In Detroit, Tradition Takes a Hike

Annual Thanksgiving Football Game Offers Little Joy for Troubled City

DETROIT -- Andy Winnie had it all worked out. Thanksgiving dinner would be moved to Friday, so the family could make its annual pilgrimage to Thursday's Detroit Lions game.

Three weeks ago, Winnie punted. His heart wasn't in it. Not to watch these 0-11 Lions, not this year.

"It's just hard, with all the things going on in life, to watch the Lions be so pitiful," said Winnie, an owner of an advertising agency. "I'm a season ticket holder and I can't even give away my tickets. You need tickets to the game?"

It is hard to imagine, without the arrival of locusts, a city having a worse year. The economy is in a tailspin, the former mayor is in jail and the auto executives are a punch line because they went to Congress to plead poverty and arrived aboard separate private jets.

Retired laborer Bob Holmes said over a beer on an afternoon raw with sleet, "There isn't any upbeat to be had."

Certainly not at Ford Field, where the lowly Lions of the National Football League offer their fans scant refuge from the economic storm. More metaphor than football team, the squad has been suffering so long that even some Detroiters are saying it is time to let the Thanksgiving day game be played somewhere else.

Once, the sentiment would have been sacrilege. What sports-minded citizen doesn't remember being a kid and knowing the Lions were playing the Packers, the Bears, the Vikings, while the turkey was in the oven? Whatever the outcome, it felt like a contest.

"To be honest with you, they deserve to get pulled" from playing on Thanksgiving, said Ford dealer Buzzy Holzer, who once sold cars to players on the team and used to pay $10,000 a year for four season tickets on the club level. "This year, I boycotted the Lions and I'm so glad. I've got tickets for Thursday's game and I'm debating whether to go."

His calculations are not helped by the fact that the Lions' guest is the Tennessee Titans, who enter the game with a 10-1 record, tops in the American Football Conference.

The way some people talk about football and the economy in the same breath, it can be hard to know which one they're referring to.

Is it the team that has lost 18 of its last 19 games and has won just one playoff game since 1957? Or is it the city that is hemorrhaging jobs and hope as its manufacturing core splinters?

"It's like there's a black cloud over their heads. Whatever they say, it doesn't seem to work," said Dave Stronski, a bartender at Nemo's, across the street from half-demolished Tiger Stadium in the Corktown neighborhood, where the Lions also played for 36 years. He was talking about the Lions.