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Wednesday, November 27, 2013
DETROIT LIONS --
DESPITE A GREAT OWNER, A VERY POOR ORGANIZATION
William Clay Ford posed in the Lions' office after officially taking over as president of the franchise in January 1964. / ASSOCIATED PRESS file photo
William Clay Ford
Who: Lions owner who bought the team for $6 million in November 1963 and officially took over in January 1964. Director emeritus on the board of directors of Ford Motor Co. after retiring from the board in 2005.Age: 88.
Born: March 14, 1925.
Resides: Grosse Pointe Shores.
Family: He’s the youngest son of Edsel and Eleanor Ford and the last surviving grandson of Henry Ford. His wife is the former Martha Firestone and they have four children: Martha, Sheila, Bill Jr. and Elizabeth.
College: Yale (bachelor of science in economics, 1949).
Net worth: $1.4 billion, according to Forbes (ranks No. 373 in U.S.).
Notable: He served in World War II with the U.S. Naval Air Corps. He oversaw the design of the Continental Mark II. At Yale, he won Ivy League tennis titles in singles and doubles and was an honorable-mention All-America soccer player. He has seven career holes-in-one.
The coaches (NOTE: Not one of these coaches ever became a head coach in the NFL again after their Lions tenure).
1964George Wilson*
Record: 7-5-2.583
'
1965-66
Harry Gilmer
Record: 10-16-2.393
1967-72
Joe Schmidt
Record: 43-35-7.547
1973
Don McCafferty
Record: 6-7-1.464
1974-76
Rick
Forzano
Record: 15-17.469
1976-77
Tommy Hudspeth
Record: 11-13.458
1978-84
Monte Clark
Record: 43-63-1.407
1985-88
Darryl Rogers
Record: 18-40.310
1988-96
Wayne Fontes
Record: 67-71.486
1997-2000
Bobby Ross
Record: 27-32.458
2000
Gary Moeller
Record: 4-3.571
2001-02
Marty
Mornhinweg
Record: 5-27.156
2003-05
Steve Mariucci
Record: 15-28.349
2005
Dick Jauron
Record: 1-4.200
2006-08
Rod Marinelli
Record: 10-38.208
2009-?
Jim Schwartz
Record: 27-45.375
*Wilson also was coach in 1957-63 before Ford owned the team.1964-66: Edwin J. Anderson (GM),
A look at the 10 longest-tenured current NFL owners in years and months:
54.1
Ralph
Wilson
Bills
Since: October 195950.0
William Clay Ford
Lions
Since: November 196341.2
Bill
Bidwill
Cardinals
Since: September 197230.1
Virginia Halas McCaskey
Bears
Since: October 198329.8
Pat
Bowlen
Broncos
Since: March 198429.3
Alex
Spanos
Chargers
Since: August 198428.6
Tom
Benson
Saints
Since: May 198525.3
Dan
Rooney
Steelers
Since: August 198824.9
Jerry
Jones
Cowboys
Since: February 198922.3
Mike
Brown
Bengals
Since: August 1991
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A light snow was falling as the Lions loaded their bus after the only NFC championship game appearance in franchise history, a 41-10 loss to Washington at old RFK Stadium in January 1992, when then-coach Wayne Fontes noticed his billionaire owner, William Clay Ford, standing on a street corner.
Fontes told the bus to stop, got out and invited Ford and his wife, Martha, inside to keep warm while they waited for their ride.
Ford politely declined, telling Fontes he didn’t want to interfere with his own team, and moments later his car pulled up to the curb.
The men shook hands, and Fontes apologized for the team’s play that day and the emptiness both felt inside.
“He just kind of said, ‘I understand,’ and he said, ‘Maybe next year,’ ” Fontes recalled. “He did say, or he, his wife, one of them said, ‘This is the best we’ve been in years and it’s been a great run.’
“I was down and he was down, and when we stood out there in the snow together, it was kind of — somebody should have painted the picture of both of us standing there going, ‘My goodness, what happened?’ Snowflakes were falling and we were talking about the year we had and how we came up short and looking forward to more and better years and not knowing the tragedy that would (prevent us from taking) the next step. It would have been a great picture.”
A fitting one, too, for a man who purchased the Lions 50 years ago this month. The only current NFL owner who has run a team longer is Ralph Wilson, who founded the Buffalo Bills in 1959.
The Lions declined interview requests from the Free Press for the 88-year-old Ford, his son, Bill Jr., the team’s vice chairman, and team president Tom Lewand for this story. But in interviews over the past three months, more than 50 current and former players, coaches and executives, both with the Lions and across the NFL, paint Ford as a kind and generous man of uncommon wealth who bought the football team he grew up rooting for mostly because he was a fan.
Now largely out of sight from a skeptical public but still the final arbiter of the organization’s most important decisions, Ford remains in search of his second playoff victory and that elusive Super Bowl appearance.
How that would affect his dubious legacy is anyone’s guess.
Former players swear by Ford’s kindness and save their harshest words for some of the managers he employed. Old coaches appreciate his loyalty that fans have come to loathe. And people across the league insist the NFL — and football in Detroit — wouldn’t be where it is today if not for Ford’s decision to rescue the team from a syndicate of 144 stockholders.
■ Related: Timeline for Lions owner William Clay Ford
A regular at home and road games who once flew from London to Baltimore and back to see the Lions play, Ford was forced to watch a Lions-Bears game from his couch that December after inclement weather grounded his plane to Chicago.
With the Bears ahead, 15-9, late in the fourth quarter, Ford grew so incensed at a play that he kicked a hole in his TV screen. Moments later, realizing the game wasn’t over, Ford “scurried frantically around his mansion (and) located a radio in the servants’ quarters just in time to hear” Terry Barr score the game-winning touchdown for the Lions, according to a 1963 profile of Ford in the Sunday Free Press Magazine. A Detroit News story the same year said Ford’s brother, Henry, suggested after the incident, “Why don’t you buy the Lions and straighten things out?”
Ford’s interest was sufficiently piqued, and the man who grew up watching Lions games at old University of Detroit Stadium spent the next few years getting close to players.
On several occasions, he took groups of players duck hunting at a private reserve in Canada. They stayed in a plush log cabin, hunted with 12-gauge shotguns and had guides for help.
“It was such a good time,” said Wayne Walker, a Lions linebacker in 1958-72. “They had a clubhouse there and we had a lunch. We did that three or four times during the course of my career. He was just, in those situations, just one of the guys. It was really great.”
Pat Studstill, a Lions receiver in 1961-67, said players used to gather at Joe Schmidt’s Golden Lion restaurant in Grosse Pointe after games. Ford and his wife occasionally stopped by, and at one point Ford confided in some he was thinking about buying the team.
“It didn’t happen every week, but anytime we won we would have a big spirits party, what we called a spirits party, and we had just a real close team at that time,” Studstill said. “This was in ’62 and we kind of thought that he was looking to buy the club.
“I’m pretty sure he kind of more or less put out a, ‘Should I buy the club?’ ”
A year later, at an Oct. 15 board of directors meeting, Ford made a $6-million bid for sole control of the Lions that surprised almost everyone. The purchase was not on the board’s agenda for the day, and Ford described it to the Free Press at the time, “If you said it was a bombshell, you’re right.”
The bid, about $45 million in present value, included the Lions’ Michigan Avenue headquarters and $1.5 million in cash and securities. Forbes estimates the franchise is worth $900 million today.
Less than two weeks later, the board approved the sale, and on Nov. 22, 1963, the same day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, 94% of the 23,000-plus shares of the Detroit Football Co. voted in favor of the deal in a meeting at the Statler Hilton Hotel. Ford’s great uncle, E.R. Bryant, was the only significant dissenting vote due to his own legal entanglements.
■ Videos: Former players, coaches on Ford
Forty years later, Ford mused about the timing of the deal.
“It turned into a sad, terrible day,” he told the Free Press in 2003. “About a half-hour after the meeting, a few of us were having lunch at the Statler Hilton to celebrate. And a waitress came up to me and asked if I heard about Kennedy in Dallas. And I was waiting for the punch line. There were a lot of sick people making jokes about Kennedy around that time. But then you could tell that she was serious, and she said that he had been shot.
“It’s a terrible coincidence that both of these things would occur around the same time. But there were a couple of times over the years when some things happened to us that you just couldn’t figure out why or how it happened, and you’d briefly think if there’s some kind of stigma attached to anything else that may have taken place that awful day.”
Studstill said Ford didn’t come around the Golden Lion as much after he took control of the team, officially on Jan. 10, 1964, but players were generally pleased to have him as owner after years of board control.
“We were all kind of sweating it a little bit, we didn’t know what was going to transpire,” he said. “But he turned out to be a good owner — a very good owner. And as far as I was concerned, he helped a lot of players — buying cars, if nothing else. He was a good owner. He really was.”
Roger Brown, a Lions defensive tackle in 1960-66, said Ford took players to a Ford factory early that decade and let them pick out a car to use for the year. Brown got a Mercury, Bruce Maher got a 450-horsepower station wagon, and Ford picked up the insurance for everyone.
“All I could think about was my little salary that I was getting,” Brown said. “I said, ‘Hey, at least I’ll have a new car every year.’ It lasted one year. The guys crashed them up, so it didn’t last long.”
Ford endeared himself to players in other ways, too. He paid Alex Karras’ $5,000 fine for gambling late in the 1963 season, and when the Lions defensive tackle was suspended from football and something of a pariah, Ford showed up for the grand opening of his bar, the Lindell A.C.
Still, the Lions, one of the NFL’s powerhouse teams of the 1950s, went through lean years immediately after Ford took control.
General manager Edwin J. Anderson, who Ford backed in a proxy fight years earlier and who described Ford to the San Francisco News Call Bulletin as a “quite rabid” fan who spends his Sundays in the press box “screaming like mad” for the Lions and a game he thinks “is the greatest invention since kissing,” took over as president in 1964, and Ford gave his good friend Russ Thomas control of personnel.
Coach George Wilson, who led the Lions to their last world championship in 1957, re-signed after the ’64 season much to the dismay of players after several of his assistants were fired, and the Lions had losing records the next four years with Harry Gilmer and then Schmidt as coaches.
Bud Erickson, the Lions’ former publicity director and assistant general manager, said he was partially responsible for the Gilmer hire and thus “maybe I caused some of the problems that the Lions had early in the ’60s.”
“I’d go around and be at places like Green Bay and Chicago, and you were very friendly in those days,” Erickson said. “You’d have lunch with the owner and talk about other things in the particular game coming up, and I always thought that Harry Gilmer was a guy that a lot of people thought very highly of as a new possibility for being a head coach.
“I remember, we had lunch one day with Mr. Ford and Anderson at the Detroit Club and I threw out the name of Harry Gilmer for if they were making a move. After that it was out of my hands, of course, but they went ahead and met with Gilmer and hired him, and I guess that was some of the problems early in the ’60s that it didn’t quite work out the way it expected.”
Two years ago, they qualified as an NFC wild card with a 10-6 record and lost to the New Orleans Saints, 45-28. They’ve made the playoffs in strike-shortened seasons, on four-game losing streaks and after winning in Week 17 to get in.
Twice, they’ve had legitimate chances to win a championship, and both times they’ve fallen short of the Super Bowl.
In 1970, Schmidt’s fourth season as coach, the Lions went 10-4 and made the playoffs as a wild card after winning their final five games. The sense, even among opposing players, was that the Lions had as good a chance as anyone to win the NFC.
“We saw (former Cowboys running back) Calvin Hill (at last week’s Lions-Cowboys game) and he said, ‘You guys were the best team,’ ” said Hall of Fame tight end Charlie Sanders, who played for the Lions in 1968-77 and now serves as the team’s assistant director of pro personnel. “He said we should have won the Super Bowl that year. He said there was no doubt that we had the best team.”
The Lions finished with the league’s second-best defense that year, behind a Minnesota Vikings team they lost to twice during the regular season, and with Greg Landry and Bill Munson at quarterback and Mel Farr and Altie Taylor in the backfield they had one of the best rushing attacks in the NFL.
After beating the Los Angeles Rams, 28-23, in a Monday night game to get to nine wins and with snow bearing down on the Midwest, the Lions decided to stay in L.A. to prepare for a must-win season finale against the Green Bay Packers.
Ford gave every player $100, Sanders said, to go Christmas shopping while they were away from home.
“I think I was making $17,000,” Sanders said. “That $100 was a lot.”
And when players got back to the team hotel after the game they took over the bar and threw themselves a party at the Lions’ expense. Schmidt ended up on stage singing or playing the piano — or both — and Thomas found himself stuck with a surprise bill the next day.
“I remember that night Karras signed Russ Thomas’ name to one of the checks,” said linebacker Mike Lucci, who played for the Lions in 1965-73. “They locked the doors. It was one of the great times.”
Farr, who suffered a dislocated shoulder in the game, was one of the few players who did not attend the party. Instead, he flew home with Ford by private plane to get his shoulder looked at, an experience he said changed his life.
“That plane flight did wonders for me,” said Farr, who worked for Ford Motor Co. during his playing days and bought his first Ford dealership the year after he retired. “It made me dream, dream of owning my own plane. And guess what? I did.”
The Lions shut out the Packers, 20-0, to make the playoffs, but Farr’s injury and a late Munson interception off the hands of Earl McCullouch were too much to overcome in a 5-0 road playoff loss to a Cowboys team that went on to lose in the Super Bowl.
Sanders collapsed to his knees as Munson’s pass glanced of McCulloch’s fingers “because I knew it was over then.” Farr said his injury “cost us the Super Bowl.”
“I still believe that that team, we were destined to win the Super Bowl,” Lucci said. “Every time I go to all these functions and everybody’s got a Super Bowl ring on, I got the championship ring (I won in) Cleveland, but it’s not the same.”
In 1991, Fontes thought he had a team good enough to reach the Super Bowl, too, even after the Lions lost to Washington, 45-0, in their season opener. They went on to win a franchise-record 12 games and had Barry Sanders, a future MVP and the best running back in the league.
“I remember losing to Washington in the first game of the season and Barry Sanders didn’t play,” Fontes said. “I remember I got really thrashed for it by the league because I didn’t tell the league he wasn’t going to play and everybody was upset about it. But I told Mr. Ford after the game, and he was upset that he didn’t know Barry wasn’t going to play, and I told him the situation and he understood it.
“And I remember, I said, ‘Mr. Ford, come in the locker room.’ And he came in the locker room and the players, they were distraught, they were sitting there — this is a true story — they were sitting there, taking their uniforms off. And I said, ‘Guys, heads up.’ And they all came up to the middle of the room where I was, they always did — they gave me great respect that football team — and I said, ‘Guys, take a look around. Take a look around where you’re dressing.’ Mr. Ford was in the room. I said, ‘Take a look around where you guys are getting dressed.’ I said, ‘We’ll be back here in December to play these guys to go to the Super Bowl.’ And it happened, but we lost again.”
When the Lions got to Washington in the playoffs, longtime trainer Kent Falb said they appeared overwhelmed by an experience that was new to most in the franchise.
A motorcycle escort took the team bus from the airport to the hotel, and as they drove down Pennsylvania Avenue, Falb said a police officer on the corner flashed the thumbs-up sign that became a rallying cry for the team that year after Mike Utley suffered two fractured vertebrae in his neck and was paralyzed on the field.
After the game, Fontes and Ford shared that moment outside on the curb.
“I looked at him and I looked at his wife and I said, ‘Mr. Ford, I’m very sorry and disappointed that we couldn’t win this one for you,’ ” Fontes said. “And he and his wife looked at me both and said, ‘That’s OK. This is the furthest we’ve ever come and we’re very proud of the team.’ ”
“Mr. Ford was not a kind of guy who showed his authority,” Farr said. “He was very real and genuine and really, really wanted to do the very best thing for the players. But unfortunately, he chose some poor, poor, poor managers. And I can see how it’d be very difficult for Bill to be able to determine — he was a guy that did not want to exert his power, never have. But some of the people that he’d stick with (were) not very good.”
Of all the Lions coaches over the last 50 years, just two, Schmidt and Gary Moeller, who replaced Bobby Ross on an interim basis for the final seven games of the 2000 season, had winning records during their time in Detroit.
Ford has delegated most of the hiring responsibilities during his tenure as owner, but he also has spent plenty of time meeting with or talking regularly to his coaches.
In the ’60s and ’70s, when he was a vice president at Ford and still heavily involved in day-to-day operations of the automotive company, Ford would show up at team headquarters in Detroit or at the Pontiac Silverdome most evenings driving whatever Honolulu blue model car he had that year.
He made small talk with players after games and assistant coaches in the hallway, and he sat in on draft meetings and the draft itself, lighting a cigarette or taking a swig from his bottle of Coke after every Lions pick.
“He would never come in and say, ‘I saw this guy play on film and take this guy,’ no,” Fontes said. “His (purpose) was informational and he would say, ‘OK. If that’s what you guys want to do, go ahead.’ ”
With day-to-day coaching decisions, Ford has always been the same hands-off way.
Ross, who quit the Lions midway through his fourth season because of blood circulation problems in his legs, said Ford allowed him to move training camp to Saginaw Valley State without any hassle and didn’t question his decision to bench Scott Mitchell for Charlie Batch. Fontes said it wasn’t unusual for him to spend an hour or two talking to Ford after home games. And Rick Forzano, who coached the Lions in 1974-76, said he met with Ford and Thomas every Monday night with Thomas doing “most of the interrogating.”
Schmidt, a Hall of Fame linebacker who played on the Lions’ 1953 and ’57 championship teams before becoming coach, said he watched game tape with Ford during their meetings. One time after a loss to Buffalo, he saw the owner get so angry he kicked an empty water bucket 10 yards across the locker room. Schmidt said, “too bad you weren’t kicking today,” and Ford snapped back, “don’t you ever tell me that again.”
“I always knew he was the boss, let’s put it that way,” Schmidt said. “And you always try to please the boss. But he wasn’t Jerry Jones, thank God, and some of the other guys that are similar to Jerry. Although Bill, he’d get mad, too, just like anybody else, but he would I think channel his, how should I say, being (ticked) in a different manner. He would be more business-like as opposed to screaming and hollering.”
As close as Ford got with some of his coaches, his greatest allegiance was clearly and most perplexingly to the general managers he hired to run his team.
Thomas was promoted to vice president and GM in 1967 and stayed in that post until he resigned in 1989. The Lions made three playoff appearances and never won a postseason game with him in charge.
In 2001, Ford famously lured Matt Millen out of the broadcast booth and made him president and general manager. Millen signed a five-year contract extension in 2005, after four straight losing seasons, and finally was fired three games into 2008 after steering the Lions to a 31-84 record. That year, the Lions became the first team to go 0-16.
Millen said he met Ford for the first time a couple of years before he was hired, at the behest of Ford Jr. The two spent a day getting to know each other at Ford headquarters in Dearborn and bonded over shared interests in history, reading and football.
“He was very easy to talk to, he’s very easy to relate to, he’s just got a great sense of humor,” Millen said. “We had a lot of common ground on a lot of different things.”
Millen said he turned the job down four times before finally agreeing to it after meeting another time with Ford in Florida.
Over the next seven-plus seasons, Millen and Ford saw each other most Mondays, Wednesdays and Sundays, and the two would talk on Fridays or Saturdays. When Ford couldn’t make it to the Lions’ Allen Park headquarters, Millen would sometimes meet him at his Grosse Pointe Shores home.
“I’d go to his house sometimes and (he’d) ask me if I want a sandwich or something and Mrs. Ford would bring out a couple sandwiches and he would eat the nastiest stuff,” Millen said. “He’d have some nasty sandwich like bologna and mayonnaise and I’m like, ‘Oh, my gosh, you got to be kidding me.’ On pure white bread. And I’d say, ‘You eat that?’ And he would look at me and say, ‘And I love it.’ ”
Millen, like many who’ve worked for the Lions, said one of his biggest regrets is not winning more for Ford. Publicly, he doesn’t have a good explanation for Ford’s allegiance to him, though he insists there’s more to it than just their close relationship.
“People say a lot of things because people don’t know what goes on,” Millen said. “People have no idea. If they knew what really happened in there they would have a lot more praise for Mr. Ford.”
“No one can say anything bad about Mr. Ford other than the fact that he’s too loyal,” Farr said.
Indeed, Ford is widely respected by fellow owners even though he has grown reclusive in recent years and hasn’t been a regular at league meetings in about two decades.
He socialized with owners such as Art Modell of the Cleveland Browns in the ’60s, and a decade later was one of the most influential voices when the NFL was dealing with bouts of labor strife.
“There were some people that would say, ‘Why do we have to change our way we operate so much?’ ” said Ernie Accorsi, the former New York Giants general manager who spent two years in the league office in the ’70s. “He was one of the guys that I thought was a tremendous realist. And if he’s going to speak on anything regarding that issue, he wasn’t running a deli, you know? He was running one of the great companies in the history of this country, so he had more experience with that particular situation, with auto unions, than anybody had. And he was always reasonable. He would explain that you have collective bargaining now, it’s a different world.”
Ford picked his spots carefully during general sessions in the “Fish Room” at league headquarters, a room so named because of the mounted swordfish on the wall. But during breaks, Accorsi said he was one of the few owners then-commissioner Pete Rozelle summoned to his office for private meetings.
One instance when Ford did speak up, Accorsi said, is when some owners pushed for the league to begin rotating games on Thanksgiving Day.
“I do remember how vociferous the support was for him on that ’cause he got up and said we’ve done this when things weren’t really going that great and the league just backed him completely,” Accorsi said. “They weren’t going to let it happen. And neither was the commissioner.”
Cowboys owner Jerry Jones said Ford is missed at league meetings today but is still held in high regard by his colleagues.
“I’ve literally been at owners (meetings) when an owner came up and met Mr. Ford for the first time, and the owner was a new owner in the NFL,” Jones said. “I was standing right with him and the owner talked about how his granddad had been a Ford dealer in Texas, in the depths of Texas, and he literally teared up when he talked about what Ford, what the brand and what the individuals stood for and had stood for in his evolving to the point that he could buy an NFL football team. He actually teared up and showed that kind of emotion, and that was (former Minnesota Vikings owner) Red McCombs.
“We don’t have anyone that can approach that stature in the NFL other than Mr. Ford.”
Several former Lions said Ford has had a similar impact on their lives.
Doug English, whose career ended in 1985 after he suffered a ruptured disk in his neck that began to press on his spinal cord, said he helps raise money to fight paralysis through his Lone Star Paralysis Foundation in part because of the care he received as a Lion.
Fontes said Ford was “a cornerstone of a stadium” for him and his family after his brother, Len, died of a heart attack the spring after the Lions reached the NFC title game. Lions offensive lineman Eric Andolsek was killed the same off-season when he was struck by a truck while in his front yard, and Fontes said those two those tragedies greatly affected the team in a down season in 1992.
Falb, the Lions’ head trainer in 1967-99, said Ford made a lasting impression on his father-in-law, an Iowa farmer, after a game in 1969 when the two bumped into each other by accident in a hallway. After exchanging pleasantries, they struck up a conversation about farming and hog prices “like two old buddies.”
And Jerry Glanville, a Lions assistant in 1974-76, said Ford once helped a player he wouldn’t name kick a drug habit by getting him help after he briefly went missing. Millen said Ford did the same for more than one coach during his tenure who battled alcohol problems.
“He’d do anything for you if you had a problem,” Glanville said.
They were candid shots of players, photographs that went back to the ’60s, and Ford Jr. decided it was worth a buy.
“I gave it to my dad,” Ford Jr. said during a keynote question-and-answer session at the Lions’ Courage House dinner last month. “His eyes lit up and as he went through each page, he knew every single player, a story about the player and usually stories about their families. And it was really like time just melted away for him.”
Time will do that after 50 years.
Back in the ’60s and ’70s, Sanders said he and Lem Barney spent hours talking with Ford about topics that would be off limit for most owners now. They asked him how much money he carried in his pocket (usually $100), why he drove himself everywhere rather than employ a chauffeur (he liked driving), and joked that he must have got his powder blue pants and dark blue suit jacket at Kmart even though they knew full well “they probably came from England somewhere.”
“He’d just sit right down and just get all involved,” Sanders said. “Never saw him angry, never saw him raise his voice, just like he was really interested in what you had to say. It was almost like sometimes he wanted someone to talk to.”
A few current Lions have had smaller personal interactions with Ford. Matthew Stafford said he called Ford to say thank-you after he signed his new five-year, $76.5-million contract this summer, and last year Ford took a minute to say hi to Calvin Johnson and a few others on the Lions’ indoor practice field.
In 2011, when the Lions clinched a playoff spot, they gave Ford a game ball and broke down the postgame huddle by saying, “Ford Tough.”
Ford put his hand in the pile and joined in.
“I don’t really know much about him and what he does,” receiver Nate Burleson said. “I just, when I see him, it just kind of puts things in perspective that this is his baby at the end of the day and even though we get paid a lot of money and it is the NFL, he looks at this team as something he wants to be proud of.”
Jones, the Cowboys’ owner, said Ford has reason for that. The Lions are the only cold-weather team to host two Super Bowls, they’ve built two stadiums in the metropolitan area and have had two of the game’s most exciting stars in Johnson and Barry Sanders, who abruptly retired from the game on the eve of 1999 training camp.
“I know at the end of the day how much winning means, but in a different way there’s other things that count, too,” Jones said. “And you have more control as an owner in some of the areas like getting stadiums and doing things like that than scoring touchdowns and fumbling that ball, those types of things. And the closer he gets to where he can put his thumbprint on it, the more success the Lions have had and the more success he’s had.”
Still, championships are how teams are judged in the NFL, and for now the closest Ford has gotten is that snowy, lonely street corner in Washington, D.C.
“You’d be surprised how many people are pulling for him because he deserves it,” Charlie Sanders said. “He really, really deserves it, and just hold on. Just hold on.”
Contact Dave Birkett: dbirkett@freepress.com . Follow him on Twitter @davebirkett. Free Press sports writers Carlos Monarrez and Shawn Windsor contributed to this report.
Fontes told the bus to stop, got out and invited Ford and his wife, Martha, inside to keep warm while they waited for their ride.
Ford politely declined, telling Fontes he didn’t want to interfere with his own team, and moments later his car pulled up to the curb.
The men shook hands, and Fontes apologized for the team’s play that day and the emptiness both felt inside.
“He just kind of said, ‘I understand,’ and he said, ‘Maybe next year,’ ” Fontes recalled. “He did say, or he, his wife, one of them said, ‘This is the best we’ve been in years and it’s been a great run.’
“I was down and he was down, and when we stood out there in the snow together, it was kind of — somebody should have painted the picture of both of us standing there going, ‘My goodness, what happened?’ Snowflakes were falling and we were talking about the year we had and how we came up short and looking forward to more and better years and not knowing the tragedy that would (prevent us from taking) the next step. It would have been a great picture.”
A fitting one, too, for a man who purchased the Lions 50 years ago this month. The only current NFL owner who has run a team longer is Ralph Wilson, who founded the Buffalo Bills in 1959.
The Lions declined interview requests from the Free Press for the 88-year-old Ford, his son, Bill Jr., the team’s vice chairman, and team president Tom Lewand for this story. But in interviews over the past three months, more than 50 current and former players, coaches and executives, both with the Lions and across the NFL, paint Ford as a kind and generous man of uncommon wealth who bought the football team he grew up rooting for mostly because he was a fan.
Now largely out of sight from a skeptical public but still the final arbiter of the organization’s most important decisions, Ford remains in search of his second playoff victory and that elusive Super Bowl appearance.
How that would affect his dubious legacy is anyone’s guess.
Former players swear by Ford’s kindness and save their harshest words for some of the managers he employed. Old coaches appreciate his loyalty that fans have come to loathe. And people across the league insist the NFL — and football in Detroit — wouldn’t be where it is today if not for Ford’s decision to rescue the team from a syndicate of 144 stockholders.
■ Related: Timeline for Lions owner William Clay Ford
From fan to boss
A shareholder himself, Ford took over as Lions president in 1961 amid in-fighting among board members and got the idea to buy the franchise shortly thereafter.A regular at home and road games who once flew from London to Baltimore and back to see the Lions play, Ford was forced to watch a Lions-Bears game from his couch that December after inclement weather grounded his plane to Chicago.
With the Bears ahead, 15-9, late in the fourth quarter, Ford grew so incensed at a play that he kicked a hole in his TV screen. Moments later, realizing the game wasn’t over, Ford “scurried frantically around his mansion (and) located a radio in the servants’ quarters just in time to hear” Terry Barr score the game-winning touchdown for the Lions, according to a 1963 profile of Ford in the Sunday Free Press Magazine. A Detroit News story the same year said Ford’s brother, Henry, suggested after the incident, “Why don’t you buy the Lions and straighten things out?”
Ford’s interest was sufficiently piqued, and the man who grew up watching Lions games at old University of Detroit Stadium spent the next few years getting close to players.
On several occasions, he took groups of players duck hunting at a private reserve in Canada. They stayed in a plush log cabin, hunted with 12-gauge shotguns and had guides for help.
“It was such a good time,” said Wayne Walker, a Lions linebacker in 1958-72. “They had a clubhouse there and we had a lunch. We did that three or four times during the course of my career. He was just, in those situations, just one of the guys. It was really great.”
Pat Studstill, a Lions receiver in 1961-67, said players used to gather at Joe Schmidt’s Golden Lion restaurant in Grosse Pointe after games. Ford and his wife occasionally stopped by, and at one point Ford confided in some he was thinking about buying the team.
“It didn’t happen every week, but anytime we won we would have a big spirits party, what we called a spirits party, and we had just a real close team at that time,” Studstill said. “This was in ’62 and we kind of thought that he was looking to buy the club.
“I’m pretty sure he kind of more or less put out a, ‘Should I buy the club?’ ”
A year later, at an Oct. 15 board of directors meeting, Ford made a $6-million bid for sole control of the Lions that surprised almost everyone. The purchase was not on the board’s agenda for the day, and Ford described it to the Free Press at the time, “If you said it was a bombshell, you’re right.”
The bid, about $45 million in present value, included the Lions’ Michigan Avenue headquarters and $1.5 million in cash and securities. Forbes estimates the franchise is worth $900 million today.
Less than two weeks later, the board approved the sale, and on Nov. 22, 1963, the same day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, 94% of the 23,000-plus shares of the Detroit Football Co. voted in favor of the deal in a meeting at the Statler Hilton Hotel. Ford’s great uncle, E.R. Bryant, was the only significant dissenting vote due to his own legal entanglements.
■ Videos: Former players, coaches on Ford
Forty years later, Ford mused about the timing of the deal.
“It turned into a sad, terrible day,” he told the Free Press in 2003. “About a half-hour after the meeting, a few of us were having lunch at the Statler Hilton to celebrate. And a waitress came up to me and asked if I heard about Kennedy in Dallas. And I was waiting for the punch line. There were a lot of sick people making jokes about Kennedy around that time. But then you could tell that she was serious, and she said that he had been shot.
“It’s a terrible coincidence that both of these things would occur around the same time. But there were a couple of times over the years when some things happened to us that you just couldn’t figure out why or how it happened, and you’d briefly think if there’s some kind of stigma attached to anything else that may have taken place that awful day.”
Studstill said Ford didn’t come around the Golden Lion as much after he took control of the team, officially on Jan. 10, 1964, but players were generally pleased to have him as owner after years of board control.
“We were all kind of sweating it a little bit, we didn’t know what was going to transpire,” he said. “But he turned out to be a good owner — a very good owner. And as far as I was concerned, he helped a lot of players — buying cars, if nothing else. He was a good owner. He really was.”
Roger Brown, a Lions defensive tackle in 1960-66, said Ford took players to a Ford factory early that decade and let them pick out a car to use for the year. Brown got a Mercury, Bruce Maher got a 450-horsepower station wagon, and Ford picked up the insurance for everyone.
“All I could think about was my little salary that I was getting,” Brown said. “I said, ‘Hey, at least I’ll have a new car every year.’ It lasted one year. The guys crashed them up, so it didn’t last long.”
Ford endeared himself to players in other ways, too. He paid Alex Karras’ $5,000 fine for gambling late in the 1963 season, and when the Lions defensive tackle was suspended from football and something of a pariah, Ford showed up for the grand opening of his bar, the Lindell A.C.
Still, the Lions, one of the NFL’s powerhouse teams of the 1950s, went through lean years immediately after Ford took control.
General manager Edwin J. Anderson, who Ford backed in a proxy fight years earlier and who described Ford to the San Francisco News Call Bulletin as a “quite rabid” fan who spends his Sundays in the press box “screaming like mad” for the Lions and a game he thinks “is the greatest invention since kissing,” took over as president in 1964, and Ford gave his good friend Russ Thomas control of personnel.
Coach George Wilson, who led the Lions to their last world championship in 1957, re-signed after the ’64 season much to the dismay of players after several of his assistants were fired, and the Lions had losing records the next four years with Harry Gilmer and then Schmidt as coaches.
Bud Erickson, the Lions’ former publicity director and assistant general manager, said he was partially responsible for the Gilmer hire and thus “maybe I caused some of the problems that the Lions had early in the ’60s.”
“I’d go around and be at places like Green Bay and Chicago, and you were very friendly in those days,” Erickson said. “You’d have lunch with the owner and talk about other things in the particular game coming up, and I always thought that Harry Gilmer was a guy that a lot of people thought very highly of as a new possibility for being a head coach.
“I remember, we had lunch one day with Mr. Ford and Anderson at the Detroit Club and I threw out the name of Harry Gilmer for if they were making a move. After that it was out of my hands, of course, but they went ahead and met with Gilmer and hired him, and I guess that was some of the problems early in the ’60s that it didn’t quite work out the way it expected.”
Playoff heartache
The Lions reached the playoffs just 10 times in Ford’s first 49 seasons as owner and are 1-10 in postseason games.Two years ago, they qualified as an NFC wild card with a 10-6 record and lost to the New Orleans Saints, 45-28. They’ve made the playoffs in strike-shortened seasons, on four-game losing streaks and after winning in Week 17 to get in.
Twice, they’ve had legitimate chances to win a championship, and both times they’ve fallen short of the Super Bowl.
In 1970, Schmidt’s fourth season as coach, the Lions went 10-4 and made the playoffs as a wild card after winning their final five games. The sense, even among opposing players, was that the Lions had as good a chance as anyone to win the NFC.
“We saw (former Cowboys running back) Calvin Hill (at last week’s Lions-Cowboys game) and he said, ‘You guys were the best team,’ ” said Hall of Fame tight end Charlie Sanders, who played for the Lions in 1968-77 and now serves as the team’s assistant director of pro personnel. “He said we should have won the Super Bowl that year. He said there was no doubt that we had the best team.”
The Lions finished with the league’s second-best defense that year, behind a Minnesota Vikings team they lost to twice during the regular season, and with Greg Landry and Bill Munson at quarterback and Mel Farr and Altie Taylor in the backfield they had one of the best rushing attacks in the NFL.
After beating the Los Angeles Rams, 28-23, in a Monday night game to get to nine wins and with snow bearing down on the Midwest, the Lions decided to stay in L.A. to prepare for a must-win season finale against the Green Bay Packers.
Ford gave every player $100, Sanders said, to go Christmas shopping while they were away from home.
“I think I was making $17,000,” Sanders said. “That $100 was a lot.”
And when players got back to the team hotel after the game they took over the bar and threw themselves a party at the Lions’ expense. Schmidt ended up on stage singing or playing the piano — or both — and Thomas found himself stuck with a surprise bill the next day.
“I remember that night Karras signed Russ Thomas’ name to one of the checks,” said linebacker Mike Lucci, who played for the Lions in 1965-73. “They locked the doors. It was one of the great times.”
Farr, who suffered a dislocated shoulder in the game, was one of the few players who did not attend the party. Instead, he flew home with Ford by private plane to get his shoulder looked at, an experience he said changed his life.
“That plane flight did wonders for me,” said Farr, who worked for Ford Motor Co. during his playing days and bought his first Ford dealership the year after he retired. “It made me dream, dream of owning my own plane. And guess what? I did.”
The Lions shut out the Packers, 20-0, to make the playoffs, but Farr’s injury and a late Munson interception off the hands of Earl McCullouch were too much to overcome in a 5-0 road playoff loss to a Cowboys team that went on to lose in the Super Bowl.
Sanders collapsed to his knees as Munson’s pass glanced of McCulloch’s fingers “because I knew it was over then.” Farr said his injury “cost us the Super Bowl.”
“I still believe that that team, we were destined to win the Super Bowl,” Lucci said. “Every time I go to all these functions and everybody’s got a Super Bowl ring on, I got the championship ring (I won in) Cleveland, but it’s not the same.”
In 1991, Fontes thought he had a team good enough to reach the Super Bowl, too, even after the Lions lost to Washington, 45-0, in their season opener. They went on to win a franchise-record 12 games and had Barry Sanders, a future MVP and the best running back in the league.
“I remember losing to Washington in the first game of the season and Barry Sanders didn’t play,” Fontes said. “I remember I got really thrashed for it by the league because I didn’t tell the league he wasn’t going to play and everybody was upset about it. But I told Mr. Ford after the game, and he was upset that he didn’t know Barry wasn’t going to play, and I told him the situation and he understood it.
“And I remember, I said, ‘Mr. Ford, come in the locker room.’ And he came in the locker room and the players, they were distraught, they were sitting there — this is a true story — they were sitting there, taking their uniforms off. And I said, ‘Guys, heads up.’ And they all came up to the middle of the room where I was, they always did — they gave me great respect that football team — and I said, ‘Guys, take a look around. Take a look around where you’re dressing.’ Mr. Ford was in the room. I said, ‘Take a look around where you guys are getting dressed.’ I said, ‘We’ll be back here in December to play these guys to go to the Super Bowl.’ And it happened, but we lost again.”
When the Lions got to Washington in the playoffs, longtime trainer Kent Falb said they appeared overwhelmed by an experience that was new to most in the franchise.
A motorcycle escort took the team bus from the airport to the hotel, and as they drove down Pennsylvania Avenue, Falb said a police officer on the corner flashed the thumbs-up sign that became a rallying cry for the team that year after Mike Utley suffered two fractured vertebrae in his neck and was paralyzed on the field.
After the game, Fontes and Ford shared that moment outside on the curb.
“I looked at him and I looked at his wife and I said, ‘Mr. Ford, I’m very sorry and disappointed that we couldn’t win this one for you,’ ” Fontes said. “And he and his wife looked at me both and said, ‘That’s OK. This is the furthest we’ve ever come and we’re very proud of the team.’ ”
Loyal to a fault
Never before or since have the Lions, who’ve had losing seasons in 31 of the last 49 years, been that close to the Super Bowl, and there is one popular theory why.“Mr. Ford was not a kind of guy who showed his authority,” Farr said. “He was very real and genuine and really, really wanted to do the very best thing for the players. But unfortunately, he chose some poor, poor, poor managers. And I can see how it’d be very difficult for Bill to be able to determine — he was a guy that did not want to exert his power, never have. But some of the people that he’d stick with (were) not very good.”
Of all the Lions coaches over the last 50 years, just two, Schmidt and Gary Moeller, who replaced Bobby Ross on an interim basis for the final seven games of the 2000 season, had winning records during their time in Detroit.
Ford has delegated most of the hiring responsibilities during his tenure as owner, but he also has spent plenty of time meeting with or talking regularly to his coaches.
In the ’60s and ’70s, when he was a vice president at Ford and still heavily involved in day-to-day operations of the automotive company, Ford would show up at team headquarters in Detroit or at the Pontiac Silverdome most evenings driving whatever Honolulu blue model car he had that year.
He made small talk with players after games and assistant coaches in the hallway, and he sat in on draft meetings and the draft itself, lighting a cigarette or taking a swig from his bottle of Coke after every Lions pick.
“He would never come in and say, ‘I saw this guy play on film and take this guy,’ no,” Fontes said. “His (purpose) was informational and he would say, ‘OK. If that’s what you guys want to do, go ahead.’ ”
With day-to-day coaching decisions, Ford has always been the same hands-off way.
Ross, who quit the Lions midway through his fourth season because of blood circulation problems in his legs, said Ford allowed him to move training camp to Saginaw Valley State without any hassle and didn’t question his decision to bench Scott Mitchell for Charlie Batch. Fontes said it wasn’t unusual for him to spend an hour or two talking to Ford after home games. And Rick Forzano, who coached the Lions in 1974-76, said he met with Ford and Thomas every Monday night with Thomas doing “most of the interrogating.”
Schmidt, a Hall of Fame linebacker who played on the Lions’ 1953 and ’57 championship teams before becoming coach, said he watched game tape with Ford during their meetings. One time after a loss to Buffalo, he saw the owner get so angry he kicked an empty water bucket 10 yards across the locker room. Schmidt said, “too bad you weren’t kicking today,” and Ford snapped back, “don’t you ever tell me that again.”
“I always knew he was the boss, let’s put it that way,” Schmidt said. “And you always try to please the boss. But he wasn’t Jerry Jones, thank God, and some of the other guys that are similar to Jerry. Although Bill, he’d get mad, too, just like anybody else, but he would I think channel his, how should I say, being (ticked) in a different manner. He would be more business-like as opposed to screaming and hollering.”
As close as Ford got with some of his coaches, his greatest allegiance was clearly and most perplexingly to the general managers he hired to run his team.
Thomas was promoted to vice president and GM in 1967 and stayed in that post until he resigned in 1989. The Lions made three playoff appearances and never won a postseason game with him in charge.
In 2001, Ford famously lured Matt Millen out of the broadcast booth and made him president and general manager. Millen signed a five-year contract extension in 2005, after four straight losing seasons, and finally was fired three games into 2008 after steering the Lions to a 31-84 record. That year, the Lions became the first team to go 0-16.
Millen said he met Ford for the first time a couple of years before he was hired, at the behest of Ford Jr. The two spent a day getting to know each other at Ford headquarters in Dearborn and bonded over shared interests in history, reading and football.
“He was very easy to talk to, he’s very easy to relate to, he’s just got a great sense of humor,” Millen said. “We had a lot of common ground on a lot of different things.”
Millen said he turned the job down four times before finally agreeing to it after meeting another time with Ford in Florida.
Over the next seven-plus seasons, Millen and Ford saw each other most Mondays, Wednesdays and Sundays, and the two would talk on Fridays or Saturdays. When Ford couldn’t make it to the Lions’ Allen Park headquarters, Millen would sometimes meet him at his Grosse Pointe Shores home.
“I’d go to his house sometimes and (he’d) ask me if I want a sandwich or something and Mrs. Ford would bring out a couple sandwiches and he would eat the nastiest stuff,” Millen said. “He’d have some nasty sandwich like bologna and mayonnaise and I’m like, ‘Oh, my gosh, you got to be kidding me.’ On pure white bread. And I’d say, ‘You eat that?’ And he would look at me and say, ‘And I love it.’ ”
Millen, like many who’ve worked for the Lions, said one of his biggest regrets is not winning more for Ford. Publicly, he doesn’t have a good explanation for Ford’s allegiance to him, though he insists there’s more to it than just their close relationship.
“People say a lot of things because people don’t know what goes on,” Millen said. “People have no idea. If they knew what really happened in there they would have a lot more praise for Mr. Ford.”
An impact on many levels
While many struggle to understand Ford’s loyalty, Farr said it’s both a detriment to the organization and the beauty of Ford as a person.“No one can say anything bad about Mr. Ford other than the fact that he’s too loyal,” Farr said.
Indeed, Ford is widely respected by fellow owners even though he has grown reclusive in recent years and hasn’t been a regular at league meetings in about two decades.
He socialized with owners such as Art Modell of the Cleveland Browns in the ’60s, and a decade later was one of the most influential voices when the NFL was dealing with bouts of labor strife.
“There were some people that would say, ‘Why do we have to change our way we operate so much?’ ” said Ernie Accorsi, the former New York Giants general manager who spent two years in the league office in the ’70s. “He was one of the guys that I thought was a tremendous realist. And if he’s going to speak on anything regarding that issue, he wasn’t running a deli, you know? He was running one of the great companies in the history of this country, so he had more experience with that particular situation, with auto unions, than anybody had. And he was always reasonable. He would explain that you have collective bargaining now, it’s a different world.”
Ford picked his spots carefully during general sessions in the “Fish Room” at league headquarters, a room so named because of the mounted swordfish on the wall. But during breaks, Accorsi said he was one of the few owners then-commissioner Pete Rozelle summoned to his office for private meetings.
One instance when Ford did speak up, Accorsi said, is when some owners pushed for the league to begin rotating games on Thanksgiving Day.
“I do remember how vociferous the support was for him on that ’cause he got up and said we’ve done this when things weren’t really going that great and the league just backed him completely,” Accorsi said. “They weren’t going to let it happen. And neither was the commissioner.”
Cowboys owner Jerry Jones said Ford is missed at league meetings today but is still held in high regard by his colleagues.
“I’ve literally been at owners (meetings) when an owner came up and met Mr. Ford for the first time, and the owner was a new owner in the NFL,” Jones said. “I was standing right with him and the owner talked about how his granddad had been a Ford dealer in Texas, in the depths of Texas, and he literally teared up when he talked about what Ford, what the brand and what the individuals stood for and had stood for in his evolving to the point that he could buy an NFL football team. He actually teared up and showed that kind of emotion, and that was (former Minnesota Vikings owner) Red McCombs.
“We don’t have anyone that can approach that stature in the NFL other than Mr. Ford.”
Several former Lions said Ford has had a similar impact on their lives.
Doug English, whose career ended in 1985 after he suffered a ruptured disk in his neck that began to press on his spinal cord, said he helps raise money to fight paralysis through his Lone Star Paralysis Foundation in part because of the care he received as a Lion.
Fontes said Ford was “a cornerstone of a stadium” for him and his family after his brother, Len, died of a heart attack the spring after the Lions reached the NFC title game. Lions offensive lineman Eric Andolsek was killed the same off-season when he was struck by a truck while in his front yard, and Fontes said those two those tragedies greatly affected the team in a down season in 1992.
Falb, the Lions’ head trainer in 1967-99, said Ford made a lasting impression on his father-in-law, an Iowa farmer, after a game in 1969 when the two bumped into each other by accident in a hallway. After exchanging pleasantries, they struck up a conversation about farming and hog prices “like two old buddies.”
And Jerry Glanville, a Lions assistant in 1974-76, said Ford once helped a player he wouldn’t name kick a drug habit by getting him help after he briefly went missing. Millen said Ford did the same for more than one coach during his tenure who battled alcohol problems.
“He’d do anything for you if you had a problem,” Glanville said.
A lifelong love
Bill Ford Jr. was surfing eBay one day last year, looking for a Christmas gift for his father, when he came upon an album of pictures a fan put together from old Lions training camps at Cranbrook.They were candid shots of players, photographs that went back to the ’60s, and Ford Jr. decided it was worth a buy.
“I gave it to my dad,” Ford Jr. said during a keynote question-and-answer session at the Lions’ Courage House dinner last month. “His eyes lit up and as he went through each page, he knew every single player, a story about the player and usually stories about their families. And it was really like time just melted away for him.”
Time will do that after 50 years.
Back in the ’60s and ’70s, Sanders said he and Lem Barney spent hours talking with Ford about topics that would be off limit for most owners now. They asked him how much money he carried in his pocket (usually $100), why he drove himself everywhere rather than employ a chauffeur (he liked driving), and joked that he must have got his powder blue pants and dark blue suit jacket at Kmart even though they knew full well “they probably came from England somewhere.”
“He’d just sit right down and just get all involved,” Sanders said. “Never saw him angry, never saw him raise his voice, just like he was really interested in what you had to say. It was almost like sometimes he wanted someone to talk to.”
A few current Lions have had smaller personal interactions with Ford. Matthew Stafford said he called Ford to say thank-you after he signed his new five-year, $76.5-million contract this summer, and last year Ford took a minute to say hi to Calvin Johnson and a few others on the Lions’ indoor practice field.
In 2011, when the Lions clinched a playoff spot, they gave Ford a game ball and broke down the postgame huddle by saying, “Ford Tough.”
Ford put his hand in the pile and joined in.
“I don’t really know much about him and what he does,” receiver Nate Burleson said. “I just, when I see him, it just kind of puts things in perspective that this is his baby at the end of the day and even though we get paid a lot of money and it is the NFL, he looks at this team as something he wants to be proud of.”
Jones, the Cowboys’ owner, said Ford has reason for that. The Lions are the only cold-weather team to host two Super Bowls, they’ve built two stadiums in the metropolitan area and have had two of the game’s most exciting stars in Johnson and Barry Sanders, who abruptly retired from the game on the eve of 1999 training camp.
“I know at the end of the day how much winning means, but in a different way there’s other things that count, too,” Jones said. “And you have more control as an owner in some of the areas like getting stadiums and doing things like that than scoring touchdowns and fumbling that ball, those types of things. And the closer he gets to where he can put his thumbprint on it, the more success the Lions have had and the more success he’s had.”
Still, championships are how teams are judged in the NFL, and for now the closest Ford has gotten is that snowy, lonely street corner in Washington, D.C.
“You’d be surprised how many people are pulling for him because he deserves it,” Charlie Sanders said. “He really, really deserves it, and just hold on. Just hold on.”
Contact Dave Birkett: dbirkett@freepress.com . Follow him on Twitter @davebirkett. Free Press sports writers Carlos Monarrez and Shawn Windsor contributed to this report.
Monday, November 25, 2013
FROM THE: "NOT GOOD" DEPT.
McCarthy says Rodgers
‘slim to none’ for Thursday
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| That's an Awesome Movember Stache Aaron! |
“He would like to go. Based on the information … I would say he’s slim to none. It would be a huge stretch for him to play in this game,” Packers Head Coach Mike McCarthy said on Monday.
McCarthy did not announce who his starting quarterback will be for Thursday’s game.
“Matt (Flynn) played very well. He deserves to start. I like the way Scott (Tolzien) has grown. We’re going to do everything we can to make sure both are ready,” McCarthy said.
Packers.com will provide a full report from McCarthy’s press conference.
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Friday, November 22, 2013
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| JFK speaking at Michigan State University, 1960. |
REMEMBERING JFK &
THE NEW FRONTIER
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| JFK at the Michigan Union, Ann Arbor, 1960 |
JFK, our youngest elected president, was assassinated 50 years ago today in Dallas. The only original thing I can add is how he indirectly touched my life.
First, his death inspired my father to quite a secure teaching job and join the Peace Corps. Candidate Kennedy is shown here at his famous speech announcing his idea for the Peace Corps at the Michigan Union on U of M's campus in 1960.
Second, the co-founder of Kelley Cawthorne (the lobbying firm I am a partner in), is Michigan's Eternal General Frank J. Kelley, an Irish Catholic who was himself inspired by JFK. Pictured below is Mr. Kelley and JFK in 1962 on Kennedy's last visit to Michigan.
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| Kelley Cawthorne Co-Founder Frank J. Kelley & JFK in Detroit, 1962. |
Below is an article that appeared statewide today in Michigan.
When Frank Kelley Met JFK…
ByFrom domemagazine.com
November 22, 2013
LANSING — Fifty years ago today, Michigan Attorney General Frank Kelley was taking his usual Friday afternoon swim in a YMCA pool in downtown Lansing. Suddenly, he looked up. Leon Cohan, his deputy, was walking towards him, wearing a winter coat and a stricken expression. “My first thought was that something had happened to one of my kids,” Mr. Kelley said. “Frank, the President has been shot. It’s on the radio,” his assistant said. The Attorney General was stunned. “I was numb.”
He dressed hurriedly, got back to the office, only to be met by his secretary [who still works for him in our office by the way!] tears streaming down her face. The Department of Justice had just called. President Kennedy was dead.
“For the next few days, I was in a fog,” said Kelley, now 88 but still mentally sharp. “He was the most charismatic politician I had ever met, and have ever met, a true Irish prince.”
Half a century after the assassination, there are still many people who remember seeing or meeting John F. Kennedy. But unlike most, Frank Kelley once spent nearly an hour alone with him, in a hotel suite in Detroit. President Kennedy had come to Michigan in October, 1962, in an effort to boost the chances of then-Gov. John Swainson, who was running against George Romney.
Kelley, who had been appointed to his job less than a year before, was also trying to be elected attorney general in his own right. After a morning spent campaigning, the Governor, who had lost both legs in World War II, needed to take a nap. So the young Attorney General and the President were alone. Like JFK, Frank Kelley was Irish and a Roman Catholic. “But there was a big difference: I had managed to make it into the middle class. But the Kennedys were royalty, and I immediately saw that everything I had ever heard about JFK was true. He had all the graceful bearing you’d expect of a Prince, from his casual yet perfectly tailored Savile Row suit to his clearly custom-made shoes.
Not only that, he had the tanned face of a hero and a unique voice that was equal parts upper-class Harvard and New England.” Kelley was not a man easily wowed by celebrity, but he felt as if he was having a surreal experience. “Less than a year ago, I had been a country lawyer in Alpena. Now here I was, the Attorney General of a major industrial state, sitting with the most powerful man in the world. “I wonder if my late father would have believed it!”
In fact, the men talked about their fathers. The Attorney General said the President told him his father used to tell his sons, “You boys are privileged, and I want you to take that opportunity to serve the public. Now, I was in business and succeeded at it. But most of the people I met in business were bad, and I don’t want you boys mixed up in it.”
John F. Kennedy, who was less than eight years older than his young admirer, told him, “With that Irish name—Kelley—and your good looks, you are as good as elected.” But he said he was worried about the incumbent Democratic Governor, John Swainson. JFK’s political instincts were sound. A month later, Kelley would win his first of ten terms as the state’s attorney general. Swainson would lose by a narrow margin to the man whose own son, Mitt, would lose a presidential election half a century later.
Shortly before the end of the day, Kelley told the President that he thought Romney was putting on an act. “We’re all actors, Frank,” Kennedy said dryly. “The one who hides it the best wins.” \Frank Kelley would never see him again. Two weeks after he campaigned in Detroit, JFK was grappling with the Cuban Missile Crisis. A year later came that fateful day in Dallas.
Reflecting today, Frank Kelley said, “It may be impossible today for anyone young to understand how much we looked up to him – especially a guy from a middle-class, Irish Catholic family like me. When I was growing up, it was taken as a given that no Catholic could be elected President. He changed all that. He made us feel that we could do anything. When he said, “One man can make a difference, and every man should try,” he made us believe it.” Today, biographers and reporters have punched holes in the Kennedy legend.
A few years ago, I showed some news footage of that era to some college students. Afterwards, one young man said of JFK: “It’s as if he was in color and the rest of them were black and white. It’s like he was still living today.”
For some of us, there are times when it really does feel that way.
SATURDAY IS "THE GAME"
JFK'S "HAAVAAHD
VS THE BUSHIES YALE
A LOOK BACK AT THE INFAMOUS
29-29 GAME OF 1968
Yale entered its annual season-ending game with an 8-0 record and a 16-game winning streak.
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| Neidermyer looks like the classic uptight Yalie. |
- Standing between the Eli and their second straight Ivy League Championship was archrival Harvard, owners of an identical 8-0 record. The Crimson had the nation's best scoring defense (7.6 ppg) as they sought their first-ever outright Ivy title.
- No game in the 85 years of this storied rivalry had attracted so much attention. Harvard officials estimated they could have sold 100,000 tickets. Instead 40,000 jammed venerable Harvard Stadium. One Yale senior sold two tickets for $175 which, adjusted for inflation, would exceed $1,000 today.
and QB Brian Dowling, Yale
(NOTE: Brian Dowling was the model for Doonesbury's "BD" and he had won every game he had ever played at QB going back to grade school!) jumped out to a 22-0 lead in the second quarter.
- So desperate was Harvard coach John Yovicsin for an offensive spark that he turned to junior Frank Champi midway through the 2nd quarter.
- A javelin thrower who had started the season as the fourth string QB, Champi had only five completions all year. "He looked scared to death," said offensive lineman and future Academy Award-winning actor Tommy Lee Jones. (Jones' roommate Al Gore sat in the stands. A Yale student, George W. Bush, watched from the sidelines.)
- Nervous or not, Champi immediately took Harvard 64y in 12 plays, throwing a 15-yard TD pass with 44 seconds left in the half. A missed extra point sent the teams to the locker room with Yale ahead 22-6.
- After three-and-out, Harvard punted but recovered a fumble on the Yale 25.
- Champi returned to the huddle for good and led a drive to the goal line. A one-yard run by FB Gus Crim cut the deficit to 22-13.
- However, Dowling reseized the momentum by scoring his fourth TD of the game on a five-yard run with 10:44 left in the game. Since coach Carmen Cozza saw no need to go for two, Yale led 29-13 after a conventional PAT. Harvard would need two TDs and two two-point conversions just to tie.
- Eli fans waved white handkerchiefs and yelled "We're No. 1", then, when they tired of that, "You're No. 2."
- Yale drove to the Harvard 14 but lost a fumble with 3:34 remaining.
- Champi led his team to the Yale 38. On third-and-18, he fumbled as he was sacked. However, tackle Fritz Reed collected the loose pigskin and rambled to the 15.
- Given new life, Champi immediately completed a TD pass to Bruce Freeman with 42 seconds left.
- A pass for the two-point conversion was incomplete but pass interference gave the Crimson another chance.
- FB Gus Crim crashed over to make it 29-21 Yale.
- If Yale recovered, the game was over. But, amazingly, the Eli had never practiced defending on onsides kick.
- So they flubbed the recovery and Harvard fell on the ball at the Yale 49.
- On the sidelines, Dowling and Hill begged Cozza to let them play defense but he refused.
- Instead, they watched helplessly as Champi scampered for 14y. A face-mask penalty advanced the ball to the 20.
- With 0:32 left, Champi threw incomplete at the goal line. Then another incompletion inside the 5. 0:20 remaining.
- A draw play to Crim caught the Eli D by surprise and moved Harvard to the 6.
- Champi went back to pass, scrambled, and was sacked at the 8. So Harvard used its last timeout with three seconds left.
- Time for one last play. The Yale faithful, who earlier had taunted Harvard, desperately yelled "Hold that line!"
- Champi dropped back to the 15, pump faked twice, ran up to the 10, faked a throw to the left and then the right, shook off a tackle, retreated to the 16, looked right, then just before being leveled threw a pass to the left side of the EZ where RB Vic Gatto grabbed it as he fell backwards.
- After a long delay to clear the Crimson fans who stormed the field, Harvard lined up for another two-point conversion. Champi rolled right, planted his feet, and threw to TE Pete Varney across the middle for a 29-29 tie. Crimson revelers flooded the field again. The Yale players stood on the sidelines stunned.
Pete Varney exults after catching tying pass.
The headline in the next edition of the Harvard Crimson read: "Harvard Beats Yale 29-29." Cozza said, "We feel like we lost it, even though we didn't. Something like that won't happen again in 1,000 years." 16 points in 42 seconds.
Thursday, November 21, 2013
IN HONOR OF THURSDAY NIGHT aka
"O LINE NIGHT!"
November 20, 2013 at 1:07 am
Michigan State linemen stomping up to lead team's success, celebration
East Lansing — You might have caught a quick
glimpse of it during Michigan State’s victory over Michigan.
If you didn’t see it during the game, maybe you
noticed it on “The Journey,” the Big Ten Network program chronicling the entire
season around the conference.
But if you didn’t see Michigan State offensive lineman
Travis Jackson doing the most interesting celebration dance possibly ever seen
on a football field, check out the Spartan All-Access program from last Sunday.
As Michigan State is celebrating its victory over Nebraska last week with
coaches and players alike dancing in the middle of the locker room, it ends with
Jackson.
He’s in the middle of the entire team, crouches down,
and then begins jumping, yelling, “Yes, yes, yes,” over and over again.
The entire team joins in forming a mass of leaping, screaming players.
The entire team joins in forming a mass of leaping, screaming players.
It’s an homage to WWE wrestler Daniel Bryan, but when
it’s a 300-plus-pound offensive lineman trying to pull it off, the
side-splitting laughs are sure to follow. [EDITORS NOTE: Kind of reminds me of Electric chanting "Holy Wah" in the Bella Vista near Neon Deon's cabin].
“I wasn’t expecting it after the game,” senior guard
Dan France said. “Then everybody started going crazy when he did that. It was a
good time.”
Added Jackson, “It’s always fun and Coach D (Mark
Dantonio) puts an emphasis on enjoying the win. So getting in there in the
locker room after the game is so much fun and the guys doing their thing.
Getting the team to do it together is a blast.”
It’s easy for this team, and more specifically this
offensive line, to have a blast this season. The Spartans are unbeaten in Big
Ten play and are on the verge of locking up their second appearance in the
conference championship game in three seasons.
But for a unit that has dealt with dozens of injuries
and inconsistent play over the past two seasons, the joy of winning in 2013 is
even more gratifying.
“It’s been a really cool season,” Jackson said. “As we
gain momentum it feels like it just rolls. Last year was a really tough year,
but I think we’ll be better off for it. We learned so much and having that
momentum now with winning and having a blast makes it so much different.”
A blast isn’t exactly how Jackson or any of the
offensive linemen would describe last year’s 7-6 showing. Jackson was knocked
out after fifth game with a leg injury and tackle Fou Fonoti was lost in the
fourth game of the season. Guard Blake Treadwell also had his share of ailments,
creating a patchwork group just to make it through the year.
But the silver lining — a group of eight players with
tons of experience — is paying off now as the Spartans have slowly crept up the
rushing rankings and Michigan State quarterbacks have been sacked just nine
times, the lowest number in the Big Ten.
“There’s great chemistry in that room,” Dantonio said.
“(Offensive line) coach (Mark) Staten has created that chemistry along with our
older players in that offensive line room. They just want to win. Bottom line is
guys just want to win. They’ll sacrifice for the good of the group as long as
we’re winning or even when
we’re losing.”
That has been evident as players with plenty of
starting experience have sacrificed to create a unique rotation of as many as
eight players. Jackson, who has started 17 games in his career, now spells Jack
Allen at center and Treadwell at guard. France, who spent the last three years
at left tackle, has made the move to right guard, while Fonoti takes breaks at
right tackle to allow sophomore Donavon Clark and redshirt freshman Jack Conklin
to rotate in.
“We’re having a good time and it shows on the field,”
France said. “ We’re a really close-knit group and it feels like when we’re
playing we have each other’s back.”
A tight bond has been created among offensive linemen
that just happens to coincide with some more unique personalities.
Quarterback Connor Cook, who lives with Fonoti and
Allen, said it’s hard to explain.
“There’s so many of them and they’re so close,” he
said. “Just how they interact with each other, the jokes they crack. They’re
just hysterical.”
 |
| Meet the Meat Squad. Check em out at @meatsquadmsu on Twitter. |
And you don’t have to be playing every week to be part
of the fun. Conklin and fellow redshirt freshmen Kodi Kieler, Zach Higgins and
Benny McGowan make up the Meat Squad. They all have their own names — Meatball
and Meatloaf, for example — and they even have a Twitter account
(@meatsquadmsu).
“The Meat Squad is a very special group of guys,”
Jackson said. “I call them the four best-looking guys on the team.”
That’s something else the linemen have fun with. Most
jokes surround the fact they aren’t exactly the smallest guys on the team.
“I’ve always thought that if you’ve got a little
weight on you, you’ve got to have a personality or the girls aren’t gonna talk
to you,” Jackson said.
To which France responded, “Yeah, we don’t have the
six packs or the chiseled jaw lines.”
What they do have this season is health, and that has
led to a unit that is in position to move its offense — and its team — closer to
its goal of reaching the Rose Bowl.
“You’ve got to enjoy these moments,” Fonoti said. “We
take care of business but at the same time have fun with it. We can laugh about
it and have fun but be serious when it comes time to be serious.”
They’ve proven that, and they’ve certainly proven they
know how to have fun, even if the dances aren’t exactly classics.
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