Days after the September 2024 release of his juicy new exposé about the Detroit Lions, author Bill Morris traveled from New York for the team’s season opener against the Los Angeles Rams at Ford Field. The Lions Finally Roar: The Ford Family, the Detroit Lions, and the Road to Redemption in the NFL represents three years’ work, and this game featuring quarterbacks Jared Goff and Matthew Stafford was a flesh-and-blood extension of the literary drama in Morris’s recounting of the Lions’ shocking 2021 trade of Stafford to the Rams for Goff and draft picks.
The Lions defeated the Rams on Sept. 8, 2024 — 26 to 20 in overtime — and bailed Morris out. His account of their futility and fresh success arrived with an aura of cozy affinity, as if pointing toward great deeds to come. But would the Lions start backsliding?
“I was sort of dreading they were going to stumble and lose their first six games, and the whole thing would look kind of like a bad joke,” Morris says on a video call from Wilmington, North Carolina, where he gave a book reading and signed copies. His next stop was Greensboro, where he had been a newspaper reporter and columnist and remembered having “a nice big crowd” a decade ago when promoting his novel Motor City Burning.
Morris grew up in Birmingham, graduated in 1969 from Brother Rice High, and departed for Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. He followed the Lions from afar, even after settling in New York City. One key to writing about them came from his late father, Dick Morris, who served as executive assistant to longtime Lions owner William Clay Ford, during which time he saw Ford’s casual approach to choosing Lions management, as well as hiring and firing coaches.
Setting out to write, the author wanted more than a football book. “I want to write a Detroit book,” he told himself. “And I want this to be about football, yeah, but I want it to be about class, like the Fords, the richest people on the planet, the autoworkers, the poor Black people, Motown, the MC5” — and he continues down the list. “I wanted to get it all in there, and I hope it’s not overstuffed.”
The Lions Finally Roar is a rich, satisfying romp that serves as a counterweight to the 2019 film Ford v Ferrari with Tracy Letts’s unforgettable portrayal of William Clay Ford’s older brother, Henry Ford II. A difference in this telling is that, even under the new regime of general manager Brad Holmes and head coach Dan Campbell, the Lions continued to flounder one-third of the way into the 2022 season. Then, principal owner Sheila Ford Hamp stuck out her neck, showing up at the Allen Park practice facility and telling reporters, “I just don’t want everyone to push the panic button. … We’ve got the right people in place to pull this off.”
“And boom, they started winning right after that,” Morris says. He had to abandon his working title, Natural Born Losers, and find something that fit the tone of the times. On the Sunday when Morris was in Wilmington, Goff rallied the Lions to squeak past the Minnesota Vikings, taking first place in the NFC North — hardly a bad joke.
“You know what?” Morris says. “I’m glad for the people of Detroit that they’re winning. I dedicate the book to the people of Detroit with a line that I lifted from the great poet Philip Levine: ‘For the people of Detroit, who survive everything America can dish out.’”
This story originally appeared in the January 2025 issue of Hour Detroit magazine. To read more, pick up a copy of Hour Detroit at a local retail outlet. Our digital edition will be available on Jan. 6.
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