The Detroit Lions

Canton, Michigan, is a town about halfway between Ann Arbor and Detroit. But who wants to be "a guy from Ann Arbor."

The Detroit Lions have never been a serious football team, not one year in the entire time I’ve been alive. In the year 2008, I remember a few scenes burned into the television screen: Ellen Degeneres paying people’s credit card debt, Barack Obama pretending to be a good person, and the Detroit Lions going 0 and 16 for the season: that’s 0 wins, 16 losses in the regular season. 

Earlier this week, the producer of a movie I’m writing told me that Sunday Night Football is the most watched television show in America. Nothing else comes close. I can’t claim to be someone who follows sports religiously, not even regularly, but it would be really ignorant to ignore that sports fans are everywhere, and football fans are a microcosm that deeply reflects the soul of our communities. A soul that probably leans more male, a little more white, but is shockingly a soul all the same.

Have you ever watched a sports game with a bunch of die-hard fans? A room of people all wearing the jerseys of their favorite team: the uniform of a job they do not do, reflecting skills they do not have, and risks they do not take. Yet they see themselves in the athletes playing the game. 

When I was in Tampa with my friend Rithvic over break, I watched a man be entirely silent for hours on end watching Michigan play Alabama in the College Football Championship. He was stoic, serious, and focused. The second they won, he leapt out of his chair, ran to the TV, and started doing a dance from fortnight. It was primal, shocking, and undeniably honest. 

Many people express themselves through watching sports. The way an audition or piece of writing is a place where I get to sink deep into my own emotionality, sports is how many people find a space to safely express true, honest joy, deep grief, or searing anger. A lot of people get some part of their personality, their character, their self esteem even, from claiming the sports teams that represent them. 

Which is to say, Detroit’s 0 and 16 season defined how I, and many others, characterized Detroit sports, and thus the city of Detroit, thus the people in Detroit, for most of my life. 

For years and years, Detroit has been the city of Lions football, and the Lions sucked. Following the team almost came with a guarantee: if you ever get your hopes up, if you give them a chance to prove themselves, they will let you down. They will fail. The Lions, who employ many people for the sole task of being good at playing football, are not good at playing football. 

In the last few years, that has begun to change. This Sunday, the Lions will play in the NFC Championship- and if they win, they will go to the Super Bowl. 

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I can’t really claim to be a sports fan. This is a picture from my high school homecoming game, sophomore year:

But somehow, I have continuously stumbled into proximity to athletics. I did become my high school’s homecoming king. In my first week of college, I somehow, became my college’s mascot:

My reluctant proximity to sports began in elementary school, when I, the brother of a twin sister, became determined to befriend other males. I learned the rules of football, and played it at recess nearly every day from 4th through 8th grade. I was very bad, but football gave me some kind of community- I’m not sure if you could call them friends. Detroit sucked, so it was easy to make conversation about Detroit sports, even if you didn’t follow the teams. They just sucked, and you could say that, even if you didn’t know why. 

I went to one Lions game, with my dad, in the eighth grade. They played the Seahawks, and were leading for most of the game. This kid in my Spanish class yelled and waved to me from a few rows above in the stands. Until that point, I didn’t even realize he knew that I, a very nerdy and quiet kid at this point, was even alive. We never talked about it at school, but I’ve never forgotten. The Lions lost that game.

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Being from the Metro-Detroit area became more important to me after I left for college. I had many friends who went to the University of Michigan, and Michigan State. I went to Northwestern, which (kind of) rivaled them both. Although we supported different college teams, I knew all of my friends were following Detroit sports. Mostly because they’d be angry on Twitter about it. 

Every Sunday, I’d see tweets about a game I was not watching:

And the classic, the timeless:

College was the first time I started meeting kids who weren’t from the Metro-Detroit area. Kids who grew up in the self-proclaimed utopias of New York or California, or other big cities, or were international, or other variations on mid-sized city rich. I learned more explicitly what people outside of Detroit think about Detroit. To this day, the gut reactions that I hear verbalized about Detroit often reflect the classism and racism that is ingrained even in coastal, liberal attitudes.

People talk down on Detroit- but it’s not like those who grew up in Michigan are unfamiliar. Having something to prove has always been part of the city’s refrain. My parents listen to classic Hindi music, some 1980’s rock, Tamil songs from movies, and also Eminem- citing his lyrics as “motivational.” My sophomore year of high school, we had tried following an opportunity for our family outside of the Motor City. We lived in Austin, Texas for a few months. Things didn’t pan out, and we ended up coming back home to Michigan. Being back where we started was hard for our family, but when we drove home from the Detroit airport, “Not Afraid” came on the radio, and I felt that we were home again.

A few months later, at my high school’s “Celebration of Diversity” performance, the Bhangra team- made up of many guys who danced in Detroit, because it was a meeting ground of the immigrant communities in Southeast Michigan and a few Canadian neighborhoods- came out carrying a big Detroit VS Everybody flag. 

The mantle of Detroit, the empowering claim of being the country’s perpetual underdog, extends from the mouths of Detroit-bred artists like Eminem, down to any person who feels excluded or looked down on. Detroit is a city for people with something to prove. To be loyal to Detroit is to have a chip on your shoulder, to believe in tenacity and effort, to know that nothing comes easy, and to scorn entitlement. 

That spirit ended up following me from the suburbs of Wayne county, to Theatre school in Chicago, and has stuck with me in Los Angeles. Being from the midwest might be grounding, but having ties to the city of Detroit makes the blood in my veins run a little hotter. I’ve relied on being from a city that teaches you to embrace being an outsider whenever and wherever I’ve felt like one. Belonging to the Metro-Detroit area is a way of belonging everywhere. 

Following the Lions this year has been exciting. In 2022, the Lions were featured on the HBO series “Hard Knocks.” The show follows a different NFL team each season- usually one that’s struggling, and thus won’t impact the league too greatly by having a camera crew follow them around. The 2022 season captured Dan Campbell’s second year rebuilding the Lions. 

In 2021, the Lions went 3 and 13. In 2022, they went 9 and 8. This year, the Lions won 12 games and lost 5 before entering the playoffs. They won the next two playoff games, one against Matthew Stafford- the quarterback that had been synonymous with the Lions for my entire childhood- and now they are playing in the NFC Championship. I’m well prepared for the possibility that they lose the game this Sunday. My communities are plenty used to Lions losses. Much more daunting is the possibility of a Lions win- which would send them to the Super Bowl.

In 2018, I was friends with a die-hard Eagles fan, as that team overcame an unlucky history to win the Super Bowl. He, born and brought up in Philly, hosted a watch party, and cried when they were victorious. I had never considered what that would feel like until this year. Even I, usually comfortably ambivalent about sports, am swept with emotion when thinking about a Lions Super Bowl game. 

I don’t know what a Lions Super Bowl would be allowed to mean to me, an Arts major from Canton, Michigan, whose longest time spent consistently engaging with sports happened from inside of an animal suit. But I know what it will mean to a lot of my friends from Michigan, many of whom have stayed in and around the city to this day. I constantly write about the places and moments that I feel I come from. I feel that the city you’re from reflects a lot about your life: your motivations, your character, your community. It is literally where you start from. It’s one end of the measuring stick that, for better or worse, you can place on the places you travel in life.

For the 0 and 16 team from my youth to show their tenacity, their hunger, their skill, and their talents on the national stage shines a beacon towards the hope that anyone from Detroit, whose blood runs hot, pumped with fuel from the Motor City, can do anything that anyone born anywhere else can do too. And maybe even a little bit more on days that we’re lucky. 

Right now, it’s not Detroit VS Everybody. It’s just Detroit VS the San Francisco 49ers. I’ve wanted to write this piece for a while this season, and am rushing to get this out before the game on Sunday. I’d rather write about the possibility of a win than a reflection on a loss. And with the Lions, you just never know.