The Easter Egg Hidden in Michigan’s Football Jerseys

If you’re a Michigan football fan who needs something to focus on other than the team’s up-and-down play, you should know that there’s a cool Easter Egg hidden in the team’s jerseys—a message that pays tribute to two great teammates who played together more than 90 years ago.

Once you know it’s there, you’ll see it’s the coolest damn thing ever. For me personally, it’s even cooler know that I played a really small role in the Easter Egg being there.

But first, you need to know the backstory. It begins way back in 1934, when a tall kid from Grand Rapids named Gerald Ford (you might have heard of him) was playing his senior season in Ann Arbor. His best friend on the team was a black player from Detroit named Willis Ward, a world-class sprinter who played end and was the team’s best player.

In October 1934, when Ford and Ward were both senior starters for the Wolverines, Georgia Tech came to Ann Arbor for a game. Jim Crow was a sad fact of life in college football back then, and the Yellow Jackets said they would refuse to play the game unless Ward, the only black player on the Michigan team, was benched.

The decision about whether Ward would play fell to Fielding Yost, U-M’s legendary coach who was now the school’s athletic director. Yost, a West Virginia native and the son of a Confederate soldier, made the shameful decision to bench Ward for the game.

It caused an uproar on the Michigan campus and across the nation, and it infuriated Gerald Ford. He said he was going to quit the team in protest but agreed to play only after his friend Willis Ward told him that he had to. Ford played with a vengeance in the game, at one point knocking out a Georgia Tech player named Charlie Preston because he had been directing racial slurs at Ward.

The Wolverines won the game, 9-2, but it was their only win of the season. The Georgia Tech incident had sucked the soul out of the team, but it had a profound impact on both Ford and Ward that endured the rest of their lives.

They remained close friends, as Ford became a congressman and then vice president and then the President of the United States. Ward had an amazingly distinguished career himself, becoming the chairman of Michigan’s Public Service Commission and then the first black probate court judge in Wayne County history.

The tale of Gerald Ford and Willis Ward is one of the great stories of character and friendship in Michigan football history, and here’s the small part of the story where I come in.

In 2011, my filmmaking partner Brian Kruger and I did a documentary about all of this called “Black and Blue,” and for many people, it was their first time hearing the story of Willis Ward.

Among the people who saw the documentary and fell in love with the story was Jim Hackett, a former football player at U-M who had become a mega-successful businessman in West Michigan. In 2014, he was named Michigan’s interim athletic director, and in 2016, the Wolverines changed their athletic affiliation from Adidas to Nike’s Jumpman brand.

That meant, among other things, that Michigan needed to get all new football jerseys, so Hackett decided this was the perfect time to pay tribute to Gerald Ford and Willis Ward in a very subtle and clever way—by hiding an Easter Egg in the numbers.

Hackett told the Nike people that he wanted the “4” in the jersey to be the same style “4” that Gerald Ford had on his No. 48 jersey back in 1934. It’s a very unique serif font with two lines coming off the number and pointing to the right.

When Hackett announced the change in 2016, he told the media that he thought back to the famous team photo from 1934, when Ford and Ward were standing next to each other. The way Hackett saw it, the lines on Ford’s “4” were pointing to Willis Ward. Hackett referred to it as “a little hat,” and he said the lines on the hat were pointing from one teammate to another as a way of saying, “I’ve got your back.”

“When I looked at it, ‘I go, Gerald’s hat is pointing to Willis, and this is the man he (almost) quit the team for,’” Hackett said. “If you think this number is kind of a hats off to Willis, it’s basically saying as a player you wear a number, but it’s really your hats off to your teammate. In this case, it’s about everybody.”

So the Nike people back in 2016 created a whole new font called “Valiant,” which is only used in U-M athletic apparel and includes the unique “4.” No other college football team in America has a “4” with the two lines going off to the right.

The cool thing is that every Michigan player who has had a “4” on his jersey since 2016 has been paying secret tribute to Gerald Ford and Willis Ward. When fullback Max Bredeson wore his No. 44 jersey in 2023 as Michigan won the national championship, Jerry and Willis were out there on the field with him.

Through good times and bad, Michigan has the best helmets and best uniforms in college football. It’s cool to know that they have the best hidden message, too.