The boos were merciless, to the point even Calvin Johnson felt uncomfortable.
But as the Hall-of-Fame receiver tried to quell the jeering at his Ford Field ring ceremony last month, Detroit Lions owner Sheila Ford Hamp said she understood why fans took that moment to voice their displeasure with her and the team.
“Obviously, no one likes to be booed, but I totally understand it,” Hamp told the Free Press on Friday. “Totally understand it. Understand the frustration all the years. I think it was a lot of things involved in that booing, so as I say no one likes it, but I got it. Totally got it. And I’m as frustrated as the fans are and I appreciate their sentiment and hopefully what we’re trying to do here will turn to cheers one day.”
The Lions are 0-6, the only winless team in the NFL entering Sunday’s game against the Los Angeles Rams, and, barring a miraculous turnaround, will finish without a playoff appearance for the fifth straight season.
They’ve gone 30 years without a postseason victory, 28 without a division championship, have not had a winning record since 2017 and are trending toward having the No. 1 pick in next spring’s draft.
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Hamp replaced her mother, Martha Firestone Ford, as chairperson and principal owner last summer, but her speech at Johnson’s ring ceremony was the first truly public appearance by a member of the Ford family in a football capacity in years.
Many of the 50,788 fans in attendance that day took it as an opportunity to vent, an expression Hamp saw as being mostly about “years of frustration and limited success.”
“We do have fabulous fans as we all know and they’ve stuck with us forever through thick and thin, and a lot of thin,” Hamp said. “It’s been hard, so I agree. And this year, it’s a rebuild, it’s painful. We knew it was going to be hard, but it’s hard to lose. No one likes to lose. I hate to lose, but we are working on things and I think we’ve got a good path.”
Hamp said her only frustration about that day is, “I didn’t want to detract from the Calvin event.”
She said the reception by fans will not dissuade her from making more public appearances in the future.
“I think that would be a stupid thing to do is to hide because I really don’t feel like I need to hide,” she said. “I wouldn’t be talking to you if I felt like I needed to hide. I don’t want to hide. It’s part of what I’m trying to change around here, which is the open, communicative culture and I’m part of it. As Chris (Spielman) said, ‘You started all this,’ so it’s true and I want to live it. I’m happy to answer questions and take the arrows. Someone’s got to and it’s fine.”
And she said she understands fans who might view that as lip service, and who will need to see actual progress on the field to believe things are different.
“We all do,” she said. “That’s the point. And that’s really what we’re working for, so hopefully, we will and I think we all know it’s a process. It’s not going to happen overnight. We were left with not much and the season’s been tough on many fronts, but injuries aren’t something that — they’re not an excuse but with the talent that we’ve had, we’ve lost eight starters and we’ve got lots of young guys out there and it’s great that they’re young and enthusiastic and stuff, but they’re going to make mistakes.”
Hamp spent about 30 minutes Friday talking to the Free Press inside her Allen Park office adorned with football memorabilia.
On one shelf sat a deflated football from the organization’s first game as the Lions, a 9-0 win over the New York Giants in 1934. On another, the Ed Thorp Memorial Trophy given to the Lions’ 1935 NFL championship team, and a framed copy of the note Spielman wrote outlining three guiding principles the Lions used in the coach and general manager searches that turned up Dan Campbell and Brad Holmes: Leadership, culture and staff.
Here are excerpts of that conversation. Some questions and answers have been edited for clarity and brevity.
Calvin Johnson and Barry Sanders had strained relationships after they left the Lions. The organization seemed to handle things differently with Matthew Stafford. Will that be the new template going forward?
“I mean, I hope so. When Matthew called and said he wanted to be traded, it wasn’t what I was hoping for at the time. … I’m thinking at the time, ‘We don’t have a coach, we don’t have a general manager and now we don’t have a quarterback. OK, now what?’ But I looked at it as really as an opportunity, and it’s Dan philosophy, it’s my philosophy, we want people to be here that want to be here and that want to play for us. And I understood, I am a huge Matthew fan. I respect him.
“This would have been his fourth coach change. He didn’t know who the coach was going to be — I didn’t know who the coach was going to be at that point so I couldn’t say, ‘Oh, just hang in there because so-and-so’s coming.’ And I don’t blame him for not wanting to start over again. He’s, what, 32 (at the time)? He’s got hopefully several more years, but he’s not in his 20s anymore and he gave us his heart and soul and I so really wanted to honor his wishes and do the best we could with him.”
What was that conversation like with Stafford?
“Well, he was very emotional, I remember. He was choked up and it was hard for him and I was trying to make it not hard for him, because I really did understand where he was coming from. And we said we’ll do our best to accommodate everything you want and I think it worked out.”
How caught off guard were you by his trade demand?
“I didn’t expect it. No, I didn’t. But I maybe, could have, should have seen that coming, but I think there were so many things going on that were kind of wild and crazy at the time. So it was just one more thing, but rather than gnashing my teeth or bursting into tears or something, I saw the whole thing as an opportunity. ‘OK, let’s just hit the reset button.'”
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And you did start completely anew. But this week, you see Stafford again. What will that be like?
“I’ll be happy to see him. I saw him at the Hall of Fame when I went for Calvin’s induction. He was great. He gave me a big hug. I saw him from a distance and I went and sort of tapped him on the shoulder. He stopped talking — I was on my way out so I thought, ‘Well, it’s now or never.’ I didn’t want to interrupt him, but he was great.”
How hard will be it be to watch him play the Lions in a Rams uniform?
“Well, I’ve seen some highlights here and there already, so it’s OK. But I appreciate that he doesn’t want to make a big deal of this. I know he didn’t want to talk to the press. Neither does Jared (Goff). I think that’s the right thing. Let’s just play football. Let’s make it about the game.”
You mentioned being off to an 0-6 start. That’s not what anyone expected. How do you digest where you are now in the early stages of this rebuild?
“Well, first of all, we could have, should have won two games. Just some bad breaks and whatever. The thing that I see as a huge positive is nobody’s giving up. They really aren’t. Our last game against the Bengals wasn’t a great game, but I think it was more, we’ve got all these young people, backups that are starting. Usually, you put a backup in for a game or two, not six. And there’s going to be, at some point I think there’s a collapse of a bit, but I think it wasn’t from not trying and I think we’ll regroup. Dan is masterful at that. You’ve been around here enough to see the atmosphere. It’s totally different.”
I have gotten good feedback on Dan from people across the league. From your perspective, has anything that’s happened so far made you think any different about the new regime?
“Not at all. Not a bit. I have total faith in him, his staff. His coaching staff’s incredible, really. Just watching them work, you’ve seen them. They’re mostly former players, which I think lends tons of credibility on the front end, and they’re all good teachers and they’re out there teaching these guys and you see them being encouraging. It’s really kind of a joy to watch them work and I think that’s going to pay off. I know that’s going to pay off.”
Chris Spielman goes into Pride of the Lions next week. When you brought him on, there was a lot of uncertainty about his role. How has that been defined since?
“So it started with the interview and so Rod (Wood) and I decided, we didn’t want to go the league route again. It had been tried. And so we thought, ‘Well, we can do this, but we’re going to need some help, obviously, and first and foremost we needed some football help.’ So we thought of Chris, so called him up and talked to him about kind of what I was thinking, what direction I wanted to go and what kind of an organization we were trying to build. And he was intrigued. He embraced the whole thing and he’s been incredible.
“So his job was sort of ambiguous, to say the least, and actually started each interview, and Chris was on the call of course, and I didn’t want a potential GM or someone to think, ‘Chris Spielman’s going to be looking over my shoulder,’ or the coach. So I talked about why he was there and what he was going to do. And Chris always described himself as a servant leader, and that’s really how he’s defined his job here. He’ll do anything. He’s helping out with the coaching staff when they want him to, and turns out, they want him to do it a lot. And he was in on the draft meetings because they asked him to be there. And we’ve been doing a lot of work on integrating the culture of Ford Field and Allen Park, I know I’ve talked about that before, but that’s been a big huge mission of mine.”
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People still wonder, is Chris being groomed for something bigger?
“I mean, I don’t know. We’ll see how it evolves. He’s got his finger in a lot of different pies around here, which is great. I don’t know. It’s like Mule (Don Muhlbach) is here, too, and he’s trying to figure out what he’s doing. But he’s great. They’re wonderful people to have and they’re nothing but assets.”
Not to put a timetable on this, but record-wise 0-6 seems far away. How close do you feel to being on the right path?
“I think, as I say, everyone knew this was going to be a hard year. A rebuild, no one wanted to say that exactly, but we all kind of knew it was going to be and I think, as I say, the good news is that our young guys are getting a lot of experience, probably a lot more than they would have normally. So I think at the end of this year, we’ll really know what we have. I think we’re building our foundation and as you know, we have a slew of draft picks coming up the next few years so I see nothing but positive going forward. I think we’ll have a chance to really, really improve ourselves and I feel like we’ve got the right leaders to get us there.”
The organization has tended to build things the right way from a character standpoint. What is your appetite for risk as an owner?
“Again, I’m not going to meddle. I’m going to defer to the experts. I like to hear what they’re thinking and whatever, but I think I have a lot of faith in what they’ll do and Dan talks a lot about having the right people and what he means by that I think obviously a good attitude, loving football, having grit. There are certain things that he looks for in a player, and Brad, too. And I think that’s the right attitude, that’s how we’re going to win. Players that really want to be here, that really want to play and want to play hard. And I think they all want to play hard for Dan, I really feel that. And so I think that in and of itself is going to go a long way.”
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Attendance has been down. What do you say to fans who are taking a wait-and-see approach?
“I think it’s coming off COVID, I think people — we’re an indoor stadium. I think that’s tough. Yes, I think if we start winning, people will be more willing to take the risk or whatever, but it’s not terrible. We still have plenty of fans in there, make lots of noise. Obviously, we’d love to fill it, standing-room only.
“I really do think the people that really follow the team get it and see that there’s a path. … So we were at a restaurant in Detroit for dinner last Sunday and at the next table, just by chance was a fan wearing a Lions T-shirt and he was having dinner with some Bengals fans. And the Bengals people got up to leave and I heard him say, ‘OK, today was your day. Two years from now we’re going to eat your lunch.’ And so we were about to get up and leave, too, so I went over and said hello to him. He said, ‘You’re on the right path, everything you’re doing. I just upped my season tickets for three years.’ And I thought, ‘OK, he sees it. He gets it.’ And I’ve heard that.”
Contact Dave Birkett at dbirkett@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @davebirkett.