How Athletics Helped Build Gerald Ford’s Character

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Feb 8

It would not be difficult to make the case that Gerald Ford was the greatest athlete ever to serve as President of the United States. Captain of the University of Michigan Wolverines men’s football squad, he was also named its most valuable player in his senior year. Each of the two previous seasons, Michigan went undefeated and captured the national championship. Yet Ford’s athletic success ultimately proved less important than what he learned on the field.

Ford’s formal athletic career began at Grand Rapids South High School, where the football coach christened him a center. There Ford received lessons in responsibility, self-discipline, and hard work. The coach made it known that anyone late for practice, including the coach himself, would run laps. Ford also gained valuable leadership experience – prior to his senior year, he organized an informal training camp for the squad. The team went on to an undefeated season and won the state championship.

Ford then garnered the opportunity to play at Michigan. There were no athletic scholarships during the height of the Great Depression, and Ford was unable to pay his own way. So he took jobs waiting tables and washing dishes. As a freshman, he was ineligible for varsity play, but his performance on the freshman squad was so good that he won the award for most promising freshman. Throughout his four years at Michigan, he played center, long snapper, and linebacker.

Another notable event in Ford’s freshman year, and one of the most formative of his life, was his friendship with Willis Ward. A black student and standout track and field athlete who had been named “Michigan High School Athlete of the Year,” Ward hailed from Detroit. During his time at Michigan, Ward would win the collegiate championships in the high jump, the long jump, the 100-yard dash, and the 440-yard race. In 1933, he won the Big Ten “Athlete of the Year” award.

Ward was also only the second black player to letter in football at Michigan, 40 years after the first. He had intended to head east for college, but Michigan’s coach guaranteed that he would receive every opportunity to play for football and even offered to fight anyone at Michigan, including the school’s less enlightened athletic director, to ensure that Ward got his chance. Ward helped Michigan go undefeated in football for two years and developed a national reputation as a “one-man track team.”

In 1934, however, Michigan’s football fortunes changed. The team scored only 21 points in the entire season, 12 of which came from Ward. The most memorable game was against Georgia Tech, and ironically, it would be remembered best of all Ward’s games, largely because he did not play. The Georgia team stated that it would not take the field if Michigan fielded a black player. Demonstrations took place on the Michigan campus, demanding that Ward play.

Ford himself said that if Ward did not play, he would quit the team. But Ward convinced him to take the field, hoping that the Wolverines would defeat their racist rivals, which they managed to do, 9 to 2, their only win of the season. During the game, one of Georgia Tech’s players taunted the Michigan squad, asking, “Where’s your n______?” Enraged, Ford and a teammate seized the opportunity during a play to collide with the player so hard that he had to be carried from the field on a stretcher.

Ford, who was Ward’s roommate for away games, later recalled that the incident helped him question how administrators could “capitulate to raw prejudice.” In a 1999 New York Times editorial supporting affirmative action at Michigan, Ford wrote, “That the indignities visited on Willis Ward would be unimaginable today is a measure of how far we have come toward realizing, however belatedly, the promises we made to each other in declaring our nationhood and professing our love of liberty.”

Ford continued, “I don’t want future college students to suffer the cultural and social impoverishment that afflicted my generation. If history has taught us anything in this remarkable century, it is the notion of America as a work in progress. 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?”

Following the 1934 season, Ford played in the East-West All-Star game and the Chicago Tribune All-Star game, the latter against the Chicago Bears. He also received offers to play professional football from both the Detroit Lions and the Green Bay Packers, with a guarantee of $110 per game whether he played or not. However, Ford opted to take a coaching position at Yale University, hoping it would position him later to enter the law school there, a plan that eventually came to fruition.

Ford learned many lessons from the gridiron that he drew upon later in his career in public service. Known as someone who build bridges across political divides, Ford had learned early on the crucial role of teamwork and subordinating individual ambitions to the larger needs of the team. He learned that the will to win on the field amounts to little if it is not reflected in the will to dedicate long hours to preparing to win. And he learned how to carry on even amid adverse conditions.

Perhaps even more importantly, Ford learned that football does not respect a person’s class, religion, race, or national origin. What matters is not what you look like or where you come from, but what you can contribute as a member of the team. Ford wrote, “Tolerance, breadth of mind and appreciation for the world beyond our neighborhoods: these can be learned on the football field as well as in the lecture hall. But only if students are exposed to America in all her variety.”

Ford meant what he said about teamwork and subordinating the good of the individual to the good of the team. In a July 1974 issue of Sports Illustrated, he recalled of how over his career he had often been pictured in his Michigan uniform, with a caption below that read, “The most valuable player on a losing Michigan team.” Wrote Ford, “I’d much rather have been the ‘least valuable player on a winning Michigan team.’”

Ford continued, “Outside of national character and an educated society, there are few things more important to a country’s growth and well-being than competitive athletics. If it is a cliché to say athletics builds character as well as muscle, then I subscribe to the cliché. It has been said, too, that we are losing our competitive spirit in this country, the thing that makes us great. I don’t agree with that; the competitive urge is deep-rooted in the American character.” And Ford knew that athletics would keep it alive.