DETROIT – As you would well expect, Detroit has been surrounded by Honolulu Blue, but why did a northern city like Detroit adopt a tropical color for its football team?
The Detroit Lions are a huge part of the city’s history.
Bill Keenist works for the NFL, but he was the longtime vice president for communications. He’s still pretty much the team historian. To learn more about why the Lions chose blue, you need to go back to the beginning.
In 1928, the Detroit Lions started as the Portsmouth Spartans, based out of Portsmouth, Ohio. The city sits about halfway between Cincinnati and Charleston, West Virginia. It wouldn’t stay there for long and headed north in 1934.
“A radio executive, G.A. Richards, who ran WJR, which was an NBC affiliate at the time, wanted to bring pro football to Detroit and purchased the team,” Keenist said.
Detroit already had the Tigers and in keeping with the city’s big cat theme, the team’s new owners called them the Lions. The original Lions logo was yellow.
“It’s made such a renaissance in the last few seasons,” Keenist said. “People, sports fans in particular and Detroiters specifically, are so nostalgic.”
While we often talk about the Red Wings being an Original Six Team, we don’t talk as much about the Lions being one of the NFL’s original eight.
“The Lions are considered among that group that built the foundation for pro football,” Keenist said.
The Spartans’ colors were purple and gold, the same as the Minnesota Vikings, even though they wouldn’t come along until 27 years later.
Richards was looking into picking a new color and Honolulu Blue was in the mix because he reportedly had taken a trip to Hawaii and wanted a shade of blue to match the Pacific Ocean.
“Mr. Richards, obviously wanting to create an identity unique to the Lions, came up with these color schemes,” Keenist said. “One of the great players of that era, Glen Presnell, was in his office innocently one day, and Mr. Richards had the color swaths on his table and invited Glen and his wife in, I believe. And they loved Honolulu Blue.”
It’s been Honolulu Blue and Silver pretty much ever since. There were two years of red and white, but that’s because they hired a coach from the Indiana Hoosiers who brought the colors with him.
Keenist loves all of this -- the stories, the players, the history -- and that’s why it meant so much for him to be there last Sunday night to see a different kind of Lions’ history.
“What overwhelmed me, not surprised me, was the sheer, unadulterated joy, emotion, love -- and that’s not stretching it -- of the fans,” Keenist said. “And I’m getting goosebumps right now, because that is the beauty of sport and what it does to a community, especially like Detroit.”