Football Autumn in a Fading City

by John Gorman
Love of Sports Correspondent

The road don’t go there anymore.

It’s what we mutter when we think of Main Street, a desolate ghost town in and of itself, isolated in an ultra ill-conceived notion to visibly deface what used to be a downtown with the southern terminus of the ultimate road-to-nowhere, our subway system.

Welcome to Buffalo, NY: population 294,856 and fading.

We often spill an ocean of cry over a once proud city now popularly referred to as America’s 7th circle of hell. The rust has come off and the belt no longer exists. The youth of this area are leaving en masse like they were in the Cherokee tribe or following Moses.

“Welcome to the archeological dig site of 1900’s America, we welcome your universities’ researchers. You studied us in Social Studies during the Chapter 7: The industrial revolution & the Erie Canal.”

Buffalo still technically exists on the map, but not for long. It only resurfaces in popular culture when CNN broadcasts a blizzard of epic proportions live into your living room, and you turn to your loved ones and proudly beam, “Thank God we don’t live there.” Did you know in 1900 we were per capita the second-richest city in the country? You didn’t, did you? Neither did I.

Oh sure, we gave you Buffalo wings, Rick James, the Goo Goo Dolls, Wolf Blitzer, Warren Spahn, Tim Russert, Ani Defranco, Ron Jaworski, HSBC, whip cream, and 95% of all concessions at every major sporting event ... but you gobbled up our best like a Hungry Hungry Hippos world championship gone wrong.

Our favorite sports team will soon be winning championships for a city just up the QEW in Canada, because you have to leave Buffalo to really make it in this world - the artists formerly known as the Buffalo Braves excluded. (Go Clippers!)

In Buffalo, we are fortunate enough to have two sports franchises. That’s two more than Las Vegas and one more than Jacksonville and Sacramento. We have the Buffalo Sabres, the boys who keep us warm during the winter months between October and June, their season fittingly beginning when snow first falls and terminating when the last drop of icy sadness melts away.

We also have the Buffalo Bills, the most representative microchasm of what it means to live and die in Buffalo.

Since 1960 - the tail end of Buffalo’s golden age - the Bills have graciously allowed our ever-emptying homes a window into the hustle and bustle of a first class NFL world. Sure, other forgotten snow-belt hamlets like Detroit, Cleveland and Pittsburgh similarly maintain franchises, but they are much larger cities to boot.

The Bills are the 716’s last delusion of grandeur. The Bills represent the last umbilical cord between a fast-evolving 21st century United States and the land that time forgot.

Our fans eat, sleep, and breathe the Buffalo Bills, as they clutch their zubaz like a four-year-old would a Teddy Bear. Sadly, and we are naive for not realizing this collectively, but no longer can Buffalo realistically keep up with the NFL in terms of revenue sharing, television ratings, merchandise sales and overall aesthetic.

The National Media never covers our team… only for the two weeks preceding the Super Bowl, or during the Music City Miracle. Why, just this week, Buffalo received some press for being 4-0, but it was mostly of the “Aww, their so cute with their little football team up there” variety.

It’s no secret that the Ivory Tower of professional sports wishes us gone from it’s premier establishment. It’s hard to deny it when Ralph Wilson votes alone so often during Owners’ meetings.

The young kids don’t know this, and the natives don’t want to admit this, but the Buffalo Bills of the early 1990s were the greatest statistical anomaly in professional sports history.

The Bills had no business being in a championship game four straight years while financing one of the lowest payrolls in the NFL in one of the least desirable places to play in the NFL, with some of the most white-trash fans in the NFL. (Seriously… check out those NFL Films Super Bowl reruns, they make Buffalonians looks like extras from Deliverance.) A town that had been kicked and beaten down for the better part of 40 years got four straight cracks at American Sports’ Holy Grail, and to the extreme delight of world-class Americans everywhere, they were shut down.

There are no words to describe the intense stinging pain of those Super Bowl losses. It wasn’t just losing one championship; it was losing four – becoming a national punchline in the process.

Buffalo made history for ineptitude in deflating and heartbreaking fashion. The collective will of the town was broken, tortured, raped, and pillaged.

When you walk into any corner bar in the Queen City, (it earned that nickname from being at one point the second-largest city on the great lakes), you hear hard luck stories from patrons about poverty, drug abuse, extreme domestic disturbance ... with a side of sarcasm and “you think YOU had it bad?” attitude. The Buffalo Bills of the early 1990s were a brief reprieve from that overall vibe, and are remembered here for what they almost were and what they should have been; one final satisfying breath of pure adrenaline-infused oxygen into the atmosphere.

Those who were old enough to remember the city’s glory days basked in the glow of a supposed renaissance; those who were young like me were spoiled rotten. We should have known better. This is not a first-tier city.

Jim Kelly around these parts has a reputation as a “gamer”, though many of you refer to him as a “choker.” Thurman Thomas is remembered as having a lion’s heart; you might remember him as the guy who couldn’t find his helmet in Super Bowl XXVI. All of those ex-players are local celebrities. They could go into any restaurant in town and get the best seat in the house. Actually, many of them do.

And this is our problem, and the No. 1 reason why this city will not come back. We have given up. We reward second-best like it’s something to be rewarded. No other city in the country has this attitude. We applaud the efforts made by a small group who wore red white and blue for giving us a small, heartbreaking taste of what it’s like to be on a big stage. 

In a country gone mad with being the best at everything, Buffalo has politely conceded their membership at the country club of great American cities.

After the last pieces of those championship teams melted away like snow in May, our town was left with a franchise that is probably most notable for soon being the home team in Toronto’s first NFL football game. There will be much rejoicing in all parts of the world… except here.

This is the place where it didn’t take a Hurricane to wipe out half our population and board up our windows and suck enterprise out of town, like the Big Easy… it just took years upon years of poor political decision making, meteorological catastrophe and a collective presumption that stretches across North America that this town is history. Like Route 66, the family dinner hour and rotary telephones, Buffalo is a relic from a former era.

These Buffalo Bills let us, for 16 weeks out of the year; allow us to believe that our aging city still matters.

We can only hope that the Bills can continue their recent run of good fortune and solid play. Perhaps we can earn a playoff birth. Perhaps you and your friends might talk about Trent Edwards and Marshawn Lynch while toodling around in your corner of the world.

At least until they turn the lights out one last time - which will be sooner rather than later - and the sun sets on our once thriving civilization; a civilization that never reached the pinnacle in the course of its history in football ... or anywhere else.

All you’ll hear is deafening silence… and if you look hard enough on the map, you’ll see the road won’t go here anymore.

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