A story about the Detroit Lions, injuries, family, and getting back up.
[Editor’s note: The following post is from one of our generous donors to our Movember campaign, which supported the University of Michigan Rogel Cancer Center this year. As part of our campaign, if your donation reached a certain level, you were able to create a post on Pride of Detroit. Thanks to Joel Daly for his donation, and sharing this beautiful story]
Family on 3
By: Joel Daly
After watching the Lions lose to the Bills from our seats in Section 102 Sunday evening, admittedly, I was disappointed. I’ve thought a lot about it since then, but I started to doubt whether all the hope I had for this team was lost because of even more injuries to a team that had already been decimated by them.
And then, Monday’s news about David Montgomery broke, and again, I started to feel even worse. Not just for the hope and spirit that this team represents, but for Montgomery himself. I had to go back to what many of us have watched in the post-game locker room speeches given by Dan Campbell. They’re never just about what Campbell imparts to the team, but more importantly, how the team seems to genuinely respond to the messages he gives them. Watching those videos, it’s clear the takeaways from the messages Campbell gives after a game don’t qualify as new inspiration. They’re messages that reinforce what the team has sincerely believed all along.
Angela Duckworth wrote the book Grit. Her best-selling book and its counterpart work by Carol Dweck, Mindset, have impacted me a great deal personally. In Grit, Pete Carroll is referenced as having been an ardent supporter of the philosophy of grit in how he led the Seahawks before the keyword was adopted by Dan Campbell and the Lions. One of the guiding axioms from Duckworth’s work that highlighted the importance of perseverance as a mandatory element of grit was the Japanese proverb “Nana korobi, ya oki”, which translates to “Fall seven, rise eight.” In other words, if you fall down seven times, no worries, just get up eight times.
This is exactly what this Lions team is all about. If you count the amount of opening day starters who have landed on injured reserve, they’ve fallen down more than seven times, but with this team, getting up one more time than they’ve fallen down is normal. And getting up eight times—or nine, or ten, or however many they need to—is normal BECAUSE of their leader; not just in spite of him.
Back to Montgomery. After the rain-soaked, hard-fought win in Green Bay November 3, during the postgame locker room speech, game balls went to Kerby Joseph and David Montgomery. Montgomery, like many other game ball recipients in the videos I know we’ve all watched, chose to give credit to his teammates—inspirationally and clearly noting that he would not want to “do it with another group of guys.” He said that he was grateful and blessed to be a part of this team before breaking down the locker room by encouraging all his teammates to “get in here tight.” He chose “family” as the keyword to break the huddle. Montgomery said, “Like I said the other day man, as long as we goin’, we growin’. Family on me, family on 3. One, two, three, family!” That’s what ended the rainy night in Lambeau.
In light of the devastating news about Montgomery’s injury Monday, I had to think back to that night in the Green Bay locker room. I don’t doubt for a second that Montgomery was absolutely sincere in describing his teammates as family, and I had to believe that every other man around him felt exactly the same way. If you watch all the other postgame locker room videos, there’s a theme of game ball recipients not accepting the credit for their accomplishments during those games, but rather electing to heap the praise for what they had done back on their teammates and coaches. Shoot, Jared Goff even GAVE the game ball back to Dan Campbell after the Dallas game and spontaneously put maybe the toughest man in this organization in a beautifully, unscripted emotional place that I’m sure he wasn’t ready for, but that raw moment captured on video seemingly spoke volumes about exactly why this team is here.
Back to family, and for me, Christmas. I decided to get behind the Pride of Detroit fundraising campaign raising money for the Rogel Cancer Center for a couple of personal reasons. On December 18, 1996, while my 14-year-old younger brother had been receiving a bone marrow transplant at C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital in Ann Arbor, I got a call at the payphone in my high school in Toledo that there had been a setback and that my Dad (who was my hero and would 24 years later succumb to glioblastoma himself) would call me after school to fill me in. Later that evening, he called me at home to tell me that my brother, whose immune system was wiped out with chemotherapy to be able to accept the new bone marrow, had contracted E. coli in the hospital. His lungs were suddenly ravaged, his kidneys were failing, that he was on a ventilator and sedated, and if it couldn’t get any worse, he wasn’t expected to make it through the night. Family friends rushed my younger sister and I up to Ann Arbor from Toledo to be there, and my brother Michael stayed alive another week while we slept on the floor of the family waiting room, ever-present at the hospital. For the rest of my life, I’ll never forget opening Christmas presents as a family in the ICU at the University of Michigan while my brother lay in a hospital bed in front of us. Maybe it was just to avoid the memory of his death being on Christmas Day, but my parents elected to wait to disconnect life support until the following day. On December 26, 1996 his incredibly beautiful, but tragically short life ended.
Michael fought Acute Myelogenous Leukemia for almost 18 months before that day, first as a 13-year-old kid, who endured incredible pain and gut-wrenching treatments until he quickly became a 14-year-old full-grown man. Sick from chemotherapy or radiation (for CNS leukemia that came later), he would be right in the middle of talking to you, reach over to throw up into a tub, and go right back to finishing the conversation while barely missing a beat. He often shared with me his paraphrased version of the line from A League of Their Own telling me, “It’s the hard that makes it great.”
There’s no great way to come back from that story into one about football, so I won’t. But this isn’t at all simply a story about football. It’s entirely about a group of individuals who are truly functioning as a family, and families that truly love one another fight for each other to the bitter end. This is a group of football players, but first it’s a group of people that I think are truly connected in their brotherhood and humanity—and that really, really, down to the depths of their souls believe they will do everything in their power to cherish this opportunity not just for themselves but for every person in that locker room, for the City of Detroit, and for the legions of Lions fans that I believe they love, too.
David Montgomery was exactly right. It’s the holidays. We see our families more than usual, and sometimes that’s hard, but it’s the hard that makes it great, right? I would venture to say that the family Montgomery believes in, believes in him, too, and when he went down, there are 60 other crusaders on this mission that just became extremely motivated to help finish what David helped start. That’s family. And that’s purpose. A purpose that keeps growing in its size with every challenge it encounters, but moreover, in its strength. That’s incredibly powerful.
It’s absolutely tough not to hang your head—even just for a second—and find yourself already disappointed for what might have been, but there are three winnable games for the first seed in the NFC. That’s freaking amazing, and that’s freaking real. And this team CAN win them. If they don’t, they’re already in the playoffs, and whoever they face, this team CAN beat them. If providence is with us, and Josh Allen is across the line of scrimmage yet again, as good as that man is, this team CAN beat him, too.
It’s the hard that makes it great. Whether it was Aidan Hutchinson, or Derrick Barnes, or Alim McNeill, or Alex Anzalone, or any other of the members of this family that have been sidelined (and I have to believe hate every minute away from the team and the field), this team has kept rising. The front office has brought in good help and the coaching staff has prepared those guys to join this team fast, and by and large, they have done just that.
The last weeks of this regular season and beyond, I’m getting ready to watch the 53 guys on the sidelines show up each week and fight with new purpose—a purpose that comes from a place of selflessness and a visceral desire to finish a mission despite any setbacks. That’s what grit is. Fall seven, rise eight. So like David Montgomery said, “Get in tight. Real tight. Family on me. Family on 3.”
