was the first year I wrote about the Lions. It was also
the end for Matt Millen, and the pinnacle of Lions misery. 0-16. Rod Marinelli
waddling around like he left a load in his diaper, gibbering about pad level.
Broken people, broken everything. The economy collapsed again, people were
throwing shoes at the President, and nothing made sense anymore. Lost. All
lost. It had been 50 years now.
The next ten were chronicled pretty extensively here, give
or take a Caldwellian walkabout of my fandom. You know the story since then.
You have lived it. I have written over a million words about it. That isn’t
even an exaggeration. I had to invent people to get through it. My mind and my
soul have been broken, my fandom something more of an existential odyssey of
perpetual penance and sorrow than anything else. And so fifty years have
stretched into sixty. A demented gameshow host is now the most powerful man in
the world. Vaya con dios, y’all. Vaya con dios.
So what do we do with that? How can anything else matter
when previewing the Lions this season? It is not just karmic energy or
whatever. It is a fucking 100,000 foot tall tsunami that will drown us all no
matter what we do, no matter how much we prepare. It is just there and we’re
gonna drown in it. Say your prayers.
That is all horrible, of course, but this is what it means
to be a Lions fan. Everything else is just a child’s whisper in a hurricane of
fire and death. I don’t know, man. Do we need to hold a giant bonfire in the
middle of the ruins of the Silverdome, with priests and witches chanting as we
burn the past one item at a time? We need an exorcism, an old priest and a
young priest. We need something, anything, to get rid of these fucking Failure
Demons once and for all, or else they will never stop haunting us, ruining us
from within. We’ve already had the best running back ever, the most talented man
ever to step foot on a football field. We just had the most dominant receiver
in the NFL. We have one the best quarterbacks right now. And none of it has
mattered against the power of those goddamn Failure Demons, against the weight
and horror of the past 60 years. It hasn’t just broken us, it has broken Barry
Sanders, it has broken Calvin Johnson, and I figure we’re about two or three
years away from it breaking Matthew Stafford. And then what? Then what?
We keep moving forward because that it was human beings do.
We’re that motherfucker in The Road, pushing
our child in a shopping cart after the world has ended. We’re Rick Grimes
hacking away at zombies even though we know that’s what eventually we’ll
become. Nothing matters and we’re all already dead, but something keeps us
moving forward because there is nothing else. This is a horror story and we’re
the only characters in it.
At some point, all of this has to change, right? But how can
anyone truly believe that, can honestly think that, given all that I’ve just talked
about? This isn’t just sixty years. This is forever. This is the totality of
most of our lifetimes. This is all we know and so expecting the future to be
any different is an exercise in cruel absurdity.
And yet, here we are. And here I am, writing this preview of
the damned because something inside of me moves me to do it. There is something
left unsaid, something elusive, that I have never been able to nail down and I
suppose a part of me hopes that this something unsaid, this elusive thing that’s
perpetually just beyond me, beyond all of us, will be something good. It is
absurd and deserving of endless mockery and scorn, but there you have it. I am
basically good, despite all my ridiculous bullshit, and so that is how I
continue to imagine the world. It gets harder every day. It gets harder with
every second, with every new indignity, with every new horror show, with every
new rotten season and year. And yet, I tell myself that there’s an answer,
somewhere, anywhere. I just have to be strong enough to find it. We all just
have to be strong enough to find it. Fuck off, Failure Demons. I’ve had enough.
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