The Writer’s Playbook: When Your Journey Collapses
By Steven Harms
On March 3, 1985, a severe winter storm of heavy, wet snow blasted Pontiac, Michigan causing the air-pressured roof of the Pontiac Silverdome, home to the Detroit Pistons and Detroit Lions, to concave.
A year prior to that I began my career in pro sports with the Pistons. When I awoke the morning of the 4th, I had an inkling our home game that night would be cancelled due to the storm. Understatement of the year. Upon nearing the stadium as I drove into work, the sight was incomprehensible. The roof had inverted to such a degree that it wasn’t visible from the exterior.
I parked and made my way into the offices, proceeding to my tiny cubicle, joining my colleagues as ticket sales representatives. The first thing we all did, including my boss and the rest of the team, was to head across the hall to the Silverdome’s press box to view the scene. That space looks out over the football field and the basketball court positioned in the southeast corner.
The decision was made immediately to postpone the game. Back to our cubicles, we jumped on our phones to call every season ticket holder to inform them of the situation. Side note – there was no internet or cell phones in 1985. A few hours later, unworldly rumbles and corresponding earthquake-like shakes rolled through our offices, taking out the power in the process. We all knew what happened.
Officially, in the southwest corner of the Silverdome, the snow depressed the fabric panels low enough so that the fabric met a steel lighting catwalk positioned just below the inner lip of the roof's ring beam. The hole caused a loss of air pressure, deflating the roof. Eventually the wet snow slid down into the bowl and ruptured more roof panels, collapsing several precast risers in the upper deck, and dislodging chunks of seating areas in the process including some from the upper level that had smashed the lower-level seats upon impact. One of the collapsed panels that fell demolished the Pistons court. For all of you college football fans, Gary Danielson was practicing at midfield with a few other Lions players when the collapse began, but they made it out of there in time. Repair operations of the roof began immediately but were interrupted for over a week due to high winds. In the end, nearly all the remaining panels in the deflated roof, one hundred in all, were either ripped off their moorings or badly damaged.
As for us Pistons staff members, our story continued. We were sent home the rest of that day for obvious safety reasons. Additionally, ten home games were left in the season (including a home game that evening) as well as the high likelihood that we would be in the NBA playoffs at the end of the month. Disaster central.
In the end, we managed through. We returned to work two days later deploying generators to power high blowing heaters so at least we could function. Our phone lines were reconnected. We had to relocate season ticket holders to wherever we were going to play. It became a master class in customer service. Within a few days our president had worked out a deal with Cobo Hall and Joe Louis Arena in downtown Detroit – home of the Detroit Red Wings – to play our remaining games.
The silver lining in all of this was the experience triggered a series of business decisions that ultimately led to the Pistons building their own arena, The Palace of Auburn Hills, a few miles up the road. The Palace opened in August of 1988, corresponding with the Pistons winning NBA Championships in the first two years. The Pistons organization went on to even greater heights, establishing Palace Sports & Entertainment, acquiring the largest amphitheater in the Detroit area, and serving as entertainment managers for a few other facilities as well as starting a popular minor league hockey team, indoor soccer, and a concert venue experience like no other at the time. What the Pistons did with the Palace was groundbreaking in many ways, earning national recognition.
But here’s the thing…
If not for the collapse of the Silverdome, none of what the Pistons morphed into would have happened. The disaster was the catalyst. It birthed a rebuilt organization that achieved heights it never imagined through vision, creativity, innovation, and strategic planning and execution.
I plucked this experience from my past to shine a light on our author journeys. The correlation between the collapse of the Silverdome and what we process as authors, in every aspect, is a study in heroic pursuit of success.
For every writer reading this, whether you are published or hoping to be, please take yourself back to that moment you decided to become an author and the first time you took your seat at your keyboard to begin the first chapter. Ahead of you are a thousand challenges. Some are obvious, some are not. Success is the goal, but along the way the pieces you put in place to reach that goal can collapse, fully or in part. Among many, there’s the story you’re writing itself followed by editing and rewriting, and then the rewrite of the rewritten story, and then another rewrite of that rewrite, the agent search and multiple rejections followed by your agent’s pitch (if you landed an agent) resulting in numerous further rejections from publishers, if at all, attaining recognition and sales if you opt for self-publishing, book marketing efforts producing no discernible results, your publisher changing their mind, the toll it may take on your home life as you climb the author mountain, and. . . fill in the blank.
Yet, as happened to the Pontiac Silverdome and its consequence on the Detroit Pistons, the hardships of heavy, wet snow that descends on your author journey can either bury you into a collapsed state or serve as a reagent for you to course correct. Rebuild, transform, innovate, vision-cast. Tap into that glorious attribute ingrained within because the ability to turn a blank piece of paper into a story isn’t at all easy.
We are authors. Bring on the storm.
