Not that long ago, pizza baron Mike Ilitch owned both the Detroit Tigers and the Detroit Red Wings. The former didn't win a World Series under his watch, but at least they were competitive for a number of years. The latter indeed won a few Stanley Cups.
And then he died. The kids took over. Since then, the Tigers have totally gone in the tank, shedding whatever talent they could, and are in ground zero rebuild mode.
The Wings long streak of playoff appearances came to a screeching halt. And they look like they're going to get even worse before they ever get better.
Once upon a time, one Bill Davidson built a brand new state of the art arena (the Palace) for the Detroit Pistons out of his own money. No gouging the taxpayers. Imagine that. And he put it in a spot easily accessible to major roads, but out of the way, so as not to throw people out of their homes via the dreaded "eminent domain" law that is so often abused by billionaires and the like.
And the Detroit Pistons flourished. Three NBA titles, and numerous trips to at least the conference finals.
And then he died.
Enter one Tom Gores, a Flint native, but long a west coast guy that made his billions shuffling other people's money around. Old Bill's heiress daughter Karen didn't seem interested in running a pro basketball franchise, so she cashed out and disappeared to live the life of luxury somewhere. Good for her, definitely her choice.
But in the seven years Tom Gores has been running the show, the Pistons have been Gawd-awful. One measly playoff appearance, in which they were unceremoniously swept. And how can they justify giving Lebron-ish max contracts to the likes of Andre Drummond and Blake Griffin? It's absurd, and has crippled them salary cap-wise as to getting more talent.
Sure, they've made the usual noise about bringing in Dwayne Casey as the new head coach, but he was fired by the Toronto Raptors just months ago for heading up a team of underachievers. Does anybody really think he'll be able to whip the rag-tag sorry Pistons into any sort of contenders? Only Tom Gores could come up with this sort of twisted logic.
On the NFL front, the Detroit Lions have been the epitome of punching bags for six decades, all they way back to the Eisenhower administration. Perhaps it was a bad omen when former owner William Clay Ford sealed the deal to become majority owner -- on the very same day JFK got shot in Dallas.
And then he died.
If old Bill wasn't bad enough, enter his widow Martha, well into her nineties, and her daughters, hardly spring chickens themselves, to run the show. What was one of their first brilliant moves?
Bring in an "estate planner", a guy that dealt in wills, inheritances and the like, and make him team president. The man himself admitted he didn't know squat about running an NFL team. But he was Martha's pick for the job. If it wasn't so utterly clueless, it would be laughable.
So yep, the "old guard" of the Detroit professional sports teams may have had their ups and downs, but at least they occasionally gave the fans a reasonable chance of hope. Sometimes far-fetched, but a shot.
Nowadays, the Detroit professional sports landscape looks more like a bombed out war zone. A ghetto. Siberian tundra. Michigan roads.
Tis a sorry state of affairs when Detroit sports fans have to reminisce about the "good old days" that weren't that good in the first place.
Because the "new" generation of owners is most definitely worse -- a LOT worse -- than their predecessors.
I mean, c'mon. Out of all the cities from coast to coast that have professional sports franchises, nary a one comes anywhere close to Detroit when it comes to being a loser across the board.
As Charles Barkley would say -- turrible. Just turrible.
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