A Thriving Community of Lions Fans Will Finally Experience a Home Playoff Game
Detroit’s late-afternoon sun begins to tuck behind a red brick structure, proudly displaying Eastern Market above its bowed archways. Vendors, who punctuate the building’s open-air stalls, start packing up their vegetables, baked goods, flowers and textiles for the day. It’s 5 p.m. on Saturday, and the market’s once-packed six sheds are empty. The farmers and merchants are making way for something a bit more boisterous, but arguably just as homegrown. Come Sunday morning, the 125-year-old Eastern Market will be transformed into Lions country, with tailgaters blanketing the district in Honolulu Blue.
Integral to being a Lions fan is summoning perseverance amid pain. The team has never won a Super Bowl, nor ever really come close. Detroit’s last postseason appearance came in 2016, when the Lions fell to the Seahawks in a wild-card matchup, failing to muster a touchdown. The Lions have not won a playoff game since George H. W. Bush occupied the White House in 1991. Their last nine playoff games have been losses.
A special season has heaped more attention on a fan base that has long supported its team through many years of losing.
Kirthmon F. Dozier/USA TODAY Network
This year’s 8–2 start marked their best opening stretch since 1962. The team recovered from a midseason stumble to clinch its first division title since ’93. It will now host its first playoff game since that same season. For this, coach Dan Campbell is quickly becoming a beloved figure in Detroit, leading a gritty team in a city that prides itself on grit.
The shift in fortunes has also shined a new light on a Lions fan base and culture that has often gone unnoticed or underestimated. Detroit has made headlines throughout the season for how well the team’s supporters travel (see the Lions fans’ Lambeau Field takeover in September), but the notorious sports city has been showing out at home, too, with the renewed excitement stoking the embers of a fandom that has been there all along.
So, after years of tumult and torment, how are Lions faithfuls experiencing this Detroit football renaissance? The Sunday tailgate may hold our answer.
Through a haze of smoke that cloaks Eastern Market’s main drag, you can make out a cluster of tables and chairs with assorted umbrella awnings. Music bumps from the same hub as the barbecue fumes. It’s Bert’s Marketplace, a cornerstone of the neighborhood that’s been around since 1987. Upon first glance, Bert’s looks like a quintessential local watering hole with an unassuming entrance, but it’s actually a sprawling 24,000-square-foot entertainment complex, hosting illustrious jazz musicians and other famous entertainers throughout its tenure—even Boy George has stopped by—while serving up mouth-watering barbecue you can now find in Ford Field.
“I was raised five blocks from Eastern Market,” says Bert’s founder and owner Bert Dearing Jr. “One block over, six blocks down was my neighborhood from where I am right now.” A fifth-generation entrepreneur, Dearing has been in what he calls the people business since long before Bert’s ever came to be. He acquired his first bar, Bert’s Black Horse Lagoon, in the 1960s after Detroit’s rebellion and amid white flight from the city. “I bought the German bar, it was called the White Horse, I went down and painted the horse black and called it the Black Horse.”
Bert’s is a gathering place as much as it is a gallery, displaying Detroit relics and murals celebrating the city’s history. Dearing highlights a painting of Tigers great Willie Horton, a personal favorite, displayed along with frescos representing Black Bottom and Paradise Valley—neighboring Black communities, the former a rich residential area and the latter a booming commercial district, that defined the city in the mid-1900s before freeway construction and urban renewal decimated the neighborhoods. Dearing lived in the close-knit Black Bottom, the same area where Detroit’s greatest sports legend, boxing icon Joe Louis, grew up.
The art at Bert’s Marketplace connects to past generations of Detroit history.
Clare Brennan/Sports Illustrated
If anyone knows where the city’s been, where it is now and where it’s going, it’s Dearing. The city’s winding history has long been accentuated by its cultural output—think Motown and techno—and that certainly includes sports, but the Lions, for as long as many can remember, have been on the outside looking in. “We’ve been a hell of a sports city,” Dearing says. “We all want to have winners, which we have in hockey, have been with the Bad Boys [Pistons], had with the Tigers, and this may be the time that it may happen with football coming around because they haven’t done anything since 1957.”
Dearing was a paperboy the last time the Lions won a title with the 1957 team (before the Super Bowl era), and he remembers seeing Bobby Lane and John Henry Johnson heading out for the stadium on Sundays to play. Fast-forward 66 years and Dearing is hosting Lions fans in the back of his establishment. The tailgaters come from all over the city, he says, while patrons who can’t make the game watch from the comfort of inside Bert’s.
“When they win, nobody wants to go home,” he says.
Just outside Bert’s doors, a legion of fans queue up across Russell Street. In Shed 5 of the market, you’ll find more music, more football chatter and of course more food. The Detroit Lions VIP Tailgate put on by Bullseye Event Group is a newer occurrence, with award-winning chef and restaurateur Kate Williams in her third year serving as the event’s head chef (she was brought into the fold by Food Network celebrity chef Aaron May, who heads up the Bullseye Event Group’s culinary programming). Williams’s curated menus feature tailgate delicacies reminiscent of childhood favorites, with a bit of a gourmet twist. Detroit’s Thanksgiving Day game menu included herb-roasted turkey breast, lemon rosemary gravy, and garlic and chive mashed potatoes. And, of course, the Honolulu Blue Kool-Aid with rum is a staple for every game.
“There’s certain similarities in folks who have stuck with Detroit, the city, when everyone was talking bad about it or giving up on it, and those tried-and-true Lions fans,” says Williams. “That gives you a warm feeling about cooking for folks that maybe wouldn’t have otherwise come to your restaurant.”
The VIP tailgate posts a price tag of just over $100 for an all-you-can-eat, all-you-can-drink affair scored by DJ Don Mecca. It’s grown in size and scope over the years—its very existence a testament to the Lions’ rise—with Williams working her first Monday Night Football game this season. The Lions’ Week 8 game against the Raiders was their first time hosting on Monday since 2018.
“It’s gotten bigger every year. Exponentially bigger,” says Williams. “The first year it was definitely the die-hard Lions fans who have been there, thick and thin, good, bad or ugly through the years. Then you saw the next year it’s that same crowd coming, but a little bit different. Now this year it’s almost like the city is electric with excitement and pride about how the team is doing so it makes the tailgate super fun. It makes it so fun to cook for folks like that.”
Three lots down, at Shed 2, sits a group that knows something about the good, bad and ugly of Lions fandom. There, tailgaters are greeted with a surprising gust of warmth, as steam collides with the biting Detroit air. Is that … a hot tub? Well, it’s the tubgater to be exact—a hot tub on wheels that’s been around Lions’ tailgates since the early ’90s. The tubgater has even taken trips to other cities, visiting Lambeau Field, among other stadiums, this year.
Denny Arney, the keeper of the tubgater, calls the endeavor a “labor of love.” He lives an hour north of the city, which means he leaves his house around 2:30 a.m. on Sunday to begin the hot tub’s pilgrimage to Detroit. Arney fills up the now infamous tub at his friend’s place just a couple of miles away from where he tailgates, but that process typically takes a few hours. Finally, he’ll arrive in Eastern Market at about 6:30 a.m.
It’s a lot of work, without much return in the way of Lions’ wins or hardware. “There’s been a lot of, Why am I doing this? A lot of self-reflection like, What are you doing, Denny? That 0–16 season [in 2008] stands out,” Arney says with a laugh. The secret to being a long-term Lions fan, according to Arney, is adopting a specific disposition.
“I don’t know that the type-A personality is a good fit,” he says. “I would say you have to roll with the punches, be a generally nice person and just in it for the fun, not so much the wins. The wins are great, but if you don’t win, you’re in it for the fun.”
Arney, the keeper of the tubgater, enjoying the fruits of his labor.
Clare Brennan/Sports Illustrated
Willie “Big Blu” Murray, the leader of the Blue Crew tailgate, and fellow Shed 2 mainstay, has similarly leaned into the joy of the tailgate ritual, even in the Lions’ darkest days. Like Arney, he wakes up at the crack of dawn to get his setup ready, leaving his home near Grand Rapids (two hours west of Detroit) around 3:00 a.m. on Sundays.
“To me, the tailgating is more of a family thing; I mean all these people are like your aunts, your uncles, your cousins, your brothers,” says Murray. “So regardless of the quality of the team the Lions are putting out there, we still always have a good time and from my path of traveling, the teams with the worst records have some of the best tailgating historically.”
He might be onto something. It’s one thing to imbibe in the spoils of victory, but to joyfully jump in a hot tub or happily grill out in January in Detroit amid an umpteenth losing season, that’s different. “We’re crazy. Why would we spend so much time and money following a team that historically has been so bad?” asks Murray.
But now, the Lions are in uncharted territory—the team is good enough for there to be expectations, maybe even hope. Still, most Lions fans never get out over their skis; they’ve seen too much, they know better.
“My last really good memory was when they beat Dallas at home, but that was ’91, I believe,” says Arney. “For this year maybe my goals aren’t that high, but I am thinking I’d like to see a playoff win at home and after that, it’s all gravy. Baby steps, you know? Give me something to hang my hat on.”
And Arney’s aspirations are dangerously close to coming to fruition. Following a contentious Week 17 loss to the Cowboys (which ended in a controversial call by the officiating crew) and then a finale win over the Minnesota Vikings, Campbell’s team locked up the NFC’s No. 3 seed and will head into its postseason battle against the Los Angeles Rams with a palpable fervor. “I’m ready, man, I’ve got controlled fury,” Campbell said after Detroit’s defeat in Dallas. “I’m ready to go. I am absolutely ready to go. I don’t go the other way.” Campbell & Co. will have an equally motivated group of fans behind them and a city that’s been waiting for this moment amid an unrelenting drought. Finally, Lions fans will get to make the trek to their home stadium for a playoff game, favored against a fitting and familiar foe in the Matthew Stafford–led Rams.
The tip of Ford Field’s domed roof crests over Eastern Market as the tailgaters merge into a sea of blue, beginning their journey to the game and clearing out the sheds as the vendors had just a day earlier. The stadium is only a stone’s throw from the market, but the two are dissected by a moat of crisscrossing freeways—making downtown and the eastside feel like distinct islands. Before any football is played for the day, fans bid adieu to this sequestered isle of a neighborhood, atop expressways and with hand-painted signs only enduring small businesses could front. Here is where Lions fans have kept their hopes alive for so long—and this year, fulfilled, or possibly even exceeded—in the most uniquely Detroit of settings.
