I was listening to WXYT's afternoon drive-time show called The Sports Inferno last week when I became amused with what I heard from New York native /reborn Detroiter Mike Valenti.

"Let's get down to brass taxes..." Valenti said as he began one of his legendary rants about whatever. Don't get me wrong --I enjoy Valenti, because he is like me and simply tells you how he sees it without any holdout -- but he's the classic example of a sports fan with a radio show, a point he'll readily admit. There's nothing wrong with it, either.

What amused me is the 'brass taxes' thing. It's brass tacks. This is an example of how time changes history in subtle ways. Brass tacks was a way of measuring cloth, linen or anything else by the yard on a counter. A person would come in and ask for so much of this or that, and the actual cost would be determined by placing the material on the counter against the ruler held in place with brass tacks, thus the phrase, "Let's get down to brass tacks."
Here's another one: Toe The Line. How many times have you heard it repeated as Tow The Line? Or the oft-heard phrase, "It's a dog-eat-dog world." I've heard that catch-phrase repeated many times as 'Doggy-dog' world.

Here's why I bring this up: History is important. It shows us the right and wrong in the world before us, thus the coined phrase, "Those who do not heed history are doomed to repeat it."
I'm writing a prep basketball history book and I'm waist-deep in the city of Detroit right now. Among the interesting facts I've learned from basketball research as it relates to metro Detroit? The 30-year absence by Detroit's public school teams from the Michigan High School Athletic Association's annual boys' basketball tournament from 1931-1961. The seed of racial mistrust in Detroit is one planted long before riots and failed urban renewal.

Here's another one: School sports might have saved the city before and after the 1967 riots. The divisive busing issue was so strongly contested that many coaches and players from that era were literally scared to travel outside of their neighborhoods, but school sports was a respected rite of passage, almost an institution in Detroit. Rival schools of various religious and ethnic backgrounds might not have gotten along on any day -- save for game day. It was on these days they respected one another, played hard and shook hands after the game. That very well might have kept the city from an all-encompassing implosion that would have made the '67 riots look like a small camp fire easily doused with canteen water.

If you think the Detroit PSL doesn't have friends, consider the Catholic League fought long and hard alongside the PSL schools in the 1970s to get millage and bond requests passed. What would Detroit's schools look like today had it not been for a lil' neighborly love 30 years ago?

And what of the other history not so easily interwoven into prep sports?

The decision to plow through neighborhoods with concrete freeways did little but speed up fears of intermixed, racially-charged neighborhoods. If you look at the pictures of football and basketball, schools and neighborhoods radically changed within a few years. Today our freeways in Detroit do little but expose the worst homes and buildings within eyeshot, because really, who wants to live next to a freeway and have to leave your garage at 55 miles an hour? When's the last time you heard a neighborhood benefited from have an eight-lane ribbon of concrete driven through its heart? And if you think a freeway is bad, what about displacing the many for a hulking auto complex -- remember Poletown?

Finally, I've learned that while Kwame Kilpatrick and Coleman Young weren't great leaders, neither were a lot of their white predecessors, like Charles Bowles, Louis C. Miriani and a laundry list of leaders remembered for their poor decisions as much as any positive accomplishments. The decision to allow auto companies to erect massive auto factories in the middle of neighborhoods without a lick of civil engineering 80-90 years ago has continually crippled a lot of potential re-birth. The refusal to replace trolleys with elevated or tunnel trains, eliminating the trolleys altogether and the final legitimate transit piece, the removal of the Inter-Urban lines. This straddled the city with empty buildings and no motivation to turn them into anything but gravel lots to park suburban cars upon.

There's a ton of unique story lines and historical references that continue to co-exist with us in our daily lives. In that way, Detroit is just as compelling as Chicago, Boston and New York City. We have a lot of things wrong about the Motor City but an open canvas to remake the city, the region and the landscape we call home for the better.

All that and more is possible if we heed history and stay away from brass taxes, whatever those are.

~ T.C. Cameron is the author of Metro Detroit's High School Basketball Rivalries, due August 2009 from Arcadia Publishing.

Did you notice it?

Larry Foote, the former Michigan Wolverine, gave his prep alma mater some serious holla' when the Pittsburgh Steelers' defense introduced themselves in the first quarter of their 27-23 triumph over Arizona in Super Bowl XLIII. The overwhelming majority of players who introduce themselves -- 44 offensive and defensive starters in all -- make mention of the college or university they played football for.

Not Foote. When the heavy hitter's face emerged, his quote was simple: "Larry Foote....Detroit Pershing...Doughboy."

Of course, most of us in metropolitan Detroit know the Public School League (PSL) players from Detroit who populate the rosters in the NBA and NFL are fiercely loyal to their Detroit upbringing. Many of these players mention the PSL like it's a badge of honor on their athletic resume. It's one of the reasons I cringe when I hear suburbanites say things like, "They should just bulldoze Detroit and start over."

Try saying that to the community at Seven Mile and Ryan in Detroit. To anyone who thinks high schools in the city don't have a spirit or energy comparable with the schools in the 'burbs, I point to schools in the city like Pershing. In New York City, the word Pershing is commonly associated with Park and 42nd Street -- Grand Central Station and that intersection's name -- Pershing Square.

In Detroit, Pershing is synonymous with a football and basketball tradition swathed in royal blue and gold.

CHARLIE'S NOT SORRY: That's two championship rings for former Detroit Lion and standout Eastern Michigan University quarterback Charlie Batch. Of course, Batch is a local legend in the Pittsburgh area, where he grew up, but Batch was also one of the outstanding football players to ever toss the pigskin in Ypsilanti, Michigan.

MAC DADDY: Did anyone else take notice that three of Pittsburgh's four quarterbacks are Mid-American Conference products?Ben Roethlisberger played at Miami University andByron Leftwich was a member of Marshall's MAC championship teams. Batch makes the Mid-American hat trick possible.

There are, in fact, 22 players on the Steeler roster (active, injured/reserve or practice) from colleges in the Great Lakes, including two from the Great Lakes Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (GLIAC).

A considerable piece of Detroit's prep sports history is dying today -- Tiger Stadium is falling at the hands of de-construction crews and an army's worth of earth movers and bulldozers.

I thought I was over it. I told myself I was ready to move on after nine years of seeing the ole' ballpark shuttered. Then I heard the word yesterday on countless news bulletins and it took my breath away. I'm proud to consider Ernie Harwell a friend. He was extremely helpful in pointing me in the right direction to getting published, and he put me in touch with Paul Carey to write my book's foreword. Therefore, I pray I'm wrong when I say I don't think Ernie's best efforts will save the portion of the stadium he dearly wants to spare. Today is probably the beginning of the end of Tiger Stadium's days at 2121 Trumbull Avenue.

Tiger fans are buzzing nationwide via e-mail threads and Internet chat rooms about the stadium's demise. Both Detroit dailies began publishing online photos yesterday of the first, substantial walls to crumble from the weight of the wrecking ball. Even longtime Red Wing fans feel the sting. Those of us, myself included, who remember watching the old Olympia Stadium on Grand River Avenue at Graw fall from grace in 1986 are watching with the same, pained expression we displayed 22 summers ago.

But something more than the hallowed halls that once housed Hank Greenberg, Ty Cobb, Bobby Layne and Joe Louis is being lost. Detroit's considerable prep sports history is waving goodbye to an address that has hosted some of the most memorable prep football games, championship baseball games and a statewide All-Star baseball game.

The Goodfellows Game was a classic that was played at Tiger Stadium after the Lions and Packers battled on Thanksgiving day. The champions of the Catholic League and the Detroit Public School League, then better known as the Metropolitan League, battled for bragging rights, Top 10 rankings and potential state championships on Tiger Stadium's floor. In the spring, both the Catholic League and PSL hosted their respective league championship games in baseball. In the early summer after the state championship games, the state's best baseball players were seeded in the annual East-West All-Star Game.

The Denby Tars, Pershing Doughboys or University of Detroit High Cubs often locked horns with De LaSalle's Pilots, Catholic Central's Shamrocks, the Rustics of Redford St. Mary's or St. Ambrose in the Goodfellows Game. Many times the winner of that game was voted to a high ranking in the season-ending Associated Press poll, and sometimes the winner was declared the state champion by one of the three Detroit dailies from the 1940s and 50s.

In baseball, Birmingham Brother Rice, the Fighting Irish of Harper Woods Notre Dame or Dearborn Divine Child have been regulars in the CHSL title tilts. Detroit Western's Cowboys or the Mustangs of Detroit Mumford have been multiple-time participants from the PSL side. Frank Tanana, Frank Clouser and Frank Sumbera have been among the many ball park franks to have seen games in the first person at Tiger Stadium.

Tiger Stadium belongs to the Tigers and their faithful fans. The Lions and their long-suffering legions have a considerable stake in the stadium's last days, too. But playing a game at Tiger Stadium for your high school was the goal of many a prep football or baseball player. Wearing a school letter jacket to a Lions game or a Tiger opener was oft-seen as well.

Here's to hoping the stories, memories and traditions will outlive our historic park's fall from grace. Sadly, the dreams we all shared, long shuttered for all of us, officially died forever yesterday.

(1952 Goodfellows Game program courtesy of Detroit Catholic High School League)

~ T.C. Cameron is the author of Metro Detroit's High School Football Rivalries, due August 25th, 2008 from Arcadia Publishing

My wife and I returned last night from New York City and the weekend's 37th annual American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA) conference. I moderated a panel on successful blogging Saturday at the Grand Hyatt, connected to historic Grand Central Station. I take great pride that a healthy number of professional writers represented our metro in New York so admirably. New York City is an unbelievable town, it's my favorite U.S. city to visit and I'm happy to say we added a little something to the journalism world from Detroit.

But I'm thankful to be home, too. It was nice to be on Orchard Lake Road at midnight last night with no honking horns, cabbies with guard rails on all four sides and streets clogged with pedestrians and trash in equal numbers. I'm thankful for green grass. There's hardly any grass in New York City, save for small patches in front of three-story brownstones that could be trimmed with scissors from the junk drawer in your kitchen. It's one of the reasons Central Park stands out in NYC. I'm thankful that our schools have lawns, shrubs, stadiums and fields. Our schools don't have to rent auditoriums and parking isn't confined to a seat on a subway car.

We have a special, unique aspect of our metro we all call Detroit. We're one of the smallest big cities you'll ever see. We're about coney islands and chili fries. We're suburbs and street signs. We're not landlocked. We're not congested and co-mingled beyond recognition. Our schools have names, faces and traditions. New York City has schools called Public School 180, and that gets shortened to PS, who on any given day PS 180 might play PS 148 or PS 127. We have Eisenhower and Chippewa Valley, Pershing and Denby, Troy Athens and Lake Orion. New York City schools rise among concrete jungles, decorated in colorful murals tagged on five-story buildings. Our schools have manicured greens, atriums with doors matching the school's colors and bands that march downtown before football games.

We're not at all like New York City, and in some ways that's sad. Our big city is corrupted and confused, sorely lacking leadership and professional direction. We have no mass transit of any kind, and no, the People Mover doesn't count -- we all know this. The building clocks and neon signs that mark other big cities are missing here. Remember the Goodyear auto production counters perched above our freeways? Gone. The neon letters of General Motors? No more. The Yellow Pages ad seen from the Lodge? It no longer works. We've allowed those aspects of our city to die. We allowed our city, county, regional and state leaders to take us to nowhere. It's truth.

But we also have some things to point to that make us special. We still love high school football, and why shouldn't we love high school football game? We have an excellent high school baseball tradition in this area, with numerous major leaguers coming from metro Detroit. We have beautiful gyms and a basketball heritage most major cities would love to claim. Our schools are clean. They offer gleaming facilities and opportunities that big city institutions can't come close to offering. In our schools, 10 dollars buys you a ticket, a program, a hot dog, popcorn, something to drink and a great game to watch with your neighbors and friends. In New York City, it might get you a trip uptown and back, and a cup of coffee from a cafe you've never seen but passed a million times before.

A fun place to visit, that New York City, but not somewhere I'd want my kids to be kids. New York City takes your childhood and makes you grow up too fast. Metro Detroit isn't New York City. That isn't going to change, and I hope it doesn't any time soon.

I love New York City right where it is. Detroit? We call that home.