All Hail The Lusty Lions

It was the last Sunday of 1957, but despite the season it was an absolutely perfect day to play football. The sun was shining, the air was almost balmy and the seams of Briggs Stadium in Detroit were near to bursting with the 55,263 people who were willing to pay up to $10 apiece to watch their home-town Lions play the Cleveland Browns for the national professional football championship. As these once shunned and unwanted Lions racked up touchdown after touchdown, it seemed that Briggs Stadium could hardly contain the civic joy, but that is getting ahead of the story....

Two days earlier on a cold, blowy midnight, a line of people on Michigan Avenue in downtown Detroit stretched off into the darkness. One man was wrapped in an old multicolored quilt and another had a brown Army blanket draped tastefully over his shoulders. It was a good-natured line, and when a radio announcer asked the man in the quilt if he thought the Lions had a chance to win the following Sunday, the man said at the top of his voice, "We'll kill the Browns." The line cheered and continued to wait patiently to buy tickets to the game....

Governor G. Mennen Williams wired the commissioner of the National Football League and earnestly asked that the Lion-Brown championship game be put on television since it was a sellout. Bell refused (see page 22). Representative Thaddeus Machrowicz, of Detroit, wired the commissioner and pleaded passionately that the game be put on television. Bell refused. A filling station operator spent $200 to have an outsize aerial put on his service station and entertained his customers with the telecast of the game, picked up from 75 miles away; he too watched and didn't sell any gas....

That was Detroit before the Lions entertained the Browns. Like San Francisco the week before, when the Lions played the 49ers for the right to be in the championship game, Detroit was a hysterical city. Quarterback Tobin Rote was bigger than General Motors. Coach George Wilson was more important than the new Fords and Chryslers, and a ticket to the championship game was about as valuable as a Cadillac....

Detroit has always liked professional football. Detroit is a lusty, thriving, vigorous city and it has found a soul mate in the lusty, thriving, vigorous game. This year's Detroit Lions have endeared themselves to Detroit for a number of reasons, some of them logical.

Maybe the biggest reason was the innate American love of the underdog; the Lions fulfilled the role of underdog to a T. They, started the season by losing a coach. Buddy Parker, the moody, intense man who had guided the club to two world championships, announced as the season was about to begin: "I have a situation here I cannot handle. This is the worst team in training camp I have ever seen. The material is all right, but the team is dead. I don't want to get involved in another losing season, so I'm leaving Detroit football. I'm leaving tonight." He said this at a Detroit Lions boosters banquet, then stepped down from the podium and left. So the Lions had one big strike against them, and quite a few football fans figured the second strike followed immediately when the club named George Wilson as head coach to replace Parker.

Wilson was a very pleasant chap. He had played end on the great Chicago Bear teams of the early '40s, but he had never been more than a part-time coach for the Lions. He coached the ends and backs during the football season and then, during the rest of the year, he sold mill supplies and played golf and stuck pretty close to home and his five children. He was a big, dark man, quiet and gentle, and no one knew very much about him. Most people liked him, including the Lion players. But only a few people had any confidence in his ability to handle a head coaching job in the tough National Football League.

The team which had prompted Parker to quit was a rowdy, gay, tough team. It didn't take kindly to the strictures of training camp. It was led and typified by Bobby Layne, a chunky, blond quarterback who was arrested on a charge of drunken driving early in the season and acquitted later because the arresting officer (by then the most unpopular man in Detroit) admitted that Layne's Texas drawl might have sounded like the slurred speech of a man in his cups. The Detroit trainer reacted to this odd bit of judicature by manufacturing a sign which read, "I'm not drunk. I'm just from Texas." The team thought that was very funny, and so did everyone else in Detroit. No one blamed Bobby Layne, because, after all, Layne was the incomparable leader of the Lions, who performed miracles under pressure and who was certainly entitled to a little off-field recreation.

So, going into the season, Detroit's Lions probably held the NFL record for adversity and perversity. But they won three of their first four games, and then, on the heels of crippling injuries, they began to lose. Finally Layne was injured in the next to the last game of the regular season, just when the Lions were moving along again, and everyone—except the Detroit fans—gave up. But Tobin Rote, last Sunday's hero, took over Layne's duties with quiet competence, and the underdog Lions beat the Chicago Bears and the San Francisco 49ers and wound up in the championship game. Layne was out with a broken ankle; and Charlie Ane, maybe the best tackle in the league, was out with a bad knee; and Jim David, a key defensive back, was a doubtful starter; but the Lions were in the championship game anyway. No one conceded them much of a chance except the Detroit fans.

The man in the multicolored quilt who shivered through the long, cold, blowy night in front of the Lion ticket office was right. The Lions murdered the Browns. George Wilson, the quiet man no one knew very well, outcoached Cleveland's Paul Brown, who is regarded by quite a few people in the business as the best coach in football. The crippled Lions battered the healthy, rested Browns into a state of shock in the first quarter and kept them there for the next three. They played with the tough insouciance which is a trademark of this team, and they destroyed the poise of an opponent which had played the whole season with such calm efficiency. The men whom Buddy Parker had deserted in disgust because they could not be handled played brilliant football under the direction of Rote.