John U. Bacon

Last February, University of Missouri defensive end Michael Sam publicly declared he was gay – a first for a likely NFL draft pick. Last week, the St. Louis Rams drafted him in the last round – another first. But I believe the trickiest terrain is still ahead.

When Michael Sam told his University of Missouri teammates he was gay before last season, no one seemed to care very much. No one tweeted the news to the public, and Sam had a great season. It’s a safe bet that NFL teams – who know what kind of gum their prospects chew – already knew he was gay, too. But when Sam came out publicly, it changed the equation.

The NFL has already had gay players, so that isn’t new. But publicly declaring you’re gay is new – and so is the onslaught of media attention.

After Sam came out, he dropped from a projected fourth- or fifth-round draft pick to the seventh and final round. There’s no way to prove this, of course, but it’s hard to believe part of the reason wasn’t homophobia – though that term isn’t accurate. As the saying goes – often attributed to Morgan Freeman – “It’s not a phobia. You are not scared. You are an asshole.”

But the NFL teams that passed on Sam probably had other reasons, too. Yes, Sam was named the Defensive Player of the Year in the Southeastern Conference, the nation’s best – but he’s not a complete player. He’s great at sacking quarterbacks, but not at covering the run. At the NFL Combine, his numbers for speed, strength and agility weren’t that impressive.

But I’ll bet the biggest reason teams skipped him in the draft was a much bigger fear: Not homosexuality, but distractions. You don’t have to hang around football coaches very long before you hear them spit out their most hated word, “distractions,” about a hundred times.

Former Michigan All-American Larry Foote, who won a Super Bowl with the Pittsburgh Steelers, told me that in the NFL, just about everyone’s fast, strong and smart. So most games boil down to three or four mistakes. Whoever makes those few mistakes, loses.

This helps explain why coaches are maniacally focused individuals. It’s no surprise they expect their players to be that way, too.

The St. Louis Rams spared the league an embarrassing black eye by drafting Sam, a clearly qualified player. But a few eyebrows went up when Sam celebrated by kissing his boyfriend on live TV. Some people felt uncomfortable – but as ESPN’s Jamele Hill said, “Blacks and whites would still be drinking from separate water fountains if we waited for folks to be comfortable about social change.”

The vast majority of reactions to Sam being drafted – from fans, writers and NFL players – were unequivocally positive. Only a relative few embarrassed themselves with predictably ignorant responses.

And that’s why Sam’s next move was so befuddling. Having won the war, he decided to lose the battle – or his handlers did.  Soon after he was drafted, and was publicly welcomed by his teammates, he repeatedly said he wanted to be judged only as a football player, and keep his private life private. Fair enough. But then he signed a side deal with Oprah’s production company to star in a reality show based on his life, on and off the field – something the seventh-round draft picks aren’t typically offered.

Even commentators who had publicly supported Sam’s decision to come out felt compelled to point out the hypocrisy of Sam’s talking the talk, but walking the other way. Sam’s handlers and producers – who all stood to make millions off the reality show – had to be convinced by the team to drop the idea. And it apparently took a lot of convincing.

So, for now, things have settled down. Sam has gone back to what he claimed he always wanted to be: just a football player. He has plenty of work to do just to make the team, and even if he does, the average career for an NFL player is about three years. That’s why football players say the NFL doesn’t stand for “National Football League,” but “Not For Long.”

The trickiest terrain still lies ahead. And it’s not on the field, and it’s not with the fans, or even Sam’s teammates. It’s with his advisers, who threaten to plunder his chance to make a difference before his career even starts.

They need to let Sam be himself, and do his job. That’s enough for any man.

About the writer: Ann Arbor resident John U. Bacon is the author of the national bestsellers “Fourth and Long: The Future of College Football,” “Bo’s Lasting Lessons” and “Three and Out: Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines in the Crucible of College Football.” You can follow him on Twitter (@Johnubacon), and at johnubacon.com.

The Chronicle relies in part on regular voluntary subscriptions to support our publication of columnists like John U. Bacon. Click this link for details: Subscribe to The Chronicle. And if you’re already supporting us, please encourage your friends, neighbors and colleagues to help support The Chronicle, too!

John U. Bacon

Editor’s note: A shorter version of this column was published in the March 12, 2014 edition of the Wall Street Journal.

In the course of his 88 years, William Clay Ford, who died Sunday, captained Yale’s tennis team, earned an engineering degree and chaired Ford Motor Co.’s finance committee, which is enough for any lifetime.

But he will likely be remembered mainly as the owner of the Detroit Lions, during five woefully unsuccessful decades. Since he took over the franchise in 1964, the Lions have won exactly one playoff game, and remain the only NFL team to miss out on all 48 Super Bowls.

Ford’s critics claim he was a snob who didn’t care about the average fan, a fat cat who was more focused on profits than the playoffs.

False, and false.

The Anti-Henry

It is impossible to understand the Lions organization without first understanding the man who owned them. The sibling rivalries within the Ford family shaped the psyche of William Clay Ford Sr., which in turn determined his selection of coaches, his generous treatment of them, and his inability to win a Super Bowl before his time was done.

The decisions that seemed so mysterious to the average fan aren’t so mysterious when you understood the man who made them. Bill Ford Sr.’s family history suggests it was because he was determined to be the opposite of his cantankerous older brother, Henry II.

“Hank the Deuce” was an autocratic leader who traded on his family loyalties when convenient, drank too much, married three times and often behaved in a cold, calculating fashion.

Bill Sr. was the antithesis of all that, by design.

Much the way Henry I manipulated, humiliated and dominated his only son Edsel, Henry II tried to do the same to brothers Benson and Bill. For a time it looked as though Henry II’s blind ambition would grind up Bill the same way it had chewed up Benson.

In 1954, Henry II put his 29-year-old brother Bill in charge of the Continental Mark II, the second coming of their father’s trademark car, the Mark I. Henry II gave Bill all the tools he needed to succeed, including a generous budget, a good team and complete creative autonomy. Bill, a graduate of Yale’s engineering school, had the same knack for design that Edsel I did. He and his staff worked incredible hours to create a new standard in luxury driving.

As the landmark car was nearing completion, however, Henry II took Ford Motor Company’s stock public. Henry II feared telling potential stockholders their newest model would lose money, so they hiked the price, stripped Bill’s car of its best features and pirated them for the new Thunderbird – which was a great success.

After Henry II sabotaged the Mark II, Bill was demoralized. He took to calling his oldest brother “Lard Ass” and drinking hot gin at noon. “The trouble is,” Bill observed, “there is only room for one Ford at a time.”

According to Peter Collier’s classic book, “The Fords,” Bill’s drinking continued from 1955 to 1965, resulting in a “a ten year lost weekend.”

“What I needed most of all,” Bill said later, “was something to do.” For $4.5 million, he found it: buy the Detroit Lions. “I always wanted something that was all mine and mine to do. This was it.”

Bill Ford entered a clinic, quit drinking cold turkey, and devoted himself to his wife, his four children and his new football team. By the late ’60s, it was clear Bill Sr. had triumphed where Edsel and Benson had failed. He had managed to get off the fast track with his sanity and family intact, and soon earned a reputation around Detroit and the NFL as a sincere, humble and loyal man.

The contrast between the two brothers came into sharp focus on Thursday, March 13, 1980. According to Robert Lacey’s book, “Ford: the Men and the Machine,” Bill Sr. sat in his office at Ford World Headquarters, waiting to be named chairman by his oldest brother. Without any warning, however, Henry II came in to tell Bill that Philip Caldwell, not he, was about to be named chairman.

Bill finally let him have it. “You treat your staff like that, you treat your wives like that, and your children like that,” he spat, “and now you treat your brother in the same way.”

“I made a choice,” Henry II later acknowledged. “I married the company.”

Bill Sr. didn’t. He remained happily married to his wife, and headed the only close-knit Ford household since the turn of the century.

Two Myths

The only place where Bill Sr. kept failing was on the football field – but it wasn’t because he was an out-of-touch snob who cared more about cash than competition.

Quite the opposite. For a man born into the greatest business dynasty in U.S. history, you wouldn’t know it if you worked for him.

“Let me tell you something: he’s very down to earth,” former head coach Rick Forzano told me, echoing the comments of a dozen people interviewed on the subject. “Mr. Ford always used to get upset with me because I would never call him Bill – but he finally he gave up. He isn’t a snob by ANY stretch of the imagination.”

When Bill Ford came home from Yale for the summers, he worked on the River Rouge assembly line – and loved it. He married Martha Firestone, a Vassar student and heiress to the tire fortune, who was initially against “dynastic marriages” but couldn’t help falling for Bill. In contrast, while Anne McDonnell married Henry II because he was a Ford, Martha Firestone married Bill in spite of it. They were genuinely crazy about each other.

“She is so unpretentious it’s scary,” Forzano said of Martha Ford, who is now in charge of the Lions franchise. “My wife used to say, ‘The way she treats me, I think I’m the one who has all the money.’”

The couple worked hard to raise their children as normally as possible, and by all accounts they succeeded. Bill Ford Jr., for example, sent his two boys to Ann Arbor Huron, a public high school.

Bill Sr. found the perfect blend of informality and meritocracy in competitive athletics. As he said, “I always liked sports because they involved a democracy of talent.”

Nowhere was that more true than in Naval pre-flight school during World War II. As part of their training, hundreds of cadets – identified only by a number slapped on their backs – raced through a rigorous obstacle course designed by former heavyweight Gene Tuney.

Bill Ford finished first.

“Without anyone knowing my name or who I was or whether I had a dime,” he recalled years ago. “I did it on my own.” To the day he died, it was one of his proudest achievements.

According to the late Bill Talbert, a professional tennis star, “He was an excellent [tennis] player.”

Ford’s Yale teammates elected him captain of both the tennis and soccer teams, and he was also a fearless skier, occasionally courting serious injury. After he snapped his Achilles tendon twice in the mid-1950s, he turned his attention to the links, where he soon became a scratch golfer, scoring over a half-dozen hole-in-ones.

When Ford bought the Lions in 1964, his competitive fires were easily transferred to their Sunday games. Joe Schmidt, the Hall of Fame linebacker who coached the Lions from 1967-72, recalled a December game in Buffalo.

“It was a nasty day, rainy and muddy and cold,” he said. “We dropped two balls in the end zone, and our kicker missed three field goals within 20 yards.

“Well, Ford came walking in the dressing room and kicked a water bucket clear across the room. I said, ‘Too bad you weren’t kicking for us today.’ He shot me a look, but a few seconds later he had a little twinkle in his eye. That shows his sense of humor, but also his competitiveness.”

Those who knew Ford well said the same thing: he was a pleasant, unassuming man with a fierce desire to win.

“I’ve told people Mr. Ford would give up a lot of the monies he has to win,” Forzano said. “When we won up at Minnesota [in 1974] for the first time in eight years, we gave him the game ball. He’ll probably deny it, but this guy was crying. It excited me to no end, because I like emotional people, and Mr. Ford is an emotional person. If he’s not a competitor, then I’m a laundryman.”

“Mr. Ford can have anything he wants,” said Bill Keenist, the Lions’ longtime PR man, several years ago. “And what he wants is a Super Bowl.”

The Lions

It leads to the question: If Ford wanted to win as badly as the fans, and was willing to spend his money to do it, why did the Lombardi Trophy elude him?

In a nutshell, Ford was attracted to nice guys who finished third – or worse. And the reason for that was just as simple: he saw himself as one of them.

Since 1964, 17 different coaches have guided the Lions. Only five of them had been NFL head coaches prior, and only Dick Jauron was hired as an NFL head coach afterward. Most of those 17 coaches were Lions assistants who took over when the head coach was fired or resigned. In other words, serious national searches for proven talent rarely happened under Ford.

The former Lions head coaches have more in common than just a lack of experience and success. In a business where egos run rampant, conflict is constant and obsessiveness is the norm, the coaches Ford hired were generally likable, admirable men with bedrock values and a sense of perspective — with the notable exceptions of longtime right-hand man Russ Thomas and former president Matt Millen.

The chorus of respect for Ford within the organization and around the league is as uniform as the complete lack of praise for Thomas and Millen. Not one person interviewed offered a single kind word.

Thomas was as meddlesome as he was underqualified – sort of like Henry II, without the smarts. When Thomas retired after 43 years with the Lions, he was sufficiently disliked that the organization didn’t even attempt to hold his retirement ceremony at the Silverdome. Instead, they waited for their last away game in Atlanta, where Thomas was given an official send-off before 10,000 puzzled Georgians.

The most common theory is that, during Ford’s ten-year battle with alcoholism, Russ Thomas was the guy who made sure Ford got back safely to his home or office without incident. When Ford bought the Lions in 1964, his legendary loyalty prompted him to pledge to Thomas he would always have a job with the team.

As for Millen’s seven-year reign as president and CEO of the organization, the Lions posted a record of 31 wins against 84 losses – an average of 12 a year – the very worst in the league.

Millen wasn’t a nice guy who finished last. He was an utterly incompetent office bully who said so many stupid things he spawned websites devoted to his dumb quotes. He was so mean-spirited that even the secretaries, who never say boo to the press, felt compelled to complain to reporters about what an unbelievable jerk Millen was.

But those two exceptions prove the rule of the hundreds of genuinely nice people Bill Ford Sr. hired over his five decades at the helm, including the vast majority of his coaches. Bill Sr. tried to give men like Monte Clark, Wayne Fontes and Marty Mornhinweg the chance Henry II never gave him.

Bill Sr. has also been able to foster the kind of trusting, caring atmosphere with the Lions organization that Henry II could only dream of. Even those coaches and administrators who were let go by Ford speak very highly of him.

“Mr. Ford is as honest and generous a man as you can find anywhere,” Forzano said. “I feel so strongly about him, I’d go back and coach tomorrow for Mr. Ford if he asked me.”

“He is a very loyal and honest person,” Joe Schmidt said. “I think he gives you the opportunity to do your job, he doesn’t interfere, and he lets you follow through with your philosophy and what you think needs to be done – which is very unusual in the NFL these days.”

The Fords have never threatened to move the team, nor hijacked the taxpayers for a new stadium. They paid most of the bill for Ford Field themselves, they successfully fought to keep their traditional Thanksgiving Day game, and they’ve done it all very quietly.

Bill Sr.’s determination to be the anti-Henry II came with a price. Hiring and retaining nice guys who finished last was part of it.

But in the end, the abiding respect and affection for Bill Ford Sr. might have been worth more than the Lombardi Trophy.

About the writer: Ann Arbor resident John U. Bacon is the author of the national bestsellers “Fourth and Long: The Future of College Football,” “Bo’s Lasting Lessons” and “Three and Out: Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines in the Crucible of College Football.” You can follow him on Twitter (@Johnubacon), and at johnubacon.com.

The Chronicle relies in part on regular voluntary subscriptions to support our publication of columnists like John U. Bacon. Click this link for details: Subscribe to The Chronicle. And if you’re already supporting us, please encourage your friends, neighbors and colleagues to help support The Chronicle, too!

John U. Bacon

Congratulations! You not only survived that annual orgy of conspicuous consumption called the Super Bowl, you also survived the two weeks of endless stories without news that lead up to the big day.

And when the big game arrived, what was our reward? On the one day we actually look forward to watching TV ads, they were so bland and boring and just plain bad, we had no choice but to turn our attention to the actual football game.

Has it come to this?

But back to the point of the whole exercise: The Super Bowl ads.

To say a bunch of ads were disappointing is like complaining that your dentist’s routine cleaning is getting predictable. We usually don’t expect ads to do anything more than annoy us.

But with Super Bowl ads, all the hype raises our expectations, and all the money companies spend – a record four million dollars for a 30-second ad – only increases the pressure.

Trying to be funny is the one, surefire way to make sure you’re not. And, because the ads are so expensive, every executive at every company has got to throw in his two cents, which is trying to create comedy by committee. And that’s the second surefire way to be sure you ain’t funny.

MiO Fit sports drinks, for example, decided to pick the overweight, un-athletic comedian Tracy Morgan to pitch their product. Which is kind of like hiring Manti Te’o to shill for Match.com. Good luck with that.

Race car driver Danica Patrick is forever telling us she wants to be taken seriously, while she is forever taking millions of dollars to appear in GoDaddy.com’s sexist, sophomoric ads.

As a friend of mine once said, if you wear the clown nose and the clown hat and you honk the clown horn, sooner or later, you’re a clown.

At the other end of the spectrum, Subway spared itself the trouble of trying at all. The entire ad consisted of people trying to say “February,” or “Feb-RU-ary,” or “Febuany,” or something, and screwing it up. I want to say, “You had to be there,” but even the people who were there weren’t laughing.

Mercedes made a mildly clever ad featuring a Rolling Stones song and Willem Dafoe as the devil, and that gets a little sympathy from me. Simply by virtue of not stinking, it made my top five.

The marketing on Super Bowl Sunday hits you like a fire hose. Even if you skipped every TV commercial, you’d still get splashed with ads.

Corporate logos flashed in front of the sportscasters’ desk, and more popped up behind it. The coin toss was sponsored by Papa John’s Pizza, the game ball was brought to you by… someone selling something – I can’t recall – and after that you could enjoy the Pepsi Half Time.

They could not stop themselves. They ran commercials right before an extra point, then ran more right after it – a 20-to-1 ratio of ads to action.

The flood of commercialism was so great, the Mercedes-Benz Superdome just couldn’t take it. She’s breakin’ up! The 34-minute blackout provided the most peaceful portion of the event. It was also the most spontaneous, which showed us that, without their cue cards, the analysts are incapable of stringing together two coherent thoughts. Maybe CBS should try hiring a couple journalists.

Good news: Next year, the blackout will be brought to you by the good folks at DTE.

Lost in all this was a football game. As I suspect you’ve heard, the teams were coached by John and Jim Harbaugh, brothers from Ann Arbor. John, the older brother, has lived in Jim’s shadow his entire life. Jim’s team came back from a 28-6 deficit to pull within one play of winning. But the pass fell incomplete, and John’s team won. Good for him.

In the old days, the game stunk, but the game day experience was – dare I say it – almost pure, by today’s standards. Now, it’s the opposite – but you can’t see the game from the trees, which are brought to you by the good folks at Weyerhaeuser lumber company.

About the writer: John U. Bacon is the author of “Bo’s Lasting Lessons” and “Three and Out: Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines in the Crucible of College Football” – both national bestsellers. His upcoming book, “Fourth and Long: The Future of College Football,” will be published by Simon & Schuster in September 2013. You can follow him on Twitter (@Johnubacon), and at johnubacon.com.

The Chronicle relies in part on regular voluntary subscriptions to support our publication of columnists like John U. Bacon. Click this link for details: Subscribe to The Chronicle. And if you’re already supporting us, please encourage your friends, neighbors and colleagues to help support The Chronicle, too!

John U. Bacon

It’s been five days since the Super Bowl, just enough time to give us a little perspective on the whole thing. Was it a football game? A concert? A competition for the Clio Award? Or some bizarrely American combination of all three?

Let’s start with the least important: The football game. You might have caught bits of it, squeezed between the ads and the show. How could you tell when the game was on? Those were the people who ran really fast, and wore clothes.

For the Super Bowl’s first 30 years, most of the games were boring blowouts. I suspect even the players can’t recall the scores of those snoozers.

But the ads and the halftime shows were hard to forget, and often featured a member of the Jackson family having his hair ignited or her wardrobe mysteriously malfunction.

But lately, it’s been the other way around. Ten of the past 16 games have been barn burners – and the rest of the stuff is putting us to sleep.

This year’s Super Sunday delivered another exciting game, showcasing two big-time quarterbacks battling to the last second. The game even featured a first: one team scored a touchdown against its will. The New York Giants had the ball on New England’s 6-yard line, but they wanted to kill more time off the clock before they scored, so New England wouldn’t have any time left to mount a comeback.

But the Patriots didn’t want the Giants to do that, so they got out of the way like matadors avoiding a raging bull, and let Ahmad Bradshaw run into the endzone untouched. But he didn’t want to score, so he stopped on the one yard line, turned around, all but begging the Patriots to tackle him, and fell backwards into the endzone like Jacques Cousteau flipping into the ocean.

It was almost as strange as the halftime show, when Madonna put forth even less effort.

As a commentator, one of my favorite subjects to address is anything but Madonna. I’ve always considered her a mediocre singer and songwriter, whose main talent is somehow becoming rich and famous with less actual talent than the karaoke singers at your local bowling alley.

So it’s given me great pleasure to ignore her. But this time, I just can’t.

I used to think the worst Super Bowl halftime show had to be the one in 1989, when an Elvis impersonator and magician named Elvis Presto – get it? – managed to both befuddle and bore the crowd at the same time. Which, it now occurs to me, is actually a pretty difficult trick.

But no, Elvis Presto’s musical magic show was positively scintillating compared to Madonna’s performance. I discovered something worse than Madonna singing, and that’s Madonna lip syncing her way through her worn out repertoire and dull dancing. Let us never speak of it again.

The most authentic element of this year’s Super Sunday extravaganza – when the team with the ball did not want to score and the team that didn’t have the ball did not want to stop them, and the women paid millions to sing didn’t sing at all – was an advertisement, of all things, that they’d filmed weeks earlier.

Once again, Chrysler came through with the best two minutes of the entire event, this time thanks to Clint Eastwood.

When Eastwood said, “People are out of work and they’re hurting, and they’re all wondering what they’re gonna do to make a comeback. People of Detroit…almost lost everything,” he delivered the most honest line of the day – then followed that up with an equally convincing declaration: “We find a way through tough times. And if we can’t find a way, then we’ll make one…. This country can’t be knocked out with one punch. We get right back up again and, when we do, the world is gonna hear the roar of our engines.”

When he finished, I was so riveted I was ready to do some actual riveting.

So, a year from now, if you want to see a heartfelt performance, you’ll have to skip the game and the halftime show, and wait for the Chrysler ad.

For the second year in a row, no one did it better.

About the author: John U. Bacon is the author of “Three and Out: Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines in the Crucible of College Football.” 

The Chronicle relies in part on regular voluntary subscriptions to support our publication of columnists like John U. Bacon. Click this link for details: Subscribe to The Chronicle. And if you’re already supporting us, please encourage your friends, neighbors and colleagues to help support The Chronicle, too!

John U. Bacon

Forty-five years ago, the Super Bowl … wasn’t even the Super Bowl. They called it the NFL-AFL Championship Game, until one of the founders renamed it after watching his grandson play with a “High Bouncing Ball” – a super ball. Super ball – Super Bowl. Get it? And thus, an artificial event was born.

Tickets were just fifteen bucks for that first game – and they barely sold half of those, leaving some 40,000 empty seats in the Los Angeles Coliseum.

A 30-second ad cost only $42,000 – and they weren’t any different than the ads they showed the previous weekend. The half-time show featured three college marching bands – including one you might have seen from the University of Michigan.

Over the next couple decades, of course, the event became a veritable national holiday. Tickets now sell for thousands of dollars, and ads for millions. The game attracts more than 100 million viewers in the U.S. alone.

The hoopla surrounding the game has exploded, too. Instead of sticking to college marching bands for halftime, they branched out into other forms of entertainment. For reasons I’ll never understand, that included four appearances by a group called “Up With People!” Or, as the Simpsons called them, “those clean-cut young go-getters, Hooray for Everything!’”

“Up with People!”? As opposed to what, exactly? “Down With Humans!”? Besides, I don’t think we can afford to be that conclusive. “Up With People” sounds great – so long as we’re not talking all people.

One year they devoted the show to America’s 200th anniversary, followed by the 100th anniversary of Hollywood, the 40th anniversary of the Peanuts’ comic strip, then the 25th anniversary of … the Super Bowl itself. You kind of got the feeling they were running out of ideas.

That all changed in 1993, when Michael Jackson performed the half-time show, and his hair caught on fire, or his sister suffered a ‘”wardrobe malfunction” or maybe they conducted the OJ trial live on the 50-yard line – I’m sorry, but these events have started to blur for me.

The point is, the half-time show became a big deal. Such a big deal, in fact, that the ratings were higher for the show, than for the game. A survey showed most fans said they would rather miss a play than an ad. Style had officially triumphed over substance.

That might have been a good thing, because the game itself usually stunk. Of the first 30 Super Bowls, only seven – less than a quarter – were within a touchdown. But more than half the past 15 Super Bowls have been that close.

And that’s good, too, because now all the stuff around the game itself – the national anthem, the half-time shows, the ads – have become almost unwatchable.

On Sunday we heard Christina Aguilera butcher the Star Spangled Banner, which was bad enough. But then we heard the Black Eyed Peas butcher their own songs, which was even worse.

The only thing that matched the quality of the game – which was great, once again – was the now-famous Chrysler ad. It was as much about their car as it was about the city that spawned it. It certainly beat piling on the poor city, which every hack out there has already done. And it was better than the dopey old campaign, “Say Nice Things About Detroit.” Yes, and “Up With People!” too, while you’re at it.

No, the ad was authentic, it was serious, it was sincere. It was real.

When you look back at the checkered history of over-hyped Super Bowl games and shows, that understated ad stands out as something truly super.

About the author: John U. Bacon lives in Ann Arbor and has written for Time, the Wall Street Journal, and ESPN Magazine, among others. He is the author of “Bo’s Lasting Lessons,” a New York Times and Wall Street Journal business bestseller, and “Third and Long: Three Years with Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines,” due out this fall through FSG. Bacon teaches at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, and the University of Michigan, where the students awarded him the Golden Apple Award for 2009. This commentary originally aired on Michigan Radio.

John U. Bacon

The wonderfully named Zoltan Mesko was born and raised in Timisoara, Romania, right on the Hungarian border. Like his parents, Mihai and Elizabeta, Zoltan speaks both languages fluently.

When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, life improved dramatically for most people living behind the Iron Curtain – but not much for Romanians. His parents, both engineers, could not leave the country until they won Romania’s Green Card lottery – yes, they had one – in 1997, when Zoltan was ten.

They quickly discovered Hollywood’s depiction of America didn’t quite match their apartment in Queens. It was dirty and cramped – even for just three people – and too expensive, so they moved to Twinsburg, Ohio, right outside Cleveland.

Zoltan learned English in about two months. His parents took two years, but understanding American culture took a little longer.

When Mesko’s eighth-grade class played kickball inside the gym one day, he boomed the ball so high it shattered a ceiling light. The teacher gave him a choice: “You’re either paying for that light, or you’re playing football.”

It was an easy decision. At Mesko’s Thursday night soccer games, only the parents watched. But the Friday night football games were sold out, every time. And football had cheerleaders.

During warm-ups for a game his first year, Mesko’s coach casually mentioned that the other team’s punter had just gotten a college scholarship.

“Excuse me?” a mystified Mesko asked. “A scholarship – for punting?”

“Yeah, for punting,” the coach said, like it was the most natural thing in the world.

When Zoltan told his parents, they didn’t believe him. Who’d heard of such a thing?

But Mesko knew they couldn’t pay for college any other way, so he devoted himself to the singular skill of kicking a football as high and far as he could. Before his senior season, he’d become the nation’s top punting prospect. Indiana offered him a full scholarship, then Harvard, Yale and every other Ivy League school offered him admission and financial aid. It still didn’t make sense to his parents, but they were no longer going to question it.

Mesko grew up a Buckeye fan, but when his mom researched his options, they quickly dismissed the home state team. The Columbia coach told him, “We can’t guarantee you the NFL, but we can guarantee you Wall Street.” Mesko wanted a shot at both, so he enrolled at Michigan.

He graduated from Michigan’s business school in four years with an A-minus average, and will be awarded a master’s degree in sports management tomorrow. He also got the attention of NFL scouts, but almost blew it at the Senior Bowl in January, where he was distracted by the gifts and the interviews and the atmosphere, and kicked badly.

A month later, at the NFL combine in Indianapolis, Zoltan focused on just one thing: Kicking the football. In a one-hour work out with four other punters, he re-established himself as the best prospect.

On Saturday, he watched the NFL draft with his friends and his parents, who drove up for the day. During the fifth round, Mesko’s cell phone rang. “Unknown Caller,” it said. When he picked it up, he found himself talking to the New England Patriots’ head coach, Bill Belichick, who’s won three Super Bowls, and the owner, Robert Kraft. While they talked, ESPN announced that, “With the 150th pick, the New England Patriots select Zoltan Mesko of Michigan.” The room erupted.

This spring Mesko will sign a contract for the minimum wage. But, in the NFL, that’s not $7.25 an hour, but $320,000 a year. He will be the poorest player in the NFL, but probably the richest kid from Timisoara, Romania.

Taking it all in, Mesko said, “What a difference a decade makes.”

Only in America.

About the author: John U. Bacon lives in Ann Arbor and has written for Time, the New York Times, and ESPN Magazine, among others. His most recent book is “Bo’s Lasting Lessons,” a New York Times and Wall Street Journal business bestseller. Bacon teaches at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio; Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism; and the University of Michigan, where the students awarded him the Golden Apple Award for 2009. This commentary originally aired on Michigan Radio.

John U. Bacon

It’s hard to think of too many endeavors that receive more overblown attention than do sports. And within sports, nothing’s more overblown than the Super Bowl.

This time around, we’re getting endless stories about President Obama picking the New Orleans Saints – because … that matters? – a preview of the ads scheduled to run during the game, and several hundred articles analyzing the recuperation of Dwight Freeney’s sprained right ankle, and how that might affect national security. Or some such.

But in the midst of this morass are two stories worth telling.

The first is Kurt Warner. After graduating from Northern Iowa in 1994, not one NFL team drafted him. In other words, the NFL determined there were at least 222 players better than Kurt Warner that year alone.

Warner was tempted to pack it in. Instead, he started packing groceries in Cedar Falls, Iowa, while living in his girlfriend’s parents’ basement, serving as a graduate assistant coach for his alma mater, and working out in the hopes of getting another chance. He had to settle for the Iowa Barnstormers, a team that played in the doomed Arena Football League. But, what should have been a dead end proved to be a launch pad.

Arena Football’s funny rules required Warner to speed up his decision-making and his delivery – skills you need to succeed in the NFL. Three years later, one of the NFL’s worst teams, the St. Louis Rams, hired him as a backup. The next season, incredibly, the Rams won their first Super Bowl, and Kurt Warner won the league’s MVP – his first of three.

Last week, Warner retired with a pile of records, a pile of money, and a well-earned reputation for playing his best in the biggest games. He said he didn’t want to be known for being a clutch player, but a hard worker. He’ll have to settle for both.

Warner left the stage with quiet dignity – two qualities not often associated with NFL players – just as a younger quarterback was taking his place.

Drew Brees was one of the most celebrated high school quarterbacks in Texas, a state that celebrates high school quarterbacks more than it does Supreme Court justices. But Brees blew off the hometown Texas Longhorns to head north to Purdue, where he set just about every school record for passing. He took the Boilermakers to their first Rose Bowl in over three decades, and was named not just an Academic All-American, but the Academic All-American of the Year.

But in the NFL, Brees struggled his first three seasons. Soon after he finally found his rhythm, he also found a new city to play in: New Orleans, which had been ravished by Hurricane Katrina the year before. The Saints’ home, the Superdome, had become the very symbol of the disaster, and the owners were considering moving the team for good.

Enter Drew Brees, who not only led the historically pathetic Saints to the playoffs, he spent his money and his time creating his own foundation, which restores schools, parks and playgrounds, in a city desperate for all three. A recent Sports Illustrated cover story said Brees was “as adored and appreciated as any [athlete] in an American city today.”

It’s hard to argue with that, and even harder to root against Drew Brees.

So, if you missed Kurt Warner, enjoy Drew Brees while you can. Players like this don’t come along very often.

About the author: John U. Bacon lives in Ann Arbor and has written for Time, the New York Times, and ESPN Magazine, among others. His most recent book is “Bo’s Lasting Lessons,” a New York Times and Wall Street Journal business bestseller. Bacon teaches at Miami of Ohio, Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, and the University of Michigan, where the students awarded him the Golden Apple Award for 2009. This commentary originally aired on Michigan Radio.