Hi Detroit,

People ask me how I can be a hardcore fan of a pro sports team. They can’t process the devotion of a professional sports fan, because we’re just cheering for laundry, right? Not some tradition-steeped money-printing golden pyramid of virtuousness like a big time university. It’s hard to explain to them, but I can tell you.

See, I love you Detroit, and you’re right, I’ve never even lived there. I did grow up in your shadow – that far-ranging auto industry shadow – that fed my family and my friends families and everything in our town to a large extent. We didn’t soar as high as you did and our fall was faster, sooner, harder.

We traveled to you, but we weren’t exactly tourists. We were students. Our families took us to the Corner and we drove down deserted downtown streets, and we asked where the people were at. We didn’t understand why it wasn’t like trips to Chicago, with families crowding the avenues and bright, shining storefronts. The elders talked about how it used to be and we wondered what happened and over the years we learned. Your boarded up businesses taught us about the real race issues in America, the ones they gloss over in middle school history. We researched riots and politics and you planted the seed that drives our politics today – whichever way you lean.

And at the heart of those trips was the Corner. It smelled, looked and felt like the harness raceway back home. Instead of half-person jockeys in carts there were beer vendors and peanuts, panhandlers and Travis Fryman. It was the time you got to stay up til 1 AM with no consequences and see a city a night.

What I like about you, Detroit, is that you’re honest in your lies. When you have the worst professional football roster in history, you lose every god damned game. If you can’t hit a ball inside but can’t bring yourself to lay off, you swing at three straight pitches in the dirt. When the taxes can’t pay for the promises, you let the buildings rot in full view. If you need money, you ask. It isn’t always honorable and it’s rarely pretty but it’s not hidden. It’s there for the world.

What I love about you, though, is that when you’re good you don’t hide it. You break 9 tackles in one run, catch touchdown passes in triple coverage, win basketball championships scoring less than football teams, inflict grave bodily harm on quarterbacks, throw 101 in the 8th, crack jokes at first, play hunches and tinker with the lineup, build monster cars that make grown men weep 40 years later, manufacture an army to save Europe, and build a giant statue of a fist – because – Fuck You, that’s why.

They are going to spend a lot of time this weekend talking about your troubles and how these freak athletes are going to save you and people will bat around their theories of revitalization. But you don’t need a savior. You don’t need a superhero or a light rail or a new bridge. None of that is going to “save” anything. You need people that believe, wherever they are, and you need smart, talented people that work. Your teams aren’t you – they are now the ideal you strive for. Talented machines built by patient architects. The equals of anyone they meet on the field.

You aren’t the American underdog, or the realization of the American dream, or the American Paris, or the symbol of the broken American promises – you are America, every triumph and failure. And you’ll always be more than just laundry to me.