In Detroit, loving the Lions has rarely been about winning. For author, comedian and Motor City native Joel Walkowski, it became something much deeper: a family inheritance, a language shared with his father, and eventually a way to understand his own struggles with addiction, recovery, disappointment and resilience. Walkowski's engaging new book, "Honolulu Blues: How Loving a Losing Football Team Created a Winning Man," weaves the tortured history of the NFL's Detroit Lions into an intensely personal story about what it means to keep showing up when life — or your football team — refuses to cooperate.
Walkowski grew up almost in sync with Barry Sanders, whose first NFL game fell on Joel’s third birthday. Trips to the Silverdome with his Lions-obsessed father came with elaborate rituals, while the franchise itself supplied an endless procession of near-misses, bizarre defeats and organizational dysfunction. As Joel’s own life began to unravel, the parallels became uncanny: the Matt Millen-era Lions bottomed out at 0-16 as his addiction deepened; Matthew Stafford’s arrival coincided with the slow process of becoming functional again; and the Dan Campbell/Jared Goff revival unfolded alongside Joel’s more serious work in recovery.
This week, Walkowski joins to explore why Barry Sanders became something of a personal “higher power,” why generations of Lions fans learned to expect heartbreak, and how football became the connective tissue between father and son. Most poignantly, he recounts watching Detroit’s long-awaited 2023 playoff breakthrough while caring for his dying father — and discovering that after a lifetime spent waiting for the Lions to win, perhaps the real payoff had been there all along.
