'Detroit History Podcast' revisits 1957 Detroit Lions' NFL championship run
“Grit” has been the motto for this season’s Detroit Lions, who will make the franchise’s first-ever Super Bowl appearance if they can scratch out a win Sunday against the San Francisco 49ers.
That’s fitting, because the last time the Lions won a championship, 67 years ago, grit was also a key player.
"The Detroit History Podcast" looked at that championship Lions team five years ago, when the team was mired in a decades-long rut. The team had a 6-10 record in 2018. We figured fans could use a boost.
We interviewed Joe Schmidt, an NFL Hall of Famer who played on that 1957 championship team and is still considered one of the best to wear the Honolulu blue and silver. We talked with Steve Junker, who was a rookie in 1957, and caught two touchdown passes in the championship against the Cleveland Browns. (Junker died in December.) We had football analyst Jim Brandstatter read from that season’s press coverage. We had Michigan State University sports journalism professor Joanne Gerstner, an expert on concussions, talk about the brutality of the sport. The Free Press' Dave Birkett, who has done considerable research on the team’s history, downloaded his head full of knowledge.
Lions grit, 1957 vintage? For starters. The head coach walked off the job about six weeks before the season began. The star quarterback got arrested for drunk driving at 2:30 a.m. early in the season, then broke his ankle in the final weeks. Then, in a contest that would decide who would go to the league championship game – now known as the Super Bowl – the Lions found themselves down 24-7 at halftime. In, of course, San Francisco.
The Lions won that game, then blew out the Cleveland Browns for the championship.
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The departure of coach Buddy Parker on the eve of the season caused most experts to write off the team’s chances. His abrupt farewell, at a “Meet the Lions” banquet at a downtown Detroit hotel, is the stuff of NFL legend.
“We had we had like eight, nine, ten directors on the team,” Joe Schmidt recalled in a 2019 phone interview. “Each of those individuals had suites in the hotel where they entertained their customers. Five or six guys wandered up there and got into those suites and had a couple of beers or something. Buddy Parker saw and witnessed what was going on. So, he got up in the banquet and went.”
Steve Junker, a rookie, said: “This was the first time I had met him (Parker), and he was at that banquet. He got up and said, ‘I can’t handle these guys’.”
Parker’s apprehension was affirmed when quarterback Bobby Layne was arrested for drunk driving on Grand River with two other guys and three women in the car. Layne admitted to drinking a half-dozen highballs, but in December was acquitted by a jury after 24 minutes of deliberation.
It was a different era on the field. “Tackling protocols” was not a familiar term.
“They were tackling head-to-head,” said MSU’s Gerstner, who has studied concussions. “I mean, they were like battering rams. They were literally using their heads as weapons. And the argument some guys would make from that era was, ‘well, we thought we had helmets.’ If you watch the NFL films from back in the day, you will definitely see it. It gives you chills to see what they did to each other.”
And they did it for little money.
“In my first year, I made $5,700, and the best ever made was $35,000 in my last year,” Schmidt said.
Grit was the greatest motivation.
The financial picture has changed considerably in the NFL. It seems, however, that grit still takes you to the big games. Maybe even all the way.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: 'Detroit History Podcast' revisits 1957 Detroit Lions
