The Hammock Papers: Lions

Showing posts with label Lions. Show all posts

27 November 2025

Ice-Cold.

Getting ready for the Lions game, Dad would always set out creamed herring, extra sharp Pinconning cheddar, Triscuits, and "ice-cold" Bud.

"It's gotta be ice-cold!"

Thanks, Pop.

Tradition.

Vintage Detroit looks at the Lions' Thanksgiving tradition ...

The tradition began in 1934, during the team’s first season in Detroit. Then-owner G.A. “Dick” Richards, who had recently moved the franchise from Portsmouth, Ohio, was struggling to draw fans. Despite fielding a competitive team, the Lions couldn’t lure attention away from baseball’s powerhouse Detroit Tigers.

Richards, who also owned a radio station, decided to stage a bold publicity stunt: a Thanksgiving Day game. He convinced the NBC Radio Network to broadcast it nationally—an unprecedented move at the time. On November 29, 1934, the Lions hosted the defending champion Chicago Bears at University of Detroit Stadium.

The result? A sellout crowd of 26,000 fans, with thousands more turned away at the gates. The Bears won 19–16, but Detroit’s holiday football experiment was a resounding success. A new tradition was born.

18 January 2025

Trust.

The Athletic on Dan Campbell's leadership ...

Campbell asked his team who they wanted to be.

“You have to be made a certain way or you’re not even coming here anyway,” he said recently. “The fact that you’re doubted — ‘You’re not good enough, you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re not very smart, you can’t process, you’re throwing the ball out of bounds on fourth down, your coach is a meathead …'

“You go through this whole deal, but yet you look at each other and you trust each other.”

He trusted them. They trusted him. Three wins later, including a winner-take-all finale against the Vikings, Campbell slipped on a baby blue T-shirt that read “READY TO ROLL” in the victorious locker room at Ford Field. The Lions had repeated as division champs and clinched the NFC’s top seed for the first time in franchise history. Their story was still in their hands.

22 December 2024

21 October 2024

Technique.

Coach Campbell on technique ...

The last time somebody called me classless, I was drinking wine out of a bottle.

04 October 2024

Greg Landry, Rest in Peace

My first sports hero, Greg Landry, has passed (I'm assuming it was a completion).

28 January 2024

02 January 2024

Controlled.

Controlled fury 🔥 pic.twitter.com/gKiLKGB4mT
— Detroit Lions (@Lions) January 1, 2024

31 December 2023

Leadership.

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Leadership.

Dan Campbell, Building a Legacy ...

Coach Campbell reacts to Lions penalty on 2-point conversion vs. Cowboys ...

23 November 2023

02 October 2023

24 December 2022

Magic.

One year ago today the @lions were sitting at 2-12.
SOL’ers were reveling. Draft talk ran rampant. Dan Campbell, a mockery to some.
Today, we joyously await Christmas Eve to watch the Lions play for a potential playoff berth. Magic is happening in Detroit✨pic.twitter.com/EActJIgFda
— Natalie Sparbeck (@NatSparbeck) December 21, 2022

Dan Campbell loves outdoor football. He wishes the Lions game at the Jets was on grass.

“I’m a big grass stain guy. I just think it looks great,” he said.

pic.twitter.com/iTE0Mk8Q0F
— Brad Galli (@BradGalli) December 17, 2022

21 November 2022

Serenity.

Enthusiasm is a supernatural serenity.

Henry David Thoreau

20 November 2022

Outstanding.

That's outstanding, gentlemen! pic.twitter.com/buXYqZ2amR
— Detroit Lions (@Lions) November 21, 2022

11 July 2022

15 February 2022

05 December 2021

31 October 2017

11 April 2013

Rugland.

The Detroit Lions have signed Havard Rugland to replace recently-retired legend, Jason Hanson ...

BARRY HINES

"That's why it makes me mad when I take her out and I'll hear somebody say, 'Look, there's Billy Casper there wi' his pet hawk. I could shout at 'em; it's not a pet, Sir, hawks are not pets. Or when folks stop me and say, 'Is it tame?' Is it heck tame, it's trained that's all. It's fierce, and it's wild, an' it's not bothered about anybody, not even about me, right. And that's why it's great.Look, there's Billy Casper there wi' his pet hawk.' I could shout at 'em. It's not a pet, Sir. Hawks are not pets. Or when folks stop me and say, 'Is it tame?' Is it heck tame, it's trained, that's all. It's fierce, and it's wild, an' it's not bothered about anybody, not even about me right. And that's why it's great." (A Kestrel for a Knave)

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

WALT WHITMAN

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering. I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. The last scud of day holds back for me, It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow’d wilds, It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk. I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun, I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags. I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles. You will hardly know who I am or what I mean, But I shall be good health to you nevertheless, And filter and fibre your blood. Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, Missing me one place search another, I stop somewhere waiting for you.

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."