The Detroit native and Michigan State alumnus who started her journalism career as an apprentice with the Free Press, returned to her hometown paper in the late 1990s to cover MSU football and basketball. She also contributed to coverage of the Pistons and the Olympics until she was hired as a columnist for the Orlando Sentinel.
From there, she was hired to write for ESPN, which later turned into a role as a host for “SportsCenter.”
Hill details her journey in Detroit and through her life in “Uphill: A Memoir,” which was released on Tuesday. To purchase a copy of her book, visit mahagonaybooks.com. She will have a book signing at the Detroit Public Library on Woodward at 5:30 p.m. Nov. 16.
In this excerpt from her book, Hill explains just how she fell in love with sports writing as a kid.
Whenever I’m asked how I became interested in sports journalism, I tell the story of Mr. Miller, the eighty-year-old white man whose house my mother cleaned for years. Mr. Miller lived on the southwest side of Detroit and subscribed to both hometown newspapers, the Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News. I often accompanied my mother when she cleaned his house, and to entertain myself as she scrubbed his two-story home spotless, I would read his newspapers.
I always grabbed the sports section as I was in the process of becoming a sports junkie. James Morgan had helped turn me into a sports addict and we would spend a lot of time together playing catch or watching sports. Competition excited me. I loved watching great athletes and was drawn to the drama of sports. I loved the strategy and artistry. I was amazed and enthralled by all of it.
Mr. Miller also loved sports, and like me, he was a huge baseball fan. As my presence in his life grew, Mr. Miller and I would often watch Detroit Tigers games together and, because of his age, he knew a lot about their history. Sometimes Mr. Miller would also turn on the Tigers radio broadcast, so we could listen to the legendary Ernie Harwell’s play-by-play. Harwell was the radio voice of the Tigers for forty-two seasons and is one of the most beloved people in Detroit’s history.
Whenever I spoke of my love for the Tigers, my grandmother would tell me how much she hated the Tigers because they were once owned by the unrepentant racist Walter O. Briggs Sr. In 1935, Briggs assumed sole ownership of the Tigers franchise. Briggs’s refusal to sign Black players made the Tigers the second to last team in Major League Baseball to integrate. In a 2017 editorial for the Detroit Free Press, Briggs’s great-grandson, Harvey Briggs, wrote that around the team clubhouse, team personnel often used the phrase “No Jigs with Briggs,” because Briggs Sr.’s hatred and bigotry toward African Americans was well known. Even when the Tigers won the World Series in 1984 and remained competitive for much of the 1980s, my grandmother refused to root for them.
My grandmother was the reason Mr. Miller came into our lives in the first place. She had majored in sociology and was a social worker for the state of Michigan for nearly four decades. For a time, her cases consisted of just senior citizens. When I was younger, I would go with my grandmother on her house visits to her elderly clients. I saw my grandmother counsel and guide people whose living situations were often deplorable. I saw sickly, older people who were unable to do much for themselves and were mostly living alone. If they did have relatives, the relatives only took advantage of their situation. Generations of poverty had run in their families and their golden years were filled with financial despair and bad health.
Long before I used my fingers to write my first articles, I used them to file welfare cases in the social services office where my grandmother worked. She’d lobbied for me to get my first job there, and though it was tedious, boring work, it felt good to earn my own money. Even though those paper cuts really sucked.
One of the services my grandmother regularly set up for her elderly clients was housecleaning and caretaker services. And because my mother had started her own cleaning service when we lived in Texas, my grandmother employed my mother as a caretaker and housekeeper. My mother has always loved to clean, which suited her germaphobe tendencies. Sometimes it became annoying navigating my mother’s little household quirks, like making sure all of the towels in the linen closet were folded and facing in the same direction. And no matter how many times she showed me, I still couldn’t fold a fitted sheet.
Mr. Miller started as one of my grandmother’s clients, and she then arranged it so that my mother became his housekeeper. The first time I saw his house, it seemed like a mansion to me. He had four bedrooms, and a kitchen that was bigger than any I’d ever seen. He also had a family room, a spacious dining room, and a fairly new burgundy Grand Marquis. I thought Mr. Miller was some kind of tycoon.
Mr. Miller was a kind man but, like many seniors, he was lonely. He was a widower, and although he had kids of his own who cared about him, they had lives of their own. He wanted companionship, and, unfortunately, my mother stepped in to fill that role.
One of the reasons my mother had been so angry about what I’d written in my journal is because I wrote about her relationship with Mr. Miller, which felt inappropriate to me. It made me feel ashamed of her because I thought she was using him, and, in many ways, doing the same thing Henry had done to her. My mother did genuinely care for Mr. Miller. She made sure he got to his appointments and took his medication. She cooked and cleaned for him. But they were also romantically involved, and that was the part that disgusted me.
At that age, I only had a basic understanding of what sex was, but I knew that what was going on wasn’t right. Of course, Mr. Miller enjoyed my mother’s attention and affection. What eighty-year-old man wouldn’t? He gave her money, paid some of her bills, and let her drive his car, all of which both directly and indirectly supported her drug habit. Sugar daddy and sugar baby. On a few occasions, I overheard my mother and Mr. Miller argue about her drug use, yet that didn’t stop Mr. Miller from feeding her habit. I felt more compassion for Mr. Miller than I did for some of the other men that enabled her habit because we had developed a relationship. Some of it had to do with his age. He also wasn’t in the street life like most of the men who came in and out of my mother’s life. He was just an old man who wanted to feel like he mattered. As much as I hated to admit it, there was a part of me that could relate to that.
The Tigers won the World Series in 1968, a year after Detroit was torn apart by one of the most destructive riots of the civil rights era.
The unrest started just a few blocks from where my grandmother, mother, and uncle Norman lived, on 12th Street and Clairmount. At the time, Detroit was suffocated by racial tension. The Detroit police department had a notorious, well-earned reputation for harassing, profiling, and brutalizing Black Detroiters. On a miserable hot July night in 1967, the police raided a “blind pig,” which was the nickname for an illegal after-hours club. This particular establishment was hosting a party for two servicemen who recently returned home from the Vietnam War. The police raided the spot at three thirty a.m., and when the club patrons spilled out onto the street, all hell broke loose. Some two hundred fed-up onlookers gathered around the police as they took the club’s patrons to jail. People shouted, threw glass bottles, and managed to chase the police away. But their anger couldn’t be contained; people were tired of being disenfranchised and treated as if they weren’t human. Soon, hundreds of people spilled out into the streets. The riots lasted five days. Forty-three people died. Fourteen hundred buildings were burned. Many of the neighborhoods that were the center of where the unrest took place never recovered.
That first night of the riot, my mother was all alone in their apartment, which was above a hardware store. She sat on the floor, terrified in the dark. My grandmother was at work when the riots happened and she couldn’t get through to my mother because the police had barricaded the whole neighborhood. My uncle Norman also wasn’t there. Being raped isn’t the only reason my mother has never liked the dark. It also was because the dark reminds her of that night she spent alone when she was just ten years old, cowering on the floor, listening to bullets, shouting, and the rumble of military tanks from the National Guard rolling down her street.
When the Tigers won in 1968, it was a unifying moment the city desperately needed. White residents fled Detroit by the thousands to isolate themselves in the suburbs, deepening the racial divisions. The Tigers’ World Series win did not neutralize the explosive element of race in Detroit, but it gave everyone in the city something to root for. In fact, when the Tigers won the title again in 1984, I was eight years old and that racial divide was still there. But the Tigers’ ability to unite people in spite of the underlying racial disharmony was present, too.
My mother established a tradition where she took me to at least one Tigers game a year, usually on Opening Day, which in Detroit is treated like a national holiday. But since I was such a nerd and never wanted to miss school for any reason, my mother could only convince me by telling me there was no school that day. A small lie for a worthwhile experience. My mother could only afford bleacher seats, which went for $5 apiece then. We had enough money to get a few hot dogs, an ice cold beer for her, and a Coke for me. Not only was it one of the few luxuries that we had, but a priceless memory because I saw my mother’s joy.
I never could have foreseen that my love for the Tigers would be the basis for how I grew to love newspapers, and what eventually put me on the path toward a career in sports journalism. I guess this is also why I looked at Mr. Miller differently. He was an unlikely conduit to me finding my way.
Excerpted from UPHILL by Jemele Hill. Published by Henry Holt and Company. Copyright © 2022 by Jemele Hill. All rights reserved.