For all the nay-saying and negative news pouring out of Michigan these days, there's still a lot to brag about in our state. We still have the charter game of the marquee weekend in pro football's regular season with the Thanksgiving Day matinee. Yes, the Detroit Lions haven't been compelling theater in nearly three consecutive presidential terms, but I'll address that later.

Following the annual Turkey Day game, the Michigan High School Athletic Association holds it's yearly football finals at Ford Field, another Michigan tradition since the mid-to-late 1970s at the Pontiac Silverdome. There was a tremendous crowd for yesterday's Lake Orion - Rockford matchup, the gold stamp contest among eight different championship games over Friday and Saturday. I would guesstimate the assembled masses at near 20,000 for the Division I final, and I'm surprised it wasn't significantly more.

I'm surprised because we've all heard so much about our dying economy's terrifying effects of the last nearly two years. There's thousands of houses in foreclosure, jobs literally evaporating, credit virtually impossible to secure, the list is endless. Yet the Lions, at 0-11 and practically begging for people to buy tickets, get a sellout on Thanksgiving at over $40 a ticket and parking around the stadium going for $50 a car. The MHSAA? Despite the great turnout, they still had seats to spare in the endzones of the lower bowl in Ford Field. For the cost of a $10 ticket, a fan gets four games and parking locked in at $6 per car at a handful of lots, making the day-long experience of four games at Ford Field less than dinner for two at a coney island.

I'm very surprised that more fans don't take advantage of the incredible value that is the MHSAA football finals. Yes, this is a Lions town and Detroit fans have supported their team in even the most head-turning times (for example, this year, right?), so that much I understand. It's this loyalty that makes Detroit one of the nation's great sports towns.

I've sometimes been critical of the MHSAA, like many coaches, administrators, fans and fellow officials have been on many different issues. That's life. Sometimes my writing and refereeing is seen as dead-on and other times it's viewed with a less complimentary eye. After two years of attending the football finals in two different capacities, I'm floored at how effective a small army of dedicated athletic administrators, aka the MHSAA, are at transforming a mammoth, 65,000-seat facility that earned a SuperBowl and a Final Four into an incredible experience for 16 competing schools and all the marching bands, cheer squads, pom-pon teams and dance corps that accompany the championship teams. The MHSAA is to be applauded for that.

Last year I volunteered as a down box linesman for two of the eight games, and this year I covered the Lake Orion - Rockford matchup for The Oakland Press. You can read my championship game sidebar story that ran in today's edition here, and the Lake Orion - Dearborn Fordson retrospective that ran last week is linked here. I've often wondered aloud why the MHSAA doesn't share it's championship experience with a greater pool of officials, and the MHSAA has begun to address this very issue in a more proactive manner. Yet after this weekend, I can say with absolute conviction that Michigan's football finals is an incredible experience in a mesmerizing venue and it's something anyone associated with prep football should support in earnest. That might mean pushing hard to earn a finals assignment as a contest official, or volunteer as an administrator or coach, or simply purchase a few tickets and bring the family.

It's really an incredible undertaking and one that is done for the kids, which makes it all the more remarkable in today's economic climate. There are game site options available to the MHSAA that would be much more cost-friendly than Ford Field. The MHSAA gets no discount to play their championship at the Lions' facility because to Ford Field, it's just another date that could be booked with a different event, and you don't stay in business giving your product away all the time. There's no media discount either -- the cost to hook up to Ford Field's BlueZone internet service on a per day, per reporter basis was $30, the same as a Lions game. Yet the finals continue to be held at the state's premiere facility because our Michigan schools, stocked by Michigan families, expect no less of an experience than the generation before them, and the MHSAA is committed to delivering on that promise.

Our state's communities get a SuperBowl-quality experience in a SuperBowl venue -- and how many prep football fans around the country can say that?

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

Fred Fuhr never asked for glory and he never asked for pity, either. All he asked for was a chance. He got his team to the cusp of success it had enjoyed for several consecutive years and watched a rival ruin it. A year later, his team took it right back.

Fred Fuhr did what some unlucky sole will be asked to do at Clarkston High School when Kurt Richardson steps aside. Believe me when I say there will be a day when Al Fracassa is no longer on the sideline at Birmingham Brother Rice. Basketball coach Al Poynter did it at Berkley when Steve Rhodes said goodbye. Poynter has since landed on his feet successfully at Oxford High School.

Fred Fuhr followed a legend, the icon of the football program at Royal Oak Dondero High School, a man named Ivy Loftin. That's Fuhr on the right of Ivy Loftin in front of the regal, main doors of Dondero High in 1993, when first published in The Daily Tribune.

Fred Fuhr passed away last week in Jupiter, Florida. He was 69. A small obit in the Tribune, still Royal Oak's unofficial city bible, carried a simple, one-line tribute: Mr. Fuhr was a long-time teacher and coach at Royal Oak Dondero High School.

I guess the North won the Civil War and John Glenn was a pilot, too.

In Fuhr's first season the Oaks went 1-8, but that one win was a 14-0 decision in the Pontiac Silverdome against hated rival Royal Oak Kimball. His second season was a winless 0-9 and the grumblings around 709 North Washington Avenue suggested replacement, not resolve. Fuhr did what any good coach did. He didn't stray from the plan, kept his nose to the stone and kept the faith.

Sound familiar? Isn't that what us sage, old adults impart on our own children? Guess what? It worked, because in 1986, Fuhr's Oaks did what most well-coached teams do. They responded resoundingly. After dropping a 17-0 opener to Ferndale's Eagles, the Oaks blanked Bloomfield Hills Lahser 18-0. The next week Dondero lost 35-6 to West Bloomfield, but responded with three shutouts over Rochester, Birmingham Groves and Southfield Lathrup by a combined count of 63-0. After pasting Rochester Adams 26-6 and surviving Troy Athens, 14-11, the Oaks had captured their first Metro Suburban Activities Association (MSAA) title in five seasons and were poised to earn the school's first invite to the MHSAA football tournament if they won the Oak Stump Game in week nine. The Oaks would certainly 'Kan Kimball' into submission the next week.

It didn't happen. A highly-motivated Kimball team came over to Dondero's Cass Field on a gray, dank November day and ruined Fuhr's coronation by punching the Oaks in the mouth for four quarters in a 14-6 upset. Trailing 14-0, Dondero roared to a fourth-quarter score only to miss the PAT. When they pinned Kimball in the shadows of the train tracks on 3rd and 16, quarterback Mike Siwajek found receiver Danny Holeton for 18 yards. First down, Kimball. A few plays later the clock expired and it was game, set and match, Kimball.

It was then that Fred Fuhr earned his school's respect. He shook hands at midfield. He consoled his team before meeting with reporters. Did he complain, offer excuses or say it was anyone's fault? Nope. He told reporters that the better team had won the game. He explained he had smelled trouble all week, that too many Oaks believed winning would just happen when Kimball came to push.

What did Fred Fuhr do after that game? He went back to work. So did his Oaks.

After another tough, one-possession loss at Cass to Ferndale to open the '87 campaign, Dondero rattled off eight straight wins. They authored an undefeated 7-0 chapter in the MSAA and overwhelmed Kimball in the Silverdome, 27-7. Fuhr would go on to win the MSAA in '91 and went to the playoffs in both '90 and '91. Three league titles, the only two playoff appearances in school history and 33 wins in six seasons after starting 1-17.

Fred Fuhr isn't going to be mentioned with Charlie Jestice, Tom Mach or Al Fracassa as a legendary metro area coach. He wasn't the man who was the one constant, like the lighthouse at the end of the pier standing tall year after year while the never-ending crash of waves passed by, representing one class after another, year after year. Fred Fuhr was the guy that took over at a school and made it his own without you knowing it.

Sometimes the glory, the pity and the headlines go to someone else. Schools open, close and get renamed. Years from now some old codger with more miles in the rearview mirror than a '57 Chevy will sit in a McDonald's -- whatever those look like in another 30 years -- and the word Dondero will be screened on his sweatshirt. By then it might as well say Mars to most people, because Dondero will be something heard of but never really seen with flesh and blood.

Here's to a man who did something great at Dondero, a school that had already seen better days and made it seem like nothing had ever changed.

That was Fred Fuhr.

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

(Photo courtesy The Daily Tribune/Craig Gaffield)