When authors finally finish writing their all-consuming book, they often feel a sense of emptiness or grief.
But Dearborn native Joel Walkowski — whose sports-themed addiction memoir, Honolulu Blues: How Loving a Losing Football Team Created a Winning Man, came out on July 14 — experienced something far more aligned with the longtime Lions fandom. “I got hit by a bus,” he says.
Walkowski — who works at General Motors and splits his time between Dearborn and Brooklyn, NY — spent years doing stand-up comedy, so I thought he might have been joking. He was not.
“I was laid up all last autumn,” Walkowski says. “The sun got in the bus driver’s eyes. He passed me on my bike in the same lane [in Brooklyn], and I messed up my left arm pretty bad.”
But when we talk in April, Walkowski is healed and gearing up for tons of book-promotion events around Michigan.
You might wonder, how did he come to write an unconventional, often darkly funny book that connects his drug and alcohol addiction struggles with the Detroit Lions’ (mis)fortunes?
“It felt like an extension of myself,” Walkowski says. “There was a happy accident where my getting serious about my sobriety happened to overlap with the beginning of the Dan Campbell era, where it was easy to draw parallels like, ‘Oh, we’re going to do things a little differently now,’ and then a lot of the changes took [place].”
Walkowski grew up with an alcoholic, autistic father who moved the family to a high-end neighborhood shortly before he lost his job and fell into a debilitating depression. Meanwhile, Walkowski, after being prescribed Adderall at age 7, became convinced early on that he needed chemical substances to perform at his best.
But one way that he could consistently bond with his father involved watching and rooting for the Lions.
“If I can take Detroit Lions football — one of the most miserable, heart-wrenching things — and get a lot of positives out of it, I think anyone’s relationship with what they love … can be used in a similar fashion,” he says.
Of course, for the purpose of writing Honolulu, Walkowski rewatched Lions games that many fans would just as soon forget, journaling at the same time. A high point involved revisiting the greatness of Barry Sanders, but much later, the Matt Millen era (2001-2008) coincided with Walkowski’s rock bottom.
“I drank myself to death, and it almost perfectly overlaps with going 0-16,” Walkowski says. “Having that sort of addiction problem so widely announced to the world felt like the Lions’ [public humiliation].”
Writing the book not only provided a healthy, welcome distraction for Walkowski during hard times, but it also helped heal old wounds and cultivate greater familial closeness. Reading drafts aloud to his playwright mother “felt like such a beautiful, full-circle moment.” He also shared his handwritten journal entries with his father, who loved them.
In fact, when Walkowski’s father was nearing death, he pressed his son to go to the 2024 NFC championship game in person and report back. (The 49ers beat the Lions 34-31.)
“The way things went out with him taking a downturn as the team seemed to finally turn the corner and then the final disappointment there — it just felt like it was all meant to be,” Walkowski says.
