Detroit Is Ideal Target for Ripping

Detroit jokes are easy. Murder City. Cars and bars. Riots after the World Series. Snow on the Super Bowl. Jimmy Hoffa. Easy targets.

Hey, I do it. Everybody does it. It comes naturally, like “good news, bad news” jokes, or “he was so fat . . . “ jokes, even ethnic jokes. You feel guilty. You shouldn’t do it. But you do it.

So, Detroit takes its shots. Jim Murray once wrote that Detroit “should be left on the doorstep for the Salvation Army.” I happen to know Jim’s got friends and loved ones in Detroit. He doesn’t mean it; this is simply show biz. These are the jokes, folks. I loved a girl in San Francisco once. No, twice.

Every city gets it. Joe Garagiola once called Philadelphia the only place where the fans would boo children on an Easter egg hunt. Lou Holtz said that Fayetteville, Ark., “isn’t the end of the world, but you can see it from there.” Monte Clark, who coached the pro football Lions when I lived in Detroit, hailed from Kingsburg, Calif., a town “so small, the No. 1 industry there is taking bottles back to the store,” he said.

I guess my favorite city rip was when Murray wrote that there is nothing to do in Spokane, Wash., after 10 o’clock.

In the morning.

Poor old Detroit, though. It takes a licking and keeps on ticking. The movie, “Airplane!” came out, and Robert Hays was describing a gloomy saloon. “It was a rough place,” he said. “The seediest dive on the wharf, populated with every reject and cut-throat from Bombay to Calcutta. It was worse than Detroit.”

Ouch! Detroit has not developed an inferiority complex from all this, but just the same, its sense of humor has been sorely tested. Detroiters don’t mind a little teasing now and then, yet they can be as stubborn as the citizens of Meredith Willson’s River City, Iowa, who pronounce the name of their state Io-way, but insist upon no one else doing so. Detroiters and ex-Detroiters are entitled to kid Detroit. Anyone else is out of line.

When I moved to Detroit in 1981, I wrote a column saying that I thought the city seemed all right, but that it was hardly Paris, France. People came at me with tar and feathers. Go back where you came from, they said. Love it or leave it, they said. They found out my home town and picked on that. They invited me to return there. I felt like Ferdinand Marcos being chased from Manila.

As time went by, I discovered the riches of Michigan, and its residents developed a tolerance for me. Either that, or they built up an immunity. Anyway, I became acquainted with the beauty of the upper portion of the state and heard people wax rhapsodically about places I never got to see.

There was Mackinac Island, with its Grand Hotel, fudge shops and stone-skipping contests. There was the Upper Peninsula, so much of a world unto itself that the people there once petitioned in the 1980s to become the 51st state.

There was “the Thumb,” in the upper right-hand corner, so called because the boundaries of Michigan make it resemble the open palm of a human being’s right hand. There was Windsor, Canada, 5,280 feet from downtown Detroit, rife with gourmet restaurants and wild night life.

Detroit itself is rebuilding. Urban renewal became the thought for the year, after hard times shut down so many of the downtown businesses, including the flagship Hudson’s department store that was to Detroit what Macy’s was to New York. The arrival of the spage-age Renaissance Center was tempered because the place was architecturally over-designed, its shopping complex so complex, customers couldn’t make their way through the maze.

Things are picking up. For those who hunger for a little souvlaki at 4 in the morning, Greektown is expanding. The People Mover, a monorail system, transports consumers above city streets, and keeps drinkers out of their cars. Historic theaters and other landmark buildings are being restored, with financial assistance from civic-minded leaders such as Mike Ilitch, who sells pizza for a living and owns hockey’s Red Wings.

And then, there’s Tiger Stadium. A relic if there ever was one. Chipped paint. Dingy dugouts. Cramped locker rooms. Iron posts that obstruct spectators’ views.

Big shots ranging from the ballclub’s owner to the city’s mayor want to raze the obsolete structure and erect a stately pleasure dome, one with grass and a retractable roof. Tiger traditionalists, though, are outraged, and cling so desperately to their favorite recreation room, they organized a “ballpark hug” that enabled fans to link arms, all the way around the stadium.

There is no telling them that it is just a hunk of concrete and metal, no telling them that Cincinnati people can hardly remember Crosley Field, that Minneapolis people can watch a game comfortably now, in any weather. They know what they know. They want no one messing with what is theirs.

One of the things Detroit has is a pro basketball team, the Pistons. This team plays maybe 40 miles outside of town, so far away that some of their fans can drive to Ohio faster than they can drive to a Piston game.

This team is theirs, though, and they support it wholeheartedly. They have drawn as many as 61,000--you heard right, 61,000--for a basketball game. That’s sort of like conducting the Philharmonic at the Rose Bowl instead of at the Hollywood Bowl.

How many will attend today’s soiree between the Pistons and Lakers, for Game 3 of the National Basketball Assn.’s finals? Lots, that’s how many. Lots and lots of lots. And, most of them will side with Detroit. And, some of them will do California jokes. Airhead jokes. La-la land jokes. Surfer jokes. Freeway jokes. Me, too. Jokes can be funny.

I do not know if they will riot in the streets if Detroit takes the NBA championship here. The image of burning automobiles, the epilogue of the 1984 World Series, still sticks with Detroit, and enrages those who had nothing whatever to do with it.

Los Angeles, however, has earthquakes. Los Angeles has just as many faults as Detroit does, only with Detroit’s faults, the earth doesn’t move under your feet.

C’mon, laugh. These are the jokes, folks.