Around the world with Doug Hill

METRO DETROIT — Growing up a sports fan really is the luck of the draw based on where you grow up.

If you’re near a lively downtown scene with multiple teams to its name, sports will likely be more involved in your life simply by proximity.

For Macomb Township resident and Eastern Michigan University graduate Doug Hill, growing up in Decatur, Indiana, for the first 11 years of his life, before moving to St. Clair Shores, meant the Indiana Pacers, the Indiana Hoosiers and the Purdue Boilermakers were the hometown teams.

Unfortunately, the Pacers weren’t necessarily anything to write home about, nor were any of the teams close in location.

“Growing up in a tiny town in Indiana, my window in the world was through the television and seeing these different events,” Hill said.

So when Hill, 57, retired from Rochester Community Schools — where he was a teacher and union president — in June of this year after 25 years, the freedom of retirement opened up the opportunity to make up for lost time in the sporting event world.

With a chance to start something new in his hands, Hill took inspiration from his days as a middle school English teacher by mirroring Jules Verne’s book “Around the World in Eighty Days,” but putting his own spin on it.

“As a sports fan my entire life and former sports fan in a previous career, for me it was always, ‘Well, maybe I can make something happen about seeing different sporting events,’” Hill said. “I kind of laid out this whole idea of basically spending an entire year going to all these marquee events.”

Sports has always been at the epicenter of Hill’s life whether it was his time as a sports journalist with the Ann Arbor News, the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner in Alaska, The Oakland Press, and the Detroit Free Press, or countless times he and his wife, Carol, took their two children, now 27 and 23 years old, to Detroit Tigers games all over the country.

“We used to follow the Tigers,” said Carol Hill, Doug’s wife of nearly 30 years. “Wherever the Tigers played, we would go there. We would go to Toronto, Baltimore, Boston. The kids loved it, and they enjoyed the sport as well.”

What marquee events made the list, you ask? Hill is well aware there could be some bar conversations about why some events made it and some didn’t, but the list includes a MLB World Series game, the World Baseball Classic, an NBA Finals game, Army vs. Navy and Ohio State vs. Michigan in college football, the NHL Winter Classic, and many more.

The goal? Complete all 80 events in three years, when Hill turns 60, and end it with one final event in mind.

“Even though I’ve been in Detroit for the majority of my life and the (Red) Wings have certainly been successful in my lifetime, I’ve never been at an arena to see the (Stanley) Cup presented,” Hill said. “In ’27, I want to be there from whatever games forward to see it presented. I’m hoping for something not like last year where it was Florida and Edmonton in seven games because that would be a lot of back-and-forth from Edmonton to Miami. I’m secretly pulling for a Red Wings and (Chicago) Blackhawks series that I could just drive back and forth for.”

After working with his financial adviser and tweaking things here and there to make the plan logistically and financially ideal, all systems were a go.

 

The start of a journey
The birth of Hill’s sports fandom first took place when he went to his first-ever event — a Chicago Cubs baseball game.

It was only right the journey was kickstarted alongside the same person who brought him to his very first game, his father, Jerry Hill.

“The weekend after I retired, I was on my way to my dad’s place in Indiana,” Doug Hill said. “I picked him up and we went to Pinehurst for the U.S. Open this year. That was the first of the 10 I’ve been to so far.”

As Hill mentioned, he’s already knocked 10 off the list with the Little League World Series, the Red River Rivalry between Texas and Oklahoma football, a Permian High School football game in Texas, a Dallas Cowboys game, Ole Miss vs. Mississippi State football, Auburn vs. Alabama football, the Pro Football Hall of Fame, the Solheim Cup, and the NASCAR Cup semifinals all checked off the list.

A few out-of-country events have already made an appearance as well with The Open Championship in Scotland and the President’s Cup in Montreal, but many more are still to follow.

Hill’s father has been on a few of the trips, but none more special than when Doug Hill was able to take his father, a huge Cubs fan, back to Wrigley Field for the first time since the 1970s.

“They have lights now, and they have a new scoreboard,” Jerry Hill said. “When you go into Wrigley, they have what they call, ‘Gallagher Way,’ which has a bunch of statues of all the great Cubs. There were quite a few changes, yes. Back the last time we went, the bullpens were in the field of play. If a guy hit one down the line and bounced into the bullpen, the bullpen guys would have to scatter.”

The award for best atmosphere so far goes to Permian High School in Texas, which faced off against Odessa High School Oct. 11 in a 50-26 win in favor of Permian.

“The game wasn’t much to watch because it got out of hand rather rapidly, but I think it was going to see Permian High School in Odessa, Texas, where ‘Friday Night Lights’ was based out of, and seeing them play their crosstown rival Odessa High with close to 19,000 seats for a regular season high school game,” Hill said.

For Jerry Hill, stopping at the Flight 93 National Memorial, which honors the passengers of a United Airlines flight that was hijacked during 9/11, in Pennsylvania, was a memory he’ll never forget.

“I enjoyed everything else, but that really jumps out,” Jerry Hill said. “You talk about heroes, those people on that plane that commandeered those hijackers were heroes.”

 

Where it’s going and how far it’s come
As a sportswriter for so long, Hill admits that there becomes somewhat of a disconnect when it comes to simply being a fan of sports.

It became a job, and while he loved his job, it’s viewed differently than just someone attending a game purely as a fan.

This list has brought many things to the forefront for Hill, but for starters it rejuvenated his love for sports and brought him back into the world of fandom.

“It’s been great to be able to reconnect at a fan level because for so many years I was a sportswriter and kind of got away and hadn’t allowed myself to just be a fan,” Hill said. “Even after that, it kind of changes and skews your whole perspective of the events when you work in the business. Just to be able to get back and go and be a fan has been a lot of fun.”

Being able to travel with his wife, whom Hill calls his “biggest supporter,” and father has made it all the more special, but Hill has also been able to reconnect with old friends along the way.

“An old childhood neighbor, he and his family live in Frederick, Maryland, so on the way back from the Solheim Cup my dad and I had lunch with him,” Hill said. “Longtime family friends live in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, so we were able to meet him for a meal when we were down in Pinehurst. Both of his boys actually went to the University of Alabama, so I just saw him again last weekend at the tailgate in Tuscaloosa. That’s been part of the enjoyment in (that) this is reconnecting with some of those individuals.”

Hill and his wife have also been able to add a new traveling bucket list to their already existing “50 states in 50 years” plan.

When Hill and his wife, both St. Clair Shores Lakeview High School graduates, first got married, they made a plan to visit one state a year and finish their final state on their 50th anniversary in the same state they honeymooned in — Massachusetts.

Hill’s sporting event journey has been a nice addition to their state journey as Wyoming will be making an appearance next year for the both of them when they go to the rodeo at Cheyenne Frontier Days.

The other special part of it is that Carol Hill probably never would’ve imagined going to a PGA event, but a trip to Scotland for The Open Championship showed her a different side of golf.

“What was truly interesting was how in love they were with their golfer,” Carol Hill said. “Rory McIlroy had this huge following, and the people in the stands next to us were cheering him on as if he were their own son. It was quite wonderful to be around the people that were there just to hear them rally around their golfer like it was their own kid.”

There are a couple of personal ones on the list for Hill, including a trip to South Bend for a USC vs. Notre Dame football game. Hill grew up a Notre Dame fan enamored by Ara Parseghian and the Fighting Irish.

One of the more important ones will be a trip to Pasadena, California, for the NCAA’s Rose Bowl game.

“That was always our New Year’s Day whether I was in Decatur or St. Clair Shores,” Hill said. “You live in Michigan, so you know what it’s like in January. It tends to be gray and cold and kind of damp but turning on the television and seeing both the parade and the game that day was like you were whisked away to a far-off land.”

Hill also plans to take in the Rose Bowl parade as well, which is personal in itself for him following the passing of his mother.

“I lost my mother a couple of years ago, and she was a big fan of the parade,” Hill said. “Not the game necessarily, but the parade. Going to the parade is my cap tip and honor to her because we would typically call after the parade and discuss the bands and the floats.”

Each trip is accompanied with photos and a blog summarizing the trip, and you can follow along with Hill’s journey and see a full list of events he plans to attend at thesports
fanproject.com. Hill also has a podcast titled “Conversations with Sports Fans” on his website.