On the Privilege of Losing: Notes of a Detroit Lions Fan
Consider the synonyms of loser, that two-syllable acidic stain on the tongue that we’re told is a label to avoid: also-ran, underdog, deadbeat, defeated, dud, failure, flop, has-been, disadvantaged, down-and-outer, flunked, underprivileged.
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I won’t bore you with anecdotes on the myriad little losses I’ve experienced in my life—spelling bees, baseball tournaments, hands of blackjack, games of darts, etc.—but rather I’ll cut to the heart of the matter and the impetus of this essay. I am a Detroit Lions fan. I’m talking more than just a flip-on-the-game-right-quick-oh-they’re-losing-guess-I’ll-turn-it-off-and-try-again-next-Sunday fan. I am, admittedly, too emotionally and temporally invested in a professional football team that continues to find new ways to lose.
Fortunately, I was born into the habit of losing. Never in my time as a Lions fan have I ever been deceived by the illusion of consistent winning. In my first year on this earth, and my first season as a de facto Lions fan—1997—the Lions went 9-7 and made the playoffs. Not bad. But then they of course lost in the Wild Card round. After that 1997 playoff run, the losses came and they’ve yet to show any sign of leaving.
5-11. 8-8. 9-7. 2-14. 3-13. 5-11. 6-10. 5-11. 3-13. 7-9. And then the infamous 0-16 2008 season. I’ll stop listing season records here. I think you get the point.
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It was losing that brought the Lions to Detroit, but it wasn’t football games they lost.
Founded in 1928, the Portsmouth Spartans were a successful football team. In their short professional tenure, they held a record of 28-16-7. The Spartans’ problem, however, was off the field. Timing. The Spartans were founded shortly before Black Tuesday and the start of the Great Depression that left America mired in a ten-year economic abyss. Undoubtedly an inauspicious time to start a professional football team in southern Ohio.
Portsmouth, Ohio, was a small town. Like most of America, Portsmouth residents were harshly affected by the Depression, and the town’s football team felt the effects. Fans loved and supported the Spartans, there was no doubt about that, but they couldn’t afford tickets to the games. Star running back Dutch Clark said about the fans, “Hell, we’d get 4,000 or 5,000 people out to watch practice and at game time we’d be lucky if we had 2,000.”
As a result, the team went deeper into debt as the Depression worsened in the early 1930s. The Spartans’ financial situation became so bleak that players were forced to take shares of stock in the team in lieu of their usual salary. There was no money, not for the players, coaches, or front office. A change needed to be made. Enter George A. Richards.
Richards, owner of the Detroit radio station WJR, bought the Portsmouth Spartans for a price reported to have been between $15,000 and $16,500. The new owner wasted no time in his revamping of the team. He moved the Spartans to Detroit, Michigan, and renamed them the Lions, with the goal of building the “king of the NFL.” The Lions played their first game in 1934, and they’ve remained in Detroit ever since.
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Let’s take history’s most humiliating losses and examine them.
Crassus led 43,000 legionnaires in an attack on the Pathian Empire. The marauding legionnaires were heavily fatigued and famished, but Crassus ordered them to continue their campaign in an attempt to catch the Parthians off-guard in Mesopotamia. Crassus and his crew of 43,000 were subsequently met with a bulwark of Parthian horse archers and armed horsemen. Drowning in arrows, the Roman army scattered and fled for their lives. Many were captured and killed in the fracas, including Crassus who was beheaded by his captors.
But how does this loss compare to leading 20-17 in the fourth quarter of a playoff game against the Dallas Cowboys only for Cowboys linebacker Anthony Hitchens to get away with an egregious pass interference on Brandon Pettigrew—the flag was thrown, then picked up!—and don’t forget Dez Bryant running onto the field without a helmet on—also not penalized—and the culmination of it all being a late-game Tony Romo touchdown pass to Terrance Williams and a 24-20 loss for the Lions, ultimately ending their season in appropriate hapless fashion.
In 1939, Stalin thought he could bully his smaller neighbor Finland. He sent the Red Army into an unforgiving Finnish winter with a surplus of manpower and firepower. But it didn’t matter what the Soviets brought with them. The Finnish Army was ready. Russian troops were systematically sniped as they trudged through the snow on their way to meet their Finnish foes. These casualties, however, only emboldened Stalin. He ordered more troops to Finland, and they were promptly shot and killed. By the end, the Red Army suffered three times as many casualties as Finland.
But how does this loss compare to K.J. Wright’s blatant and unpenalized breaking of NFL rule 12.1.8—A player may not bat or punch: (a) a loose ball (in field of play) toward opponent's goal line; (b) a loose ball (that has touched the ground) in any direction, if it is in either end zone; (c) a backward pass in flight may not be batted forward by an offensive player—as he swatted the football out of the back of the end zone to stultify a late fourth quarter drive by the Lions, ultimately putting a bow on a 13-10 loss to the Seattle Seahawks on Monday Night Football.
And how could any of these losses compare to the most emblematic loss in recent Detroit Lions history: the Miracle in Motown. The Lions were up 23-21 on the Packers when Aaron Rodgers was stuffed into the Ford Field turf as time expired, therefore solidifying a Lions victory. But then the flag came. A phantom facemask call on Devon Taylor gave Aaron Rodgers and the Packers fifteen yards and a free play. Starting on the Packers’ thirty-nine-yard line, Rodgers took the snap, stepped back, let his receivers air out, scrambled from defenders, and heaved the ball to the end zone. The ball floated in the air, high enough to almost hit the rafters, and it landed in the hands of Packers tight end Richard Rodgers II for a Green Bay touchdown, ultimately sealing a 27-23 Lions loss. Announcer Jim Nantz called it “Miracle in Motown.” It won the award for Best Play at the 2016 ESPY Awards. It is still the longest game-winning Hail Mary play in NFL history.
Coincidentally, all three of these aforementioned Lions’ losses happened in the calendar year 2015. Just another year for the Detroit Lions and their fans. Just another year of desensitized and blasé losing.
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Sports fans especially don’t take well to losing. Go to YouTube and search “sports fan meltdown” and you’ll get pages and pages of major meltdowns filmed in portrait mode in living rooms across the world. The top search result is a video titled “NFL Angry Fans Compilation,” uploaded by user Kilo Goodwin. It has over 1.6 million views. In the video, fans of six different NFL teams are seen having meltdowns after big losses. And with the exception of the Cleveland Browns, all the teams featured have had relative success recently. Seattle Seahawks, Denver Broncos, San Francisco 49ers, Pittsburgh Steelers, and the Carolina Panthers.
It’s as if success—winning—heightens the fall and increases the pain. The fall doesn’t hurt so bad when it’s only a couple of inches, as any experienced loser would know. The invisible culprit behind all these meltdowns, it seems, is the misguided belief in the certitude of victory—something that can only occur after a habit of winning more than losing has been established.
Perhaps the most notorious instance of a fan meltdown is Harvey Updyke. Updyke was a lifelong Alabama Crimson Tide Fan who, after an Alabama loss to Auburn in the 2010 Iron Bowl, took matters into his own destructive hands. He drove thirty miles to Toomer’s Corner, a historic landmark on Auburn’s campus, and poisoned the two iconic oak trees with Spike 80DF herbicide. Updyke felt no remorse, and he even went as far as calling into a sports radio talk show to gloat about the act. When asked by host Paul Finebaum if it was a crime to poison a tree, Updyke said, “Do you think I care?” He ended his call with, “Roll damn Tide!” and shortly after the trees died.
Rivalries can play a role in these behaviors, sure, but the Lions are (allegedly) rivals with the Green Bay Packers, and one would be hard-pressed to see anything remotely close to this behavior after the Lions receive their two losses from the Packers each year.Take the previously mentioned Miracle in Motown. There’s plenty of YouTube videos showing the live reaction from the stands in Ford Field. Packers fans raucously cheer and make a scene. Lions fans silently march out of the stadium, stoically distant from a meltdown, desensitized to it all. Nobody wearing Honolulu blue felt deceived or shorted. They got what they paid for when they were born into the inculcated cycle of losing that is being a Detroit Lions fan.
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It happens almost every sports season, but it remains hilarious to watch from an unempathetic perspective. Good teams go bad. Winners lose. As I write this, two perennial winners are experiencing “failing” seasons in the NFL. The New England Patriots are 3-4 and the Pittsburgh Steelers are 3-3. Both teams have six Super Bowl titles, their fans have become accustomed to winning, and now the sky is falling.
To be .500 would be a hallucination. To even have a win would be surreal (Lions are 0-7 as I write this). Yet I don’t need a winning record or a win, I’ve realized. A win is as futile as the penny I get back in change at the gas station. It will do nothing; I’ll eventually forget about it. And the Lions have developed a habit of forcing their fans to give that win-penny back with late-game blunders, blown calls, and all the other vagaries of being a Lions fan.
Consider the synonyms of Lions fan, that three-syllable acidic stain on the tongue that we’re told is a label to avoid: also-ran, underdog, deadbeat, defeated, dud, failure, flop, has-been, disadvantaged, down-and-outer, flunked, loser.
We are losers, and we are better people for it. We have no illusions of supremacy or entitlement. We take what is thrown at us and we handle it with the grace and solemnity of a Stoic. We don’t whine or whimper. We don’t smash televisions or poison nature. We don’t even raise our voices. We simply move on having accepted defeat, as we’ve had the privilege of experiencing it so often, and we go on with our lives.
Beck says in his 1994 single “Loser,” “I’m a loser, baby, so why don’t you kill me?” But I don’t think us losers can be killed. Like Achilles, we’ve been dipped in a river of immortality. Our river flows of shortcomings and failures, and our immortality is expectational. Our heel, and the only way we can succumb to expectational death, is the deception of winning. So we keep losing, and we remain impervious.
RILEY WINCHESTER is a writer from Michigan. He will always be a Lions fan.