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A Year Later, Here's What I Miss Most About Michigan

A year ago a moving van pulled our possessions off our driveway and moved them 550 miles southeast into Maryland. It's been a long, strange journey filled with some heartache, struggles and some incredible experiences, too.

So as I type this, it occurred to me I'm pining a bit nostalgic for my Michigan roots. Football season is ramping up here, but the fervor, anticipation and general excitement isn't the same. For those reasons and a few others, here's the Top 10 things I miss from Michigan.

10. Cool nights. Jesus, as if 80 inches of snow packaged in three storms of 20+ inches wasn't enough, we're already at 45 days above 90 degrees. I've worked two plate games where it was warmer that 105 when I took the lineups, over 95 when the game ended and still above 90 when I got home in the late evening. I had heard the Mid-Atlantic was hot; I didn't realize that was merely code for living in the doorway of a blast furnace.

9. Sports Town Tradition. Look, Baltimore and D.C. are great cities with their own distinct energy and passion, but like Chicago, New York and L.A., they pale in comparison to the passion that oozes from The D. That's just fact.

8. Nicknames. OK, the Baltimore Dunbar High Poets is cool, but the winningest Maryland basketball school this side of De Matha High is the overwhelming exception. We're overloaded by Cougars, Falcons, Lions, Tigers, Eagles and Patriots in Maryland. By comparison, Detroit's got Doughboys, Tars, Tractors, Thunderbirds, Maples and River Rats. We lost the Oaks and Chiefs but you can still find Shamrocks, Saddelites and Pilots, too.

7. Opinion. The local Baltimore sports media probably wouldn't look very dignified in cheerleader outfits, but if it sounds like a cheerleader and squeals like a cheerleader, why not just finish the look? I think this town is still scared to say anything that will make the owner pack up this toys and go elsewhere. The Tigers had 12 losings seasons in a row and there were songs and shirts chiding the team, and I think the Matt Millen era of Detroit Lions football -- if that's what you call that regular season scrimmage schedule-- speaks for itself. Try saying something negative about the Ravens here, and it's the media, not the fans, who shoot your argument down.

6. Driving Seven Over The Speed Limit. Note to everyone from Maryland: Driving 45 mph in the far left lane is pathetic. So is entering the freeway at 25 mph, scared to death of pushing your way into a moving lane of traffic. Slowing down to a crawl on the freeway for no absolute reason is also a swell Blue Crab state tradition. Jesus, people, we drive 45 mph in our Michigan neighborhoods, just not the nice ones, right? Get moving!

5. Football Fever. Before I chide the Navy gameday experience, I need to omit the games the Mids play Notre Dame, Air Force and Army. Those are exceptional spectacles, but your garden-variety Navy football game looks great from afar, but when you actually go to a game, you realize it's a lot of retired brass sitting on their hands awash in the three scotch n' sodas they put down in the parking lot. The 3,800 Midshipmen in the stands are into it for sure, but it's no Spartan Stadium or Big House, where each school's band thunders into the stadium and the rest of the day just gets crazier from there.

The University of Maryland? Yeah, fear the turtle...if you're trying to stay awake.

4. The Big Ten. If I had a dollar for every transposed Big 10 fan I've met from Michigan, Ohio or Penn State who is secretly rooting for Maryland to be the surprise addition to the Big 10 so they can see their favorite school once a year, I wouldn't have to look for work. If you ask the Maryland fans, they oppose joining the Big 10, but a lot of Big Ten'rs think this is fear. They know the Terrapins would struggle mightily in football and they know it; can you say Indiana East? 

Marylanders also point to the ACC and their rivalry with Duke or North Carolina on the hardwood. Well, it's only a big deal when they play Duke or UNC to Maryland, because the rest of the country doesn't care. Being a Big 10 school hasn't hurt Tom Izzo's Spartans from getting to six Final Fours in 12 years either.

3. Fight Songs. Anchors Aweigh is a stirring march to be sure, but fight songs like the Buckeye Battle Cry, On Wisconsin and The Victors, not to mention Falcone Fight (Michigan State), and Hail! Purdue are just amazing. A handful of the Big 10 fight songs are derived from Civil War hymns. How cool is that?

2. High School Football Scores. I so miss ripping open the paper or going online and pouring over the scores. Of course, before they closed, my first glance pointed to Royal Oak. Did Kimball win? How did Dondero do? The upsets. Walled Lake Western got beat by who? Farmington Hills Harrison. Dearborn Fordson. The PSL. King, Southeastern, Pershing and Denby. The trio of schools in Livonia and Plymouth. The Catholic League. Who did CC play? Did the Cubs win? Where is Brother Rice today?

By comparison, here in Anne Arundel County, which is about the size and population of Oakland County, we have 12 public schools and six private schools, and the JV plays at 4:00 on Friday before the varsity game at 6:30. Hardly the stuff of Friday Night Lights, let alone Ampipe High in All The Right Moves. Tell Bosco I'll be seeing him around!

1. Coney Dogs, Apple Cider, Sweet Corn & Driving Down The Lodge Listening To "It's The Same Old Song". Don't get wrong, Maryland Blue Crabs and cold beer is a beautiful thing, but every time I'm back in The D, I hit a coney and grab two with everything. Greek salads, too. It's just part of Detroit that I've never seen replicated. Washington D.C. has Ben's Chili Bowl on U Street (a must-see when you're in The District, btw), but it's not a true Detroit coney. And good luck finding a cider mill or a sweet corn stand on the side of the road. That truly is Pure Michigan.

~ T.C. Cameron is the author of Metro Detroit's High School Football Rivalries, Metro Detroit's High School Basketball Rivalries and writes sports for The Capital-Gazette newspaper in Annapolis.

The Path To Success Leads Through The Capital

ANNAPOLIS -- On the opening day of the college football season, a day when No. 6 ranked Ohio State needed every break it could muster to defeat The Naval Academy Midshipmen, a small victory took place in front of a crowd of...nobody.

I'm happy to announce I've been added to the considerable stable of freelancers at The Capital, the howntown daily in Annapolis serving most of Anne Arundel County. The Capital is best described as a paper that does what it does best instead of trying to be all things to all people.

At this juncture of the summer/fall, the officiating schedule is still being assembled so this is a great lil' gig to get acclimated to the area (no one knows the footprint better than a good reporter) and make a few contacts in the sporting community.

~ T.C. Cameron is rooting for Eastern Michigan's Hurons to forge a furious comeback and defeat Army in Rynearson Stadium Stadium night in Ypsi.

Holla' For History

I was listening to WXYT's afternoon drive-time show called The Sports Inferno last week when I became amused with what I heard from New York native /reborn Detroiter Mike Valenti.

"Let's get down to brass taxes..." Valenti said as he began one of his legendary rants about whatever. Don't get me wrong --I enjoy Valenti, because he is like me and simply tells you how he sees it without any holdout -- but he's the classic example of a sports fan with a radio show, a point he'll readily admit. There's nothing wrong with it, either.

What amused me is the 'brass taxes' thing. It's brass tacks. This is an example of how time changes history in subtle ways. Brass tacks was a way of measuring cloth, linen or anything else by the yard on a counter. A person would come in and ask for so much of this or that, and the actual cost would be determined by placing the material on the counter against the ruler held in place with brass tacks, thus the phrase, "Let's get down to brass tacks."

Here's another one: Toe The Line. How many times have you heard it repeated as Tow The Line? Or the oft-heard phrase, "It's a dog-eat-dog world." I've heard that catch-phrase repeated many times as 'Doggy-dog' world.

Here's why I bring this up: History is important. It shows us the right and wrong in the world before us, thus the coined phrase, "Those who do not heed history are doomed to repeat it."

I'm writing a prep basketball history book and I'm waist-deep in the city of Detroit right now. Among the interesting facts I've learned from basketball research as it relates to metro Detroit? The 30-year absence by Detroit's public school teams from the Michigan High School Athletic Association's annual boys' basketball tournament from 1931-1961. The seed of racial mistrust in Detroit is one planted long before riots and failed urban renewal.

Here's another one: School sports might have saved the city before and after the 1967 riots. The divisive busing issue was so strongly contested that many coaches and players from that era were literally scared to travel outside of their neighborhoods, but school sports was a respected rite of passage, almost an institution in Detroit. Rival schools of various religious and ethnic backgrounds might not have gotten along on any day -- save for game day. It was on these days they respected one another, played hard and shook hands after the game. That very well might have kept the city from an all-encompassing implosion that would have made the '67 riots look like a small camp fire easily doused with canteen water.

If you think the Detroit PSL doesn't have friends, consider the Catholic League fought long and hard alongside the PSL schools in the 1970s to get millage and bond requests passed. What would Detroit's schools look like today had it not been for a lil' neighborly love 30 years ago?

And what of the other history not so easily interwoven into prep sports?

The decision to plow through neighborhoods with concrete freeways did little but speed up fears of intermixed, racially-charged neighborhoods. If you look at the pictures of football and basketball, schools and neighborhoods radically changed within a few years. Today our freeways in Detroit do little but expose the worst homes and buildings within eyeshot, because really, who wants to live next to a freeway and have to leave your garage at 55 miles an hour? When's the last time you heard a neighborhood benefited from have an eight-lane ribbon of concrete driven through its heart? And if you think a freeway is bad, what about displacing the many for a hulking auto complex -- remember Poletown?

Finally, I've learned that while Kwame Kilpatrick and Coleman Young weren't great leaders, neither were a lot of their white predecessors, like Charles Bowles, Louis C. Miriani and a laundry list of leaders remembered for their poor decisions as much as any positive accomplishments. The decision to allow auto companies to erect massive auto factories in the middle of neighborhoods without a lick of civil engineering 80-90 years ago has continually crippled a lot of potential re-birth. The refusal to replace trolleys with elevated or tunnel trains, eliminating the trolleys altogether and the final legitimate transit piece, the removal of the Inter-Urban lines. This straddled the city with empty buildings and no motivation to turn them into anything but gravel lots to park suburban cars upon.

There's a ton of unique story lines and historical references that continue to co-exist with us in our daily lives. In that way, Detroit is just as compelling as Chicago, Boston and New York City. We have a lot of things wrong about the Motor City but an open canvas to remake the city, the region and the landscape we call home for the better.

All that and more is possible if we heed history and stay away from brass taxes, whatever those are.