Bad Boys and Birdsong: Heroes of Detroit
During the 2004 NBA Finals, in a match-up between the Los Angeles Lakers and the Detroit Pistons, Jimmy Kimmel commented: “I’m glad the Lakers are winning because, besides the fact that I’m a Lakers fan, I realize they’re gonna burn the city of Detroit down if the Pistons win, and it’s not worth it.” It is impossible to escape the irony of this statement: Kimmel’s show was, and still is, shot in Los Angeles, a city torn apart by riots in 1992 (following the acquittal of police officers involved in the beating of Rodney King) and 1943 (in response to conflicts between young Mexican-American residents of the city and United States servicemen). Still, the casual mention of events that had scarred Detroit in the past incited outrage.
The Riot of 1943, which erupted after heightening war-time anxieties, the northward migration of southerners looking for factory work, and anger at years of mistreatment and marginalization of Detroit’s Black citizens, left nine white and 25 Black citizens dead. In 1967, The 12th Street Riot, which began after a raid on an unlicensed bar, broke the tension of years of racist policing practices and efforts by local government and homeowners’ associations to prevent the integration of neighborhoods and schools. The riot resulted in forty-three deaths, many injuries, over sixteen hundred instances of arson, and more than seven thousand arrests. Kimmel apologized many times over for his comments—in 2006, he even hosted a series of Jimmy Kimmel Live! tapings in Detroit.
The representation of Detroit as a smoldering ruin, a shell of a once-great city, is not new, and is certainly not a unique creation of Kimmel’s. Tired metaphors for Detroit’s decline abound in written as well as visual media—among the most popular of such choices is the presentation of Detroit as a “war zone,” —and rhetoric surrounding the city is often sprinkled with racist and classist dog whistles. Nearly seventy-eight percent of Detroit’s over 620,000 occupants are Black. The city is the fifth poorest in the United States. “Should Detroit be abandoned and left as a monument to America’s failures?” asked one Quora user; “Is Detroit Dead?” asked another. To ask these questions of a city occupied by more than half a million people is a blatant act of verbal aggression toward those inhabitants. When it is taken into account that those occupants are nearly all poor, people of color, or both, such disrespect takes on an even more sinister tone.
Despite the near-constant degradation Detroit has faced since deindustrialization began in the 1950s, the city has exhibited incredible resilience and remains a vibrant urban landscape where rich artistic traditions have taken root. Famously home to the Motown music scene and the site of the techno genre’s creation, Detroit lays claim to the legacies of artists such as Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder, The White Stripes, and Eminem. The sports culture—most recently on display during the Detroit Lions’ run in the 2024 NFL playoffs—has created a base of incredibly loyal fans, and the city boasts eleven Stanley Cup championships, three NBA championships, three WNBA championships, and four World Series championships. The Detroit Institute of Art houses murals by Diego Rivera, as well as works by contemporary artists such as Kehinde Wiley. Detroit and its citizens have created their own cultural practices, crafted their own mythologies, created legends and heroes from ordinary people and taken care to properly memorialize those lost. Few cities in the United States have been more maligned in public opinion.
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Poet Erika Meitner invites us to contemplate the negative images of Detroit the public is often presented with. “Closed fifty-four years,” begins her poem “Outside the Abandoned Packard Plant,” published in The New York Times Magazine in early 2015. She continues:
the crickets
are like summer, are like night
in a field, but it is daytime. It is August.
There is no pastoral in sight — only
Albert Kahn’s stripped factory, acres
of busted and trembling brick facade
so vast there must be thousands
of crickets rubbing their wings
beneath makeshift thresholds of PVC
piping tangled in ghetto palm saplings
growing through a deflated mattress top
tossed over rusted industrial metal the shape
of an elephant dropped on its knees
dispensing invisible passengers into
moats of rubble dappled with what?
Meitner does not shy away from the imagery of degradation—words like “rubble” and “rusted” and “stripped” are nestled into the stanzas. But the poem will not allow the reader to assume the factory or the city is uninhabited, or even uninhabitable. Resisting the cliché of “this place has good bones” and refusing the dehumanization of drawing connections between the musical bugs and city’s remaining residents, Meitner forces us to consider the profits and costs of industry, of the ownership and stewardship of urban space, and of the ways we describe cities affected by major financial and societal upheaval.
Whereas Meitner relies on imagery to guide readers through their already-existing thoughts of the city, Detroit-raised poet Jamaal May directly appeals to the reader to cast aside what they think they know about his home city, to instead listen to dispatches of a man who has actually lived within its limits. After a simple, direct epigraph—“For Detroit”—the poem begins:
There are birds here,
so many birds here
is what I was trying to say
when they said those birds were metaphors
for what is trapped
between buildings
and buildings. No.
The birds are here
to root around for bread
the girl’s hands tear
and toss like confetti. No,
I don’t mean the bread is torn like cotton,
I said confetti, and no
not the confetti
a tank can make of a building.
The poem resists the pull of embracing the ruin-porn imagery that many associate with the city, of sliding from scenes of the everyday into those that evoke trauma, while taking aim at those who choose to focus commentary about Detroit on violence and its wake. Confetti is just confetti, birds are just living, singing neighbors for whom the community’s girls provide bits of bread. There is life and sustenance and impractical bits of beauty.
There are birds here—standing in the city, the poem’s speaker forces the reader to, if they are “here” in Detroit, bear witness to the life that flies through the city. For those not “here,” those looking in, May asks them to listen not only to the voices speaking ill of Detroit, but also to the birdsong echoing between its buildings. There are birds here. The statement does not need to be qualified or bolstered by anything. It stands alone. It stands in spite of articles that question whether the city may disappear altogether, or pronounce Detroit already dead, and photography collections that seek to deliver its eulogy.
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The Detroit Pistons’ hopes of being taken seriously as an NBA franchise had all but died as the 1980s came to pass. After arriving in the city from Fort Wayne, Indiana in 1957, the team spent the entirety of the 1960s below .500; save a short period of success in the mid-70s, the Pistons were a joke in the league with little apparent hope of getting better. Released in 2014 as part of ESPN’s 30 for 30 film series, the Zak Levitt-directed documentary Bad Boys traces the Pistons’ journey from mediocrity to clinching back-to-back NBA championships in 1989 and 1990.
I became fascinated with the Bad Boys as a teenager, watching highlight reels of Bill Laimbeer and Rick Mahorn planting elbows and punches on all-time greats, videos of Dennis Rodman throwing his body across the floor for every loose ball, even when the Pistons held considerable leads. What I found to be most interesting about the Bad Boys and their lore, however, was not just the unchecked aggression and enthusiasm with which they played, but the fervor with which opposing teams and cities hated them, and the genuine dedication with which the city of Detroit loved them.
A team often forgotten in the transition between the “NB80s” domination of the Showtime Lakers and Larry Bird-led Celtics and the early-nineties seasons that served as the stage for Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls’ monopoly on success in the league, the two-time champion Pistons were hated by nearly everyone outside of Detroit. Led by Thomas and fellow future hall-of-famer Joe Dumars, accompanied by the perfectly villainous Bill Laimbeer and a Dennis Rodman not yet familiar with being tabloid fodder, the team’s identity hinged on hard work, harsh physicality, and resilience: that is, their grit.
This style of play earned the Pistons a reputation as a team that played dirty basketball—and this was not completely inaccurate. Archival footage in the documentary shows Bill Laimbeer, Rick Mahorn, Dennis Rodman, and other Pistons engaging in plays that range from “love taps” to actual instances of assault. In one clip, Laimbeer blatantly strikes an opponent in an away-from-the-ball play (“Listen to this slap!” urges the announcer). In another, Mahorn body-checks a young Charles Barkley to the ground. However, the Bad Boys chose to embrace this image after it was thrust upon them, as they were painted as the villains of the league and labeled “thugs” by the press. Levitt shows us the moment the team decided to become the aggressors the league wanted them to be, to “wear the black hat,” as Laimbeer described. In a current-day interview woven into the documentary, Isiah Thomas remembers: “We said ‘okay we’ll be like the Oakland Raiders—the old Oakland Raiders’,” an NFL team once notorious for their ruthless, take-no-prisoners style of play.
In the documentary, sportswriter Bryan Burwell comments, “From a fan standpoint, they were saying ‘I don’t care if you’re a miserable, dirty, lowdown dog, just as long as you’re my miserable, dirty, lowdown dog.’” In another scene, a replica of Laimbeer’s jersey is destroyed at the half-court line of the Boston Garden as the crowd screams their approval.
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Meitner’s poem does not allow us to halt at simple scenes of degradation, forcing readers to peer into the images of what we’ve been told to disregard, to loathe. She refuses to let change be automatically be dismissed as death, showing us the life that breathes within Kahn’s plant, as well as that that rages on outside the complex’s walls:
These crickets, their industrious wings
mimicking silence and song, lonely
background, until one beat-up maroon
Buick flies down Concord, accelerating
like the road just keeps going, like he’ll
actually get away with whatever he’s doing,
then two white cop cars, Doppler sirens
shrieking and braiding, but it is peaceful
other than that — you might think
you’re in the country as in not the city
as in wilderness under the bridge that used to say
MOTOR CITY INDUSTRIAL PARK
and now just punched out eyes and ARK
Hope and the persecution of hope abound in these final lines, in the man fleeing the police and the peace persisting despite the sirens, in the “actually” that lets us know the man will not “get away with whatever he’s doing,” the poem’s refusal to identify him as innocent or guilty, to show him as anything but pursued. The Detroit of May’s poem is no less complicated than Meitner’s, asserting joy in the face of negative rhetoric:
I mean the confetti
a boy can’t stop smiling about
and no his smile isn’t much
like a skeleton at all. And no
his neighborhood is not like a war zone.
I am trying to say
his neighborhood
is as tattered and feathered
as anything else,
as shadow pierced by sun
and light parted
by shadow-dance as anything else,
but they won’t stop saying
how lovely the ruins,
how ruined the lovely
children must be in that birdless city.
May nearly begs us to believe in this city, this center of life and culture and community from which so much vibrant history and art springs, in which poets and poetry bloom against the backdrop of a living city disregarded by the people and institutions that continue to dismiss and exploit it, that continue to lament a thing still living and imagine what it could look like if its character were overhauled entirely.
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Save Laimbeer, the Pistons’ most important players were Black and came from socioeconomically disadvantaged households: Isiah Thomas, Dennis Rodman, and Joe Dumars were quickly beloved in Detroit and served as key pieces in the Pistons’ journey toward back-to-back rings. After defeats by the Celtics in the Eastern Conference finals and the Lakers in the NBA finals, the Bad Boys were able to bring the first championship to the unlikeliest of cities in 1989 after defeating the Lakers in the rematch of the previous year’s championship contest. The joy in the footage of that first championship parade on Woodward Avenue is palpable: the bright faces of the crowd, the players atop floats with brooms celebrating their four-game sweep. Perhaps the sweetest moment of the celebration comes when head coach Chuck Daly asks the crowd “These are some bad boys, aren’t they folks?” Following the crowd’s cheers, he asks another question: “And what about you all, are you bad fans?” Somehow, the cheers get even louder.
Despite a path marked with several obstacles—including the Michael Jordan-fronted Chicago Bulls—the Bad Boys managed to bring a second title home to Detroit. This one proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that it wasn’t a fluke, that cheap shots and bad calls could not be blamed. Of course, the second win would precede the decline, the slow breakdown of the beautiful machine that dug up the gold in the first place. The footage from the locker room does not foreshadow any of this—it’s all hugs and champagne and grins from ear to ear.
The Bad Boys were defeated by the Chicago Bulls in the 1991 Eastern Conference Finals, being swept in just four games. Levitt moves us through the highlights of the series, mostly clips of Michael Jordan making undeniably excellent plays, with strong support from Scottie Pippen. In the final moments of the final game, the Pistons left the court and walked to the locker room, denying the newly minted Eastern Conference champions the chance to shake hands and experience the passing of the torch. This incident would stain the Pistons’ reputation—and Isiah Thomas’s in particular—for years to come. In the documentary, when asked by a reporter if he thought their defeat of the Pistons would lead the basketball world to celebrate “the end of dirty basketball,” Michael Jordan replied: “I hope so—except for Detroit. I mean, you saw what type of class they had.”
It would be easy to agree with Jordan if Levitt hadn’t been so diligent in showing us how Detroit was received by host cities, how other players described the team’s players and dynamic as they toiled and worked toward their two championships. The Pistons became what the league expected and wanted a team from Detroit to be. They were thugs who had to be put in their place. Outclassed. People who needed to go back home. Playing the victim.
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In the final lines of Meitner’s poem, the reader’s eye is guided toward the potential, the plenty, that pours from a piece of landscape we are first invited to see as a relic of past, celebrated prosperity: “the bridge that used to say / MOTOR CITY INDUSTRIAL PARK / and now just punched out eyes and ARK.” In May’s, our ears are directed to the statements of ignorant onlookers, the misguided things that “they won’t stop saying”: “how lovely the ruins, / how ruined the lovely / children must be in that birdless city.” People will think what they think of Detroit. Some will take the time to explore, to hear the joyful voices and music and birdsong that twist through its streets. Some will never give it a chance.
“There’s one thing you have to remember about the Bad Boys,” cautions the voiceover that accompanies the 30 for 30 film’s final moments. “If you still can’t stand them, still don’t respect them, well, guess what? They don’t give a —.” The screen fades to black. Then so much music.