It was only a matter of time.
Whenever Detroit goes through some kind of rough patch, an intrepid journalist looks for a successful local sports team and explains how that team is lifting our weary spirits.
See, back in 1967 there was a riot. The next year, the Tigers won the World Series and healed all our racial wounds with their gritty ballpark heroics. Ever since then, all Detroit problems have been eased by the balm of professional sports.
Now Reuters has decided the Tigers will give us the will to continue in the face of bankruptcy.
"We definitely had a good influence on the people, having something positive to talk about," Al Kaline, a member of the 1968 team and a baseball Hall of Famer, said in an interview. "If you went to the grocery shop, you'd talk about the Tigers instead of the riots. If you'd go to the barbershop you'd talk about the Tigers instead of the riots."
Today, 45 years later, Detroit may again appeal to the Tigers or one of Detroit's three other major professional sports teams: the NFL's Lions, NBA's Pistons and NHL's Red Wings. This time, it will be to renew pride in a city demoralized after filing the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history.
That all sounds nice and you can't fault Al Kaline or any other professional athlete for giving the standard happy to help anyway we could answer to these periodic inquiries about weary spirits, but the cold truth is the 1968 Tigers didn't really ease the tension that exploded at the corner of 12th and Clairmont in July 1967. The city's population continued to decline, the region became increasingly segregated, and race is a factor in virtually every controversial issue in metro Detroit.
And, contrary to what Sports Illustrated wanted you to believe, the 2009 Tigers' "bold stand" with its fans during the auto bankruptcy did little to save the Big Three. Or make up for the generation of auto workers making $14/hour.
If you're a Detroit cop patrolling the streets in an aging, rickety sled of a police cruiser or a retiree wondering how much of that $1,900/month pension will be cut or a resident trying to get your block's streetlight fixed, Max Scherzer and Torii Hunter and Miguel Cabrera aren't going to make it better.
That's OK because Detroit baseball fans aren't asking their team to do anything more than play championship-caliber baseball for the sake of championship-caliber baseball.
Detroiters don't lack for pride in their hometown nor do they need a professional sports team to inspire them to get their act together. If only Detroit's problems were that simple!
This city requires solutions that are a little more concrete. In baseball terms, Detroit (the city, not the team) doesn't need a spunky clubhouse guy. It needs one of those proverbial power-hitting center fielders and a couple frontline starters.
The whole thing is silly and condescending on its face. No one ever writes about the A's or Orioles or Cardinals lifting the spirits of those gritty, blue-collar, [adjective] towns. Only Detroit receives such patronizing attention. Such is life, I suppose.
At the same time, if Reuters or anyone else wants to write about Detroit's connection to its sports team, they should understand what they're writing about.
The teams and the city's principal industry, car making, have close connections. William Clay Ford Sr., grandson of Henry Ford, owns the Lions. The Pistons are named for a key component in an automotive engine. The Red Wings logo features wings mounted on a car wheel.
1. After a half-century of William Clay Ford-ownership and but a single playoff win (plus the reigns of Russ Thomas, Wayne Fontes, and Matt Millen) there's not much affinity among Detroit sports fans for old man Ford. No one around here cares about his lineage. We're more interested in why he couldn't keep Barry Sanders from retiring.
2. The Pistons were named "for a key component in an automotive engine" back when they played in Fort Wayne, IN. Their first owner, Fred Zollner, named them after his Indiana supplier, Zollner Pistons. The team didn't move to Detroit until 1957, 16 years after they were founded. There's is a geographically appropriate nickname, but it's no less random than the Los Angeles Lakers or Utah Jazz.
3. The Red Wings nickname actually traces its heritage to something called the Montreal Amateur Athletic Association. The MAAA's hockey team, of which owner James Norris had been a member, was known as the Winger Wheelers. When Norris bought the then-Detroit Falcons in 1932, he changed the team's name and adopted a version of the Winged Wheelers logo.
So, yeah. Detroit. Sports. Something. The national media needs to let this one go.
