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-Hello and welcome to Book Lust.
I'm Nancy Pearl.
My guest today is author Bill Morris,
whose new book The Lions Finally Roar: The Ford Family,
the Detroit Lions, and the Road to Redemption
in the NFL is just out.
Bill, thank you so much for joining us today.
-Nancy, thanks for having me.
This is a thrill and an honor I'll tell you.
-Well, we're all excited here.
You have three football fans,
two of them from Michigan in the room with me,
including me, and now you, all four of us.
So it seemed to me in many ways
that this was a book that you were born to write,
do you think?
-Well, yes, and I guess maybe that's a good point.
It's funny, you know,
I'm mystified to this day about where books come from.
You know, I don't really know the answer to those things.
And, you know, my boyhood, we had season tickets to the Lions
when I was a boy, and my father,
as the readers will learn,
worked for William Clay Ford Sr. for 10 years.
He was his personal executive assistant.
Ford called him my PR guy,
kind of like his valet.
I don't know what, but, you know, it was,
the history is very familiar to me.
I lived at -- I grew up in Detroit.
I was a Lions fan, hardcore when I was a boy,
saw a lot of the stuff that happens in the book.
So and I guess in a sense, maybe I was destined to write it,
although I didn't figure that out
till I was almost 70 years old. -And what made you decide,
was it the change finally in the Lion's fortunes
or the change of leadership, if not ownership?
-Well, that's a kind of an interesting question
because I'll tell you,
to go back to my original statement about
where books come from.
I sat down with my father when he was 73 years old in 1995,
and I was thinking,
well, he's not going to be around much longer,
and I want to get his story down.
So I sat down with him for about three or four days
with a tape recorder
and got him to tell me his story from birth to the present.
Now, a lot of that story, of course,
was involved with his move from Washington D.C.,
where I was born when he was a reporter for The Post,
to Detroit in 1952.
Ford was beefing up its PR operation
and for the 50th anniversary in 1953.
And so my father went to work in this burgeoning company.
Well, in the interviews that I did with him,
he had a lot to say about the Ford family,
Bill Ford in particular,
the drinking, the traveling, the cars, and the Lions.
And my father was there in the room
when Bill Ford bought the team in 1963 on the day
President Kennedy was assassinated.
And I went back to those tapes.
They sat around for 25 years.
And like a lot of American men,
I sort of keep an eye, and you probably do too,
on the Lions and the Tigers, you know,
the teams that you grew up with. I don't follow them religiously,
but I kind of keep an eye on them.
And I started noticing along about 2020, 2021,
that Bill Ford had died in 2014.
His widow, Martha Firestone Ford took over the team,
ran it for six years fairly well,
and then to just about everyone's surprise,
instead of handing the keys to her only son, Bill Jr.,
she gave them to Sheila Ford Hamp, her daughter,
who had been grooming for the job all along
and was very ready to take on the job.
But in her first year,
she hires this new general manager, this new coach,
this new regime, fresh blood, people in Detroit
have heard this story a few hundred thousand times.
And sure enough, they lose their first 10 games.
And it was at that point that I thought,
there's a book here,
you know, I went back and reread the transcripts with my father
from 25 years earlier.
And I thought, now the team has been to three stadiums;
Tiger Stadium, The Silverdome, now they're in Ford Field.
They've had three owners,
they're all named Ford, Bill Ford, Martha, and now Sheila.
They've got this great new coach,
this great new general manager,
and they lost their first 10 games.
And I thought, this is, there's something going on here.
This is a culture of futility.
And I thought my original idea was to write a story about
why organizations fail,
why they're set up to fail year after year after year.
And the Lions are got to be a textbook case of that.
So my original working title was Natural Born Losers.
Which as events happened, I had to abandon and change slightly.
But that was my starting point.
I thought it would be a counterintuitive,
you know, America loves success stories, right?
I thought, I'm going to go against the grain here
and write a story about failure.
Well, it didn't turn out to be that quite that way.
I mean, there was a lot of history of failure in the book,
but the ending was very different.
-Yeah.
You know, in some ways the story of the Lions
parallels this history of Detroit,
and the fact that the Lions in the last couple of years
under Dan Campbell have been successful in the way
that Detroit seems to be coming back.
I grew up in Detroit and I went through high school in Detroit
and then went to the University of Michigan.
But it was a great place to grow up when I was growing up there
and the Tigers were great, and the Reds, you know,
the hockey team with the Red Wings were great,
but, you know, and so now I see Detroit, I mean,
in my heart of hearts,
I sort of think, oh, it would be fun to move back to Detroit
and be kind of,
you know, finish the rest of my life there
as I started it there.
But in a funny way, in a strange way,
you write about the curse on the Lions,
that quarterback Bobby Layne pronounced
when he was unceremoniously traded.
Would you talk about that?
And -- -That was 1958, right?
The year after they had won their last championship in 1957.
And people in Detroit were shocked when they traded him,
and they were outraged.
And it's an old Detroit, you know,
sort of an urban legend I discovered,
which I didn't really know much about
until I started researching the book.
He's on his way out the door to move to Pittsburgh,
he says this team's not going to win for another 50 years.
Well, he turned out it was a little conservative numbers,
but, you know, and then Bill Ford buys the team
and the vote goes through on the day
John Kennedy gets assassinated.
And I quote Bill Ford saying years later,
you know, there was something,
there was a stigma about that day, you know,
things that happened on that day, November 22, 1963,
when he paid $6 million, an unheard-of sum of money
for a professional sports team in America for the Lions.
And he said there was a stigma.
Well, you know, curse, stigma, whatever it was,
there was a cloud over that team for years and years and years.
I don't think it was magic. I think it was bad management.
But to go back to your point about Dan Campbell,
he's an interesting case
because not only is he a complete maniac,
and, you know, he's talking about biting off kneecaps
at his inaugural press conference.
He played for the Lions in his last playing season in the 2008
when they lost all 16 games.
And he mentioned that at his introductory press conference.
He says, I know what this city's been through,
they've been kicked around,
they've been knocked down,
and this team's going to get knocked down,
but we're going to get back up and on our way up,
we're going to bite off your kneecaps.
Well, that proof prophetic in its own way,
because indeed he did turn the team around,
but he understands the history as well as anyone.
He lived it, he played it, and he turned out to be, I think,
a pretty smart choice for a head coach.
-Yeah, you know,
I thought that your book was really the sort of book
that could, in a way be written about every sports team
that has come to represent a city
because what you find in this book
is it's really not just for sports fans.
I mean, I think your original inclination
or thought about writing a book about the way
companies fail and how that happens,
I mean, it was really not for a lack of talent
that the Lions had.
It was a lack of ownership coming in at the right moments,
or making the right decisions and then bad drafts.
And it could, you know, isn't it what -- here's my thought,
you should just like, get a series going.
Maybe you could do Kansas City next, and you know --
-I'm glad to hear you say that it's not just about football,
because I didn't write a football book.
-Right.
-I wanted to write a book about Detroit
and the people of Detroit and the history of Detroit.
And as you know, you grew up there, we grew up there.
It's a fascinating place.
It is really one
of the most interesting places I've ever been.
And I've been around the world a little bit.
And the history of Detroit is just,
you know, it's dark, it's uplifting, it's exciting,
it's innovative, it's scary, it's ugly, it's everything.
And like I was reading a book the other day.
It says, once you start to understand Detroit,
you start to understand America because Philip Levine,
the great poet laureate a Detroit guy,
as you know, I'm sure, you know,
I dedicate the book to the people of Detroit,
and I paraphrase a quote of his, I said,
for the people of Detroit
who survive everything America can dish out,
and that's what Philip Levine had to say
about his fellow Detroiters.
And I think that's beautiful because that's, to this day,
that's what the city is all about.
And I wanted to get that in the book.
I didn't want this to just be about football.
Although it is a lot about football, it's about cars,
it's about music, it's about Motown, it's about the MC5,
and the Grande Ballroom, and the Flame Show Bar and,
you know, Walter O.
Briggs and racism and Coleman Young and the Rebellion of '67,
the Tigers of '60.
I wanted to get all of that in the book.
Maybe that's too much. I don't know, but I tried.
-No, I think you absolutely did.
And even though I've been a fan of the Lions
and, you know, follow everything that's happening in Detroit
from afar,
though I haven't lived there for, I don't know, 50 years,
it still feels like home to me.
And there was so much in your book
that I hadn't thought of for so long.
You know, I hadn't thought of the time
when the Motown headquarters left Detroit to move
to Los Angeles, right?
And what a sort of stab in the heart that was.
And one of the things that Bill Ford did right,
I think was he kept the Lions,
he didn't move west like so many of those, you know,
Midwestern teams did, or St. Louis teams did.
-Oh, yeah.
You know, I'm glad you bring that up, Nancy,
because, you know, the premise of the book
and a lot of the book people generally agree
that the source of the Lion's perennial problems
was the fact that Bill Ford was not only too loyal to people,
but he was too loyal to the wrong people.
-Yeah.
-And my theory is that that came from his sort of
coddled upbringing is, you know, he was,
the money was new in the family.
Henry didn't get rich, the old man, until 1906.
Bill was born in 1925.
That money was less than two decades old when he was born.
But he grew up in,
I went through the Edsel and Eleanor Ford house there
on Lake Shore Drive, and he grew up in incredible opulence.
And my premise going into the book
was that this kind of upbringing
made him constitutionally incapable
of running a hard-nosed business operation.
He operated on whether he liked somebody,
he operated on whether or not,
you know, somebody did him a favor,
whether he felt comfortable,
whether he was sure the person wasn't going to
be asking for favors.
And he wound up being loyal to some really, really bad people,
bad managers for a really long time.
I was watching a game at a bar in New York.
It was a Monday night football game against the Raiders.
And I had an epiphany while I was watching the game.
This was during the last season.
It's a Monday night game, and it says the Las Vegas Raiders.
And I thought, wait a minute, the Raiders are from Oakland.
And I, you know, I'd been following football from afar,
I didn't realize until I did the research,
they'd left Oakland, they went to L.A.,
they came back to Oakland, then they moved to Las Vegas.
Al Davis was like playing this team against,
you know, playing cities off of one another.
I started doing research into other self-made men
who ran football teams who were really kind of monstrous people.
James Irsay in Indianapolis.
His father moved the Colts on the cover of darkness.
And then the real champion is Dan Snyder,
who recently was thrown out as owner
of the Washington Commanders. So I wanted to say Redskins,
but I caught myself but -- -Washington football.
-But I realized that, you know, it's not just,
you know, people who inherit money
who are bad at running things.
Some of them are quite good, actually.
It's the individual.
And simply by being a self-made multimillionaire,
that doesn't mean you're going to be good
at what you do either,
or good at running the football team.
In fact, you could be quite bad. -Right.
So but his brother, his older brother, Henry Ford II,
had no trouble making decisions, right?
I mean, you know, so there's that whole second son, I mean,
if you want to go into psychoanalyze the whole,
the family, I mean, that dynamic.
-Well, I think that the birth order of the boys
had a whole lot to do with the way their lives played out.
I mean, Henry II was the eldest,
Benson was a sort of a feckless middle brother,
and then a sister, and then Bill was the baby.
And the book,
one of the episodes that my father was involved in
was the Lincoln, the Continental Mark II,
which was Bill Ford's dream car. He conceived the car.
It was a homage to his father, Edsel.
My father ran the promotional campaign that unrolled that,
unveiled that car, and it was Bill Ford's dream.
And he had, they built a factory,
he persuaded him to build a new factory.
It was, I think it's the most beautiful car
Ford Motor Company ever built.
A real testament to Bill Ford's sense of style.
And Henry killed that car dead after two years.
They had a meeting, Robert McNamara said,
the numbers don't add up, you know, Mr. Bean Counter,
who was about to give us the Vietnam War,
they killed that car and after just two years,
and Bill Ford started drinking, and he started,
he bought into the syndicate that owned the Lions.
And the Lions became his way of dealing with his sibling war
that he had with Henry, where the standing was,
there's only room for one Ford at Ford Motor Company.
It was always that way.
Henry drove his son Edsel to an early grave
because he couldn't stand the thought of anybody,
you know, usurping his authority.
Henry II did the same thing to Benson and Bill,
and both of them started drinking heavily.
Bill, to his credit, stopped drinking in about 1965,
never drank again,
joined AA and, you know, lived a rich 40-year life.
But I don't think it's doing too much psychoanalysis
to say that the birth order
and the rivalries between those brothers
was a very big part in not only the family dynamics,
but the history of the Ford Motor Company
and the Detroit Lions and the city of Detroit.
-Right. Right.
So Detroit --
Matt Millen was promoted by Bill Ford to be the general manager,
and proved to be, I think, generally accepted one
of the least successful general managers.
But Detroit had, they had some great players.
They had Barry Sanders and I spent some years in Stillwater,
Oklahoma, and we would go to the football games
when Barry Sanders and Thurman Thomas, a Hall of Fame,
you know, were in the same backfield.
So that was really, you know, an exciting time for us.
But they, in many ways, and I think you talk about this,
although maybe not in these terms,
I mean, two great players from the Lions
retired early because of disappointment.
I mean, it wasn't that they were injured.
It just was --
-You're talking about Calvin Johnson; I think?
-Yeah, Calvin Johnson and Barry Sanders.
-Right.
And, you know, talking about the players,
I remember as a boy, some of the players were so great.
Joe Schmidt, Lem Barney, Mel Farr, you know,
the Lions hired a guy named Will Robinson, a Black scout.
And he scoured the back roads of the South and started,
the Lions were aggressively drafting Black players.
They weren't pioneers in racial integration,
but they drafted some great,
great Black players in the 1960s.
And then, like you say, you know,
Charlie Sanders, Calvin Johnson, Matthew Stafford,
who wanted to get out
and, you know, asked to be traded and was traded
and won a Super Bowl as soon
as he was traded to the Los Angeles Rams.
But there's no doubt about the fact that they had great,
great players over the years.
And, you know, Calvin Johnson,
when he walked away, he said, you know,
I look around and we've got great people in positions.
Me and Ndamukong Suh, I can't pronounce his name,
Matthew Stafford, you got me but we don't have a team.
We've got some great individuals,
but we've never had a team.
And that's one of the great lessons of the Lions,
is that nobody ever figured out
how to make them play as a team until now.
I mean, I think that in the course of writing this book,
I witnessed, I went to my only game at Ford Field last year,
saw them beat Carolina.
I watched, you know, the vibe in that stadium is incredible.
I mean, it's really an electric place,
and I think it's gotten more and more so as the course,
you know, they won two playoff games there.
Interestingly, Sheila Hamp, and she likes to be called Hamp.
She doesn't even want a Ford name in there.
Sheila Hamp doubled the number of playoff
wins her parents managed in 56 years.
-Right.
-In just four years,
she doubled their total from 56 years.
So she's doing something right.
And in a way she's sort of the,
I don't know the heroine of the book.
But she's certainly the pivot that, you know,
her sticking with those guys when they were having
tough times their first year and a half.
She was ice cold, steely, I'm not,
you know, I believe in these guys.
And I think that the reason she believed in them
was because she believes in herself.
And I think that is really the key to the story.
-So Bill, you've written several books about Detroit,
Motor City, Motor City Burning.
You mentioned earlier in our discussion
that you were still reading about Detroit.
What's next? What's coming up next?
-Well, I was afraid you were going to ask me that,
because I don't know the answer, but I got a few candidates.
Motor City Burning is a story
that I think is kind of not finished,
you know, it took place during the summers of
'67 and 1968 during the fiery summer of '67.
And then of course, the Tigers winning in '68.
And I'd like to revisit that story.
I mean, the Frank Doyle, the cop, Willie Bledsoe,
the young Black guy who gets away and, you know, gets away.
He doesn't get away with murder, but he escapes a bad situation.
I think that there's something there.
I want to go back
and maybe move that story into the Coleman Young years
or something like that.
Another idea, I was always, as a boy,
I was fascinated by the fact that William Clay Ford,
heirs to a huge auto fortune,
married Martha Firestone,
heirs to a huge tire fortune from Akron, Ohio.
And I've always thought that that marriage was
interesting in a way.
And then when I was researching this new book,
The Lions Finally Roar,
I come to find out that the playing surface at Ford Field
has rubber crumbs in it.
I noticed when the players hit the field,
there's like a little explosion.
It looks like smoke, that's rubber crumbs.
And they did it with all Firestone,
recycled Firestone tires.
And then I started thinking about rubber.
And I think rubber would be a fascinating story.
I mean, not only in football fields,
but the history of the Firestone's in Liberia.
I've been reading about Henry Ford and Fordlandia
down in Brazil, you know, it's just the story of rubber.
And then I started thinking,
well, you know, there's a new rubber now.
Now it's the search for precious metals
and the exploitation of the planet and the workers,
it's going to be just as bad.
They're looking, you know,
they're looking for lithium and under in South America,
they're going to start mining the Pacific Ocean floor.
So that's an idea, you know,
the new rubber, you know, something about.
And that's because it's going to
power electric vehicles and batteries.
And that's the new technology that we have to feed.
So that's a good idea.
I don't know, I got a few other things going on,
but maybe the Birwood Wall in Detroit,
which you may know about, story about Walls is another one.
So these are all sort of incoherent ideas, but, we'll --
-Akron is the setting for the first sit down
strike in the tire industry.
And there was a novel called Industrial Valley
by McKenney, Ruth McKenney.
Ruth McKenney, I guess her name is.
Which I believe is still in print or has been reissued,
but it's a great story of that --
-I'll look that up. That's great.
-Yeah. Yeah.
I think that would be a book that you would be interested in,
because it fits in with so much of what you're talking about.
And I've always wanted somebody to write a novel
or a book of about the young men from Detroit,
because there were many of them
who went to fight in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade
of the Spanish Civil War.
And because there isn't, you know,
I mean, they're mentioned in other nonfiction or fiction,
but I think someone who has an interest in Detroit history
would find that fascinating.
-Well, indeed, you and I need to talk some more, Nancy,
because you got some good ideas.
Let's keep talking after this is over, okay?
-Absolutely. Let's do it.
All right, Bill, thank you so much for coming on the show
and good luck with the book. I enjoyed every minute of it
and I can't wait for this season with the Lions.
-Me neither. Thank you, Nancy.
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