Someday I will write about more this. Not today because I’ve been putting it off and soon you’ll understand why. Not now because there’s only a narrow margin of time left before this city’s train leaves the station and reality sets in. Hope keeps a schedule. Kickoff is at 6:30 and I have chips to pick up.
First, let it be known that despite not being a sports fan, in any way shape or form except for party dips and tight uniforms, the success of the Buffalo Bills means a great deal to me. They’re a real part of my DNA, even though I couldn’t tell you what a down is or why there’s four of them. I don’t know what a cornerback does, or what’s so unique about Special Teams, or why coaches still use paper notebooks like astronauts with their loose ring binders. I’m sure they get it, like pencils not running out of ink in zero gravity, but I honestly don’t have the time to care.
The thing that speaks to me about their brutish, foolish game is in their marrow’s desire to win. To succeed despite impossibility. To brag with honor. To make a whole mess of beautiful idiots feel deserving of their loyalty, worthy of the scars earned from lunging themselves onto buffet tables in the parking lot. To no longer be underdogs but big dogs, with chili on their thighs. I do love a pageant.
The same ways it matters to me as a local hometown boy, who for many years assumed every NFL game came with a halftime show and felt only betrayal at my first frigid outdoor Bills game without a single colored light—the same way that counts, so too does it mean a lot for my father, who died before seeing his team win the Super Bowl. He went to the first two and spent one of the others eating wings in a hospital room with my brother, where he recovered from a terrible knee injury. Black ice will kill us all. The other Bills’ appearance we spent at his coworker’s house; more accurately I spent it in my dad’s coworker’s man cave basement admiring the homemade labels he added to his bottles of homemade beer (and laughing at the urinal he had installed in his man cave’s manbathroom). Straight guys are so weird.
Why and how (and if) it should matter to my late father’s queer son is a discussion for another appointment. It’s complicated, as neurotic people like me like to say about things that are simple. He made me feel inferior to them on a weekly basis, is the truth. He ignored me for Sundays on end as he studied the game simultaneously on TV and the radio. He rooted for them, so hard he occasionally would get up out of his recliner to scream upright into the screen. Got his face right up in the TV, let them have it, and then went to refill his chips.
It meant so much to him, for his own reasons. His father reasons, I’m sure. Why that passion didn’t transfer to my field goals, my completions, I’ll never know. I’m talking about high school musicals, but you knew that. He left at intermission one year, that was cool. It was a good show, too.
I accept him and forgive his fatherly trespasses, making me feel second in line to a team of adult professional sports stars. Usually I felt simply invisible, but I know now that I made me able to observe and absorb those feelings so I could (harbor and suppress for nearly 40 years and) share them now with you. I continue to wish he would have shared the victory lap with me had we won. I will scream his name when we win.
The fact that I’m writing this and pushing send, and not shoving it down into my feet or phone memos like I usually do, is probably the first step to acknowledging defeat. It’s okay. We got this.
This story is not over. Because the Bills are not over, they’ve assured us. Buffalo and its laundry list of penalties (that’s my last bite of clever) is not over! We will prevail, if not at the end of tonight’s game then when we inevitably trade mourning for morning and get in our TV’s faces once again.
Go Maury. Go chip refills. Go Bills.