DAVE CLARK: Are the Detroit Lions ready to roar after decades of despair?
The Lions of Detroit? They’ve broken me. It HURT ME. For many decades.
It’s the most dysfunctional, agonizing relationship I’ve ever been in. Despite the warnings and red flags raised by my friends – decent people who care about me and attempt to talk sense into me – I return to the Lions every fall.
I vividly remember that first, bitter taste of heartbreak. It was Oct. 21, 1984.
That was the day one of my all-time favorite Lions, Billy Sims, suffered a career-ending injury at the Metrodome.
Simms took a handoff from quarterback Gary Danielson, turned up field, and got clobbered by Minnesota Vikings linebacker Walker Lee Ashley.
After being tackled, he did not get up. A television camera captured the reaction on Lions head coach Monte Clark’s face as Sims was led off the field. He appeared to be broken. As I saw my hero sway back and forth in misery on the icy field, his face mirrored mine own.
I was a recently-indoctrinated Lions fan. I could have ended things right there when they ended the season 4-11-1.
But, alas, I had let my guard down and had become a Detroit Lions fan.
I’ve been broken ever since. Yet somehow, amazingly, I feel pretty good this year.
And that is truly terrifying.
Bitter beginning
“The Lions suck,” I argued with several friends standing together under a tall tree at Longview Elementary in fall 1980. We had thoughtful discussions there about AC/DC, “The Dukes of Hazzard” TV show and football.
A re-recording of “Another One Bites the Dust” by Jimmy “Spider-Man” Allen was blasting out of the tiny speaker of a cassette player held by one of the guys.
“No! The Lions are going to be good this year. We are probably going to the Super Bowl,” my friends insisted.
The Lions started the season 4-0.
Everyone thought 1980 was the “Year of the Lion.”
It was not.
The Lions ended the season 9-7, second place in the NFC Central, and did not make the playoffs.
Regardless, I was a Sims fan. He was our hope, our star – the “Silver Streak” – and maybe the best running back in football. He earned a spot in the Pro Bowl in each of his first three NFL seasons. He led the Lions to playoff appearances in 1982 and again in 1983.
Winning seemed inevitable with Billy chugging down the field. When he was injured during that game against Minnesota, the season was effectively over and so was the Lions’ hope for success for the foreseeable future. I kept watching loss after loss, hoping that my superhero running back would miraculously recover and return to lead us to victory.
Sims spent all of 1985 in rehab. He never played football again.
His is a very Lions story: A talented athlete who comes to Detroit, gives his all and leaves football with nothing to show for it.
So much wasted talent. So much disappointment. So much losing.
Hope for the future
Every fall, Lions fans use the phrase “Restore the Roar” as we begin another season hopeful and naive. It occurred to me around 1998 that the “roar” we fans referred to had been snuffed out in 1957 – nine years before the first Super Bowl was played and 14 years before I was born.
“Restore” what? We have been roarless for decades. The Lions have never “roared” during my lifetime. They have mostly coughed up hairballs and destroyed Sunday afternoons and Thanksgiving meals with mediocre football.
It’s disgusting to admit now, but I watched most of the games during the truly terrible, winless 0-16 season in 2008.
Why? What did I think was going to happen? Why watch such an awful team?
Hope.
Just to keep Lions fans engaged, hope sometimes intervened and gave you a reason to care. Barry Sanders. Calvin Johnson. Ndamukong Suh. There were years that the Lions seemed on the cusp of something that wasn’t terrible. But, until 2022, hope was as fleeting at Ford Field as it had been at the Pontiac Silverdome. Bad things always seemed to happen to the Lions.
If you couldn’t understand why Lions fans rooted for quarterback Matthew Stafford after he was traded to the LA Rams, you are not a Lions fan.
Stafford was one of our recent gridiron heroes – a tough player and a good, decent man – who found a way out this perpetual cycle of losing. Staying in Detroit would have eventually broken him, too, so he made the decision to leave.
That trade eventually led Stafford to a Super Bowl LVI victory. Adjacent success was the most a Lions fan could hope for, so we saluted Stafford – one of our stars who made it out of Detroit to live another day, play for a better franchise and finally find success in the NFL.
There is another reason to celebrate Stafford.
That trade set the table for the team that takes the field this Sunday to play the Baltimore Ravens. Thanks to the scouting skill of General Manager Brad Holmes and the irrepressible enthusiasm of head coach Dan Campbell, the Lions used those draft picks and quarterback Jared Goff to build one of the most interesting, toughest football teams that has ever come from Detroit.
They seem stocked with talent. They seem well coached. They seem capable of roaring.
The Lions are 5-1 and have beaten some legitimately good teams on the road. We, and four other teams, have the best record in football.
Winning is thrilling, terrifying, uncharted territory.
This is the most complete football team I’ve ever watched as a Lions fan. Yet I keep bracing for the 2023 version of the Sims play – a season-ending catastrophe. If Goff, defensive end Aiden Hutchinson or wide receiver Amon-Ra St. Brown linger too long on the ground after a play, my heart starts to race. “Not again!” I start to think. “Not again!”
We’ve been conditioned, for all these years, to expect the worst. Can Lions fans learn how to win?
This Lions team expects to win. The team’s body of work shows us that they can win – even when they are expected not to.
Maybe this really is our year. That would warm, and maybe start to heal, this tired fan’s broken heart.
Maybe, finally, it’s our time to roar.
Dave Clark is editor of the Daily News. Email him at david.clark@hearst.com.
