Film chronicles the stand Gerald Ford took for black U-M teammate

Ann Arbor -- It's like a treasure hunt, really. And here, they've struck gold. You can see it in their faces and hear it in their voices, even before the well-dressed man on the TV screen has finished speaking.

The man is the late Willis Ward, a former star athlete at the University of Michigan in the early 1930s who went on to a successful career as a lawyer and judge in Detroit. The treasure hunters are Brian Kruger and Buddy Moorehouse, a couple of Baby Boomers and lifelong Michiganders who've only just begun a second career as documentary filmmakers.

And they've met here at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library in Ann Arbor, where "X" marks the spot for the start of Stunt3 Multimedia's latest project, "VICTORS," a 10-part series of films mining the rich history of Michigan football.

The first volume in that series — scheduled for release in May — delves into the dust-covered controversy surrounding a 1934 game between Michigan and Georgia Tech in Ann Arbor. The Wolverines' decision to sit their lone African-American player, Ward, appeasing the Jim Crow laws of their southern guests, created a stir on the U-M campus. And in the middle of it all was one of Ward's teammates, an All-America lineman from Grand Rapids named Gerald Ford, who was Ward's roommate.

Ford threatened to quit the team in response to Ward's benching. And though he eventually was convinced to play amid campus and community protests, Ford, our nation's 38th president, would later credit that incident — and his lifelong friendship with Ward — with shaping his views on race relations and his political stance on issues like voting rights and affirmative action.

"The overriding effect that Jim Crow policies had on college football at that time, I just find fascinating, and I think that a lot of other people are going to as well," said Moorehouse, 50, a former newspaper columnist and editor who serves as Stunt3's creative director. "People are shocked to find out there was once a game where Michigan sat down a black player because they were playing a team from the South. … And letting people know that, yes, that did happen here and it really was a big event in its time and it's kind of been forgotten, that's the kind of story we're trying to tell."

'It hurt Gerry Ford'

And that's what they're doing here in the Ford library, where staff archive specialist Nancy Mirshah has queued up the raw footage of an interview Willis Ward gave for a 30-minute, election-eve commercial supporting Ford's failed 1976 presidential campaign.

Ward's not talking about politics now, though. He's talking about football, and a moment that sealed his friendship with Ford.

"Now, when we played Georgia Tech, I was benched," Ward said, putting extra emphasis on that last word. "It hurt Gerry Ford. Badly. He wrote to his father, wanted to quit the team."

And though Ford didn't, the splintering caused by that decision — one many blamed on then-athletic director Fielding H. Yost, who never had an African-American varsity letterman in 25 years as Michigan's legendary head coach (1901-26) — "ruined our ballclub," Ward said. "I'll always believe it killed the morale of our ballclub."

Still, Ward, who also was a track star at Michigan, chuckled as he told a story about what happened after Ford and the team had beaten Georgia Tech, 9-2, for Michigan's only win in 1934. (They'd been undefeated national champions the previous two seasons.)

"On Monday morning, (Ford) and Bill Borgmann told me that they'd done something during the game for me and … I'll never forget it," Ward said. "It seems as though as the game got started, a fellow on the other side of the line made a remark about him loving people like me. And his adjectives, they were 'bleep' adjectives, so I won't use it. Whereupon Jerry and Bill put a block on him that ended that fellow's participation in the game. So they came back that Monday and told me that they dedicated that block to me."

Long after his presidency, Ford, who'd remained friends with Ward through the years, noted that 1934 incident "had a significant impact" on his views on race relations.

"I admired him because of his character and intelligence," Ford wrote in 1995, more than a decade after Ward, who served as a state court judge and chairman of the Michigan Public Service Commission (1969-73), passed away in 1983. "I deeply resented those who did not treat him as an equal because he was black."

And that played a role in Ford's decision to take another stand at the age of 86, when he publicly backed the affirmative action policies that were under fire at his alma mater and other universities. Ford submitted an Op-Ed piece to the New York Times and quietly encouraged others to fight the legal battle that ultimately led to a landmark 2003 Supreme Court ruling that upheld the Michigan Law School's policy.

"Do we really want to risk turning back the clock to an era when the Willis Wards were isolated and penalized for the color of their skin, their economic standing or national ancestry?" Ford wrote in the Times, nearly 70 years after that Georgia Tech game.

Duo's latest project

Yet all of this is a story Ford's youngest son, Steven, says he only heard for the first time when the family returned for his father's jersey retirement ceremony at Michigan Stadium in 1994. As Steven Ford recounted at a speech at the Ford library back in 2006, "I have to tell you as his son, I had tears in my eyes when I heard that story about my father. Because that guy (who told me) said, 'Son, you know what character is? Character is what you do when nobody's watching.'"

And, well, that's where the filmmakers enter the picture. The Willis Ward story has been written about before. It has been mentioned in speeches, including the eulogy former President George W. Bush gave at Ford's funeral in Washington, D.C., in January 2007. And in a manner of speaking, you could say it has been legislated as well.

But has the story really been told?

That is the question Kruger and Moorehouse — friends since high school who also in 1989 formed a standup comedy troupe (Stunt Johnson Theater) that toured nationally — keep asking themselves as they embark on this new endeavor. A few years ago, Kruger, now 49, sold the publishing company (WoodWing USA) he'd founded in 2008, deciding it was time get out from behind a desk and find a little "soul redemption" again making films.

That's something he and Moorehouse had done since they were kids making 8mm shorts — "His were all monster movies and mine were all mini-bike chase movies," Moorehouse laughs — and for their first project they went back to their childhood.

"The Girl in Centerfield," last year's documentary that's now drawing interest from Hollywood, told the story of Carolyn King, the 13-year-old Ypsilanti girl who was a pioneer for girls' participation in Little League back in 1973. (Moorehouse was one of King's teammates at the time, while Kruger played for another team across town.)

Another Stunt3 film, "The Legend of Pinky Deras," tells the story of arguably the greatest Little Leaguer of all time, a boy who led a team from Hamtramck to the World Series title in 1959. (The Hamtramck City Council voted earlier this month to rename a street in honor of Art Deras, now a retired Warren police officer.) Several others are in the works, from a documentary on Solanus Casey, the Capuchin priest from Detroit and the case to make him the first American-born male saint, to "Speak for Yourself: The Jordan Levin Story," a film about a local family's struggles with raising a deaf child.

'These great local stories'

Now comes this "VICTORS" series, with a $250,000 budget that has Kruger busy soliciting investors. It'll tackle some of the greatest moments in Michigan football history, from the 1969 game against Ohio State to the 1997 national championship season, as well as some lesser-known tales, like the week in 1981 when Bo Schembechler turned down a lucrative job offer from Texas A&M. Profiles of Bob Ufer and Ron Kramer and Billy Taylor and Rick Leach and the Wistert Brothers also get an in-depth look in the series.

First, though, comes the story of Willis Ward and Gerald Ford, a project that has them digging through old newspaper accounts and tracking down Ward's stepchildren — his second wife, Margaret, died in 2007 — and planning a trip to Atlanta to research Georgia Tech's side of the controversy.

"All the big stories we've done so far, they're all kind of similar in that they're these great local stories which have been long forgotten and nobody's ever done a film on before," Moorehouse said. "We've both grown up in Michigan and lived here all our lives, so we remember a lot of these stories or remember hearing about them. But when you do a film on it, and put all that stuff together, that really does preserve the legacy in a way that it's going to be there for all time."

john.niyo@detnews.com

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