Same Old Love

January 21, 2025 / Derek Mueller

NFL football. Divisional playoffs. Top-seeded Detroit Lions, following a franchise-best 15-2 regular season record, host the Washington Commanders. It’s Saturday night, Saturday, Saturday. I had to fiddle around for an hour to get viewing options to work, as Sling Blue disappointed, then Fubo seemed fubar, and then finally I could dial in via a YouTube TV free trial (streaming medley relay can be such a drag!). Ford Field, bluelit and roaring. Despite being favorites, the Lions lose, 45-31. A two touchdown margin. No shade to the Commanders, but I do think it’s apt to say the Lions lost more than that the Commanders won. Detroit turned the ball over five times. That’s too many. Notwithstanding sixteen players on injured reserve, the Lions defense pressed again and again, aggressive style reduced to too many big gain giveaways, wide open receivers, running lanes the berth of a country road, all while committing fewer errors. Good on the Commanders for doing what they had to. But about those Lions:

I’m from Michigan. I grew up with the Lions on TV most Sundays, CBS 9 out of Cadillac because we didn’t have cable and nobody I knew had cable, though satellite dish receivers were coming on by the late 1980s. Adjust the antenna and Wayne Fontes comes to mind. Monty Clark. James Jones and Gary James. Chuck Long. Coaches and players from around the time I was 10, 11, 12. The refrain was “same old Lions,” after a loss, which was most of the time. From the time I was 10 until I was 14, the Lions season total wins amounted to this: 4, 7, 5, 4, and 4, with double-digit losses every year except 1985, when they finished 7-9. I suppose there is nothing special about my fandom for the Detroit Lions. In fact, around that same time, I took a stand, shifted my affinity to the then-and-only-briefly-ascendent Cleveland Browns (who, arguably, became the Baltimore Ravens a few years later in 1995). There was that subscription to the tabloid-paginated Browns Digest, with its full-color posters accompanying each issue, and there was that Browns bomber jacket, shiny in a way that was singular and rare in my school’s one long hallway joining together the middle school and high school. The digest and the jacket were splurges, probably two of the most expensive gifts my parents footed in those years, and the jacket especially was such a curious choice in retrospect because I wore it proudly but also took an impactful amount of crap and scrutiny and teasing for wearing it. At the scale of school experiences, which in those days were the main hub of socialization, that Browns jacket galvanized a deeply personal knowledge about community, belonging, testing alternative gravities akin to centripetal outsiderness. I could be making too much of it; I could also be making too little.

All the while, the Lions were still there, patterned results. I kidded that a Lions-Browns superbowl was my dream. And as I’ve grown older, I’ve marveled in moments at how far out of reach that ultimate matchup continues to be (forgiving, of course, the warp-wobble-weirdness of the Browns becoming the Ravens followed by the Browns rebeginning, a classic gone-noting where the gone comes back). As I watched on Saturday night, Saturday, Saturday, I felt disappointment. Dan Campbell is different. Wow, what heart. The disappointment is not for me but instead, somehow, it’s almost but not quite in that orbit of a solastalgia variant, growing up with the bookends of pigskin-headed rowdiness and shambling commercialism, where the s-o-l is “same old Lions.” A high anticipation, high expectations loss carries me back, reminds me of a time when to root for the Lions and to know serial disappointment as a regional phenomenon was also to feel a peninsular place, the ground underfoot, hold something. This is here, where I am from. Winning by contrast is easier, emotionally. But losing and knowing the aftermath of losing, long losing, its accrual too touches feeling even all these years later and from 500 miles away–in such a way that I wanted to note, here, in a low key entry. Carry on and go back to what you were doing and no big deal just a flit.

Coaches and players revolve, leave, turnstile churning, and change is skipping afoot after a 15-2 season with an early exit from the playoffs. This team’s coordinators are going elsewhere to become head coaches (OC Ben Johnson to the Bears is yesterday’s news). Yet this season wasn’t without its rewards. I’ll be pulling for them again next year. Wearing from time to time the Lions sweatshirt Ph. gifted me this past Christmas, knowing what losing knows, knowing its affective rinse as reaching long before me and far around.

91

January 26, 2021 / Derek Mueller

Illustration from Tom Lavoie, Sr., given as a gift to graduating seniors on the 1991 Beal City Aggies (19-6), Class D Michigan State Quarterfinalists.

While I’m already on that 1991 flight path (x-referencing this FB post), here’s one more scraplet of mid-Michigan memorabilia, a drawing by my hs coach’s dad, Tom Lavoie, Sr. He’d created a series of these for seniors that year, I think. My variation, shown here somehow held on for years from place to place, but eventually it succumbed to the dankness of whatever dark basement tuck-away it was temporarily stored in. I took a photo of it before I pitched it (5-6 years ago?) and then just a couple of weeks ago, reflecting on that 90-91 season, I looked up the photo and retraced it in Procreate. I mean, why forget when you can remember? In particular, I remember Tom Lavoie, Sr., as oftentimes nearby, especially for those winter break practices, which he showed up to during the holidays, joining the workout session by arming himself with football blocking pads, and fouling us as we took turns doing power-ups (could be it was only the bigs who endured this; I don’t quite remember). Possibly sounds worse than it was; it added just a little bit extra to the already-demanding exertions of again and again picking up a ball from the floor, willing it to the upper outer corner of the backboard. I assume this kind of thing–being fouled over and over by football pads–explains the band-aids, dazed-headedness, aching elbows and knees, bloody sock, and lost shoe shown here. We were always taught, if you’re gonna foul, then foul (later at Park, Coach English, too, doubled-down on this defensive philosophy: spend your fouls well, wisely; you only get a few of them to give!). Google gave me a phone number, so I tried calling Tom Lavoie, Sr., this morning, left a message of gratitude on the answering machine for the drawing, for caring enough to show up as he did for us–and, too, for the difference made by his son, who died at too young an age (53) in 2011.

Added: Tom Sr. returned my call; we chatted for 30 mins about a lot of it remembering basketball, the drawings he made for players at Beal City and also for the women’s programs at Alpena HS, the former BCHS players he still hears from, and also about how–coincidentally–he graduated from Michigan State Normal School before it was EMU, studying Phys Ed and finishing in Ypsi in 1956. Mentioned, too, the anecdote about how he and Tom (his son, my hs coach) had gone to a Dick Baumgartner shooting camp in Indiana and were astonished to learn that the diameter of the rim is twice the diameter of a basketball, and facing much disbelief about that, Baumgartner would have to climb a ladder and show it to be true (empirical evidence being observable and all)…and how he had to do that same thing when he shared that lesson in later years at Alpena.