Lions, and their ghosts, anticipate the unthinkable

Detroit will play in its first Super Bowl if it can win in San Francisco.

Alex Karras

This one’s for Bobby Layne, whom the Detroit Lions traded to Pittsburgh in 1958. This is the same Layne who was pulled for drunk driving the year before and convinced the judge that the cop mistook his Texas accent for alcoholic babble. It’s also the same Layne who said, “If I’d known I’d live this long, I’d have taken better care of myself.” When the trade came down, Layne was so miffed that he proclaimed that the Lions wouldn’t win anything for 50 years. As it turned out he was an optimist.

This one’s for Carl Brettschneider, the brawling linebacker. The Lions had a brawl with the Bears one day and it wasn’t hard to find the vortex, since all 11 Bears were going after Brettschneider. He was known as “The Badger” but developed a practical-joking persona called “The Creeper.” When author George Plimpton spent the 1965 exhibition season with the Lions as a moonlighting quarterback, he received a blood-stained dagger with a note that read, “George, you are going to get your ass knocked off today: The Badger and his friends.”

This one’s for Barry Sanders, the Lions’ alltime running back, who quit after 10 years, at the peak of his powers, because the violence of the game and the futility of the Lions had gotten to him.

And for Calvin Johnson, the Lions’ alltime receiver and still the recordholder for single-season receiving yards, who left after nine years for roughly the same reasons. The Lions eventually honored him, but first they asked for $1.8 million of his signing bonus because he retired early.

And for Matthew Stafford, the Lions’ alltime passer, who took spiritual and physical beatings for 12 years until he finally asked out and was traded to the Rams, where he won a Super Bowl in his first try.

If the Lions win at San Francisco Sunday, they will play in the NFL’s 58th Super Bowl. It will  be their first. It would be their first championship of any kind since 1957, when they bullied Cleveland, 59-14, in the title game, the week after they overcame a 27-7 deficit and beat the 49ers on the road, 31-27, in the Western Conference championship. Even then they had trouble gleaning respect. Their coach, Buddy Parker, resigned at a boosters’ club luncheon the week before the season opener, because he saw no hope.

There was a time when the Lions were kings. They won NFL titles in 1952 and 1953. Doak Walker, another legend of Highland Park High like Layne and Stafford, quit after six years because he’d fulfilled all his dreams. The Lions were among the Packers’ fiercest rivals in the early 60s and, in a memorable, muddy Thanksgiving Day in Briggs Stadium, humiliated Green Bay’s prized offensive line, sacked Bart Starr over 10 times (sacks weren’t precisely calculated in those days) and won 26-14.

But as the decades droned on, and as the Tigers, Pistons and Red Wings all had their parades, the Lions kept honoring Layne’s promise. They got to the NFC Championship Game in 1991 but lost to Washington. They made the playoffs eight times between then and now, and it’s not like they shanked every draft. They picked Lomas Brown, Keith Dorney, Al Baker, Herman Moore, William White. They got good mileage from Billy Sims, Roy Williams, Mike Williams, Luther Elliss, Benny Blades and many others. But until Stafford they never got the quarterback right. As former coach Wayne Fontes told Sanders in the Amazon Prime documentary “Bye Bye Barry,” the Lions had chances to sign Joe Montana and Warren Moon and thought both were too old.

Sheila Ford Hamp, daughter of previous owner William Clay Ford and the beneficiary of the Ford and Firestone estates, had studied all that futility and had her own plan. She hired general manager Brad Holmes, who had worked in the Rams’ front office and knew Jared Goff would be the right quarterback for whom to trade Stafford, and Dan Campbell, who had never even been a coordinator and looked more like a MMA heavyweight. So what? Campbell knew the atmospherics had to be right before the team could win. He sought out former NFL players for his staff, found offensive coordinator Ben Johnson, kept taking fourth-down dares, and generally acted like a winner. Walk only follows talk if the talent is there, and the Lions had somehow assembled a top offensive line and a bevy of playmakers. But for once they had an identity, and a refusal to recognize history.

So this one’s for Joe Schmidt, the Hall of Fame linebacker who was carried off the field after that ‘57 championship. And it’s for Dick (Night Train) Lane, who once picked off 14 passes in a 12-game regular season, after he stepped onto the Rams’ practice field as a cold-call Army veteran, bringing a vicious elbow with him and a honing device for footballs.

But mainly it’s for Alex Karras.

Karras was too big a man for one life. He is known mainly for being Mongo, the terrorizer of Rock Ridge in “Blazing Saddles” who punched out a horse and, in a moment of reflection, said, “Mongo only pawn in game of life.” He also was sensational as James Garner’s sidekick in Victor/Victoria, and as George Zaharias in a TV movie about Babe Didrikson, who was played by Susan Clark, who became Karras’ wife.

But he was also a fearsome defensive tackle, known as the Mad Duck for the way he would dance his way between blockers to find quarterbacks. He and Roger Brown  were Starr’s main assailants on that Thanksgiving Day, but there was another day in which a Packers’ rookie told reporters that he wasn’t afraid to block Karras because he was old and didn’t have the same moves. Karras so thoroughly tortured the kid that Vince Lombardi had to remove him from the game, at which point Karras yelled, “How do you like those moves, Ass Face?”

Karras had a keen sense of grievance, too. He groused that he was putting his health on the line “for pennies,” and when he acquired part of the Lindell A.C., a institutional Detroit watering hole that was colloquially known as the Bay Of Pigs, the NFL went on full alert. Karras was suspended for a year for suborning and participating in gambling. When he came back, he went to the 50 yard line for the coin flip, and when informed of the heads-or-tails options, he shook his head. “I’m not permitted to gamble,” he said.

Karras also had a short but amusing turn as the partner of Howard Cosell and Frank Gifford. One night, the bald-headed Otis Sistrunk, of the Raiders, took off his helmet, and steam began rising. “He’s from the University of Mars,” Karras said.

Karras played at Iowa, helped the Hawkeyes win a Rose Bowl, and finished second in Heisman Trophy balloting. He also claimed he took a pay cut when he went from Iowa to the Lions, and said he was “25 years away” from ever getting a degree.

In Plimpton’s book “Paper Lion,” Karras’ teammates would gather around him the night before games to hear his truly startling improvisational riffs, usually right before he would throw up from nerves. He recalled his days of working for both Adolf Hitler and George Washington in previous life, said Eva Braun was actually his sister, and said that Herman Goering was known to all as “Bavaria Fats.”

Karras also said Washington, as a boy, felt he had to chop down the cherry tree because it was full of Dutch Elm disease, and he couldn’t explain it properly to his dad because of his false teeth. “When he spoke he did this clacking, or maybe a whistle, a high whistle,” Karras explained. So Washington’s dad “took a switch” to George and “beat him half-crazy.”

The Hall of Fame welcomed Karras in 2020, eight years after he passed away. Thus we were deprived of a classic acceptance speech. A win on Sunday will test the vocabulary of anyone in Detroit who lived through most or part of the Lions’ 90 years. So this one’s for the few who could envision that possibility. But it’s really for the multitudes who couldn’t.