Marvin Gaye wanted to play for Detroit Lions

The way Marvin Gaye  figured it, if Lem Barney and Mel Farr of the Detroit Lions could sing with him on a landmark recording, the Motown superstar could play in the NFL. Forty years ago this summer, he set out to make it happen. “There’s no question that if he had started out at an early age like most of us, he could have been a fine ballplayer,” Barney says. “Marvin had a lot of heart, a lot of will and stick-to-itiveness. “He just didn’t have the skills.” Not in football, anyway. But that didn’t stop the 6-foot-4 Gaye from pursuing his dream — with the help of his football-playing friends. Barney and Farr, the NFL’s defensive and offensive rookies of the year in 1967, had befriended Gaye in 1968 after Barney knocked on the singer’s door to introduce himself. It was during the impasse that Gaye, 31 at the time, set out to join the Lions as a wide receiver.

“He transformed a master bedroom into a universal gym and bulked up from about 180 pounds to about 210,” says Barney, a longtime pastor and executive at a Detroit hospital. “He ran every day and worked out. He was ready.” Though he had never participated in organized sports, the singer believed he was a gifted athlete. “I was always a sports fan,” he told David Ritz, author of the 1985 Gaye biography “Divided Soul,” “but I was determined to play for real. I knew I could. . . . “You see, I had this fantasy: I was in the Super Bowl, with millions of people watching me on TV all over the world, as I made a spectacular leaping catch and sprinted for the winning touchdown.” Through Barney and Farr, a former UCLA star, Gaye knew most of the Lions and had met their coach, Joe Schmidt.

Only after Gaye returned to meet with the coach a second time, this time unescorted, did Schmidt realize he was serious. Still, Schmidt was unwilling to put the singer in harm’s way and quickly rejected the idea as unworkable. In January 1971, Motown finally released “What’s Going On,” which soared to the top of Billboard’s R&B sales chart. An album of the same name, released later that year, also topped the charts and was hailed by critics as a pop music masterpiece. On April 1, 1984, a day before he would have turned 45, Gaye was fatally shot by his father in Los Angeles.– LA Times