Real Goblin

  I am admittedly a fair weather fan when it comes to sports. In the last few years, my hometown team, the Buffalo Bills, has once again become a competitive force. And with it, I have found the wave of fanaticism hard to resist. I can’t speak to how fans are in other cities, but in Buffalo it feels like the Bills are so entwined with the city identity, that a loss can feel very visceral in the moment. After this most recent defeat, I began the drive from my parent’s house back to my apartment in a sulk. The mood was somber. A fresh, wet, Buffalo snow lined the branches of the trees along the roadside. The snowfall continued for the majority of my drive back. As my route merged with the stadium traffic, the drivers were forced into a slow, cautious caravan. We moved in sluggish, defeated unison, like a funeral procession for another year of squandered potential.           

           As a relatively new fan, my brother would have to explain many aspects of the game to me. By the end of the season, I was a full fledged expert. I would lurk on the team’s Reddit page and engage in discussion; now one of the hundreds of thousands of tired, beleaguered “Bills Mafia”. For many years, the Bills were completely non-competitive. A loss felt expected, and as a result each win was a pleasant surprise. This past season, however, the Bills were the favorite to win. They came out of the gate, guns blazing. The first three games were electric. The Bills felt unstoppable and with each drive it felt like everyone, from the players to the fans, were having the time of their lives. But after week three, something shifted. Suddenly, each win came only after a tooth and nail, clumsy struggle for supremacy.      

      The city of Buffalo fully embraced the Buffalo Bills all along, even if they weren’t always the gambler’s safe bet for Super Bowl Champion. And this season, the Bills were a much needed beacon of hope for many. In May, Buffalo grieved the horrific and tragic death of ten after a racist and hateful gunman traveled from central New York to the city with specific intent to harm the Black population. He targeted this particular area for the density of black residents, and had been influenced by right wing rhetoric and the idea of “white replacement theory”. This shooting left the community shattered and fearful. I remember the day explicitly. Days later, more threats began to circulate online. I was at a store on the Saturday after the shooting when someone approached me, his face the kind of pale white of someone who’s seen a ghost. He said that he didn’t want to alarm me, but he had just seen a message on social media: a list of local stores that was being targeted for more attacks and that I should avoid them. These types of empty threats follow a lot of major shootings like this, but this was the closest I had ever lived to the site of one. The next few months weighed heavily on the city.           

        Months later, the Buffalo Bills took to the field and lifted spirits. Games would begin by acknowledging the tragic shooting. In combination with the usual string of violent crime, police brutality, and racist attacks, player’s helmets now read “Choose Love” or “End Racism”. But as the season continued on, December brought a historic blizzard that set records as the deadliest storm in the city’s storied past. 47 is the official number of deaths. Some froze to death in their cars, others could not get help from emergency services.      

        As a warm spell began to melt some of the worst snow accumulations, attention returned to the Buffalo Bills once more. On January 2nd was a crucial game vs the Cincinnati Bengals. Fans rallied around the team with a nervous tension. The Bills had been getting by, but that’s just it. They were only getting by. The Bengals would not be an easy opponent. In the first quarter of the game, Bills safety Damar Hamlin was struck in the chest by a routine hit from Bengals player Tee Higgins. Hamlin stood up, then promptly collapsed backwards and lied still. Medical staff was at his side quickly, and for an excruciating nine minutes, CPR was performed on Damar Hamlin.

         The game coverage showed players in shock. Audiences had no real sense of what was happening beyond speculation. They watched as players looked onto their unconscious teammate, then turned away with mouths agape and tears streaming down their faces. It was an extremely upsetting broadcast. Football is a dangerous game. This is well known. But never has a player so publicly collapsed and required resuscitation on the field in a primetime game. Hamlin’s life was saved on the field that night, as Bills medical staff managed to stabilize him. He was transported to the ER, and the world watched with bated breath to hear of his condition. Not even the Buffalo blizzard received as much coverage as Damar Hamlin’s recovery. The display of support as seemingly the entire country rallied around the young defender was uplifting. Good news began to roll in and the city could breathe again.

          This year, I attended two games for the first time since I was a child. The first was a classic Buffalo winter game in December. The Dolphins and the Bills met under the stadium lights. This was after the first of what would be Buffalo’s two major winter storms of 2022. This one swept through the Orchard Park area and left the stadium buried in more snow than they could fully remove before game day. Many of the fans sat in the white blanket of powder that coated the stands. On each Buffalo touchdown, handfuls of snow were tossed into the air in victory and gently rained back down. The second game was the first since Damar Hamlin’s collapse. With news of Hamlin’s stable condition, fans and players alike could relax, if only a little. But the nervous energy still felt very tangible as kickoff was underway. After a nearly poetic kickoff return touchdown, the stadium erupted in cheers. The game was not necessarily a blow out, but a degree of confidence was restored. And yet, here we are two games later. The Bills lost in the divisional round for the second year in a row. Last year, it felt different. The Bills had played hard and lost in one of the closest games I’ve seen. But in the 2023 divisional round, they were far flung from the Super Bowl favorites they were in the early season.

           Fan or not, the feeling in Buffalo these days is one of exhaustion. Buffalo feels like a perpetual underdog in the grand scheme of things. Neither the professional football or hockey team has ever taken home the trophy in their prospective leagues. The region falls to the same woes as many others within America’s Rust Belt: declining populations living in the shadow of long dead industry. Some days, it seems Buffalo has been and always will simply be New York’s “other” city.

           The region’s trouble’s are not new. Buffalo’s population began a steady decline after the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway, which rendered the Erie Canal obsolete. The canal had turned Buffalo into an industrial powerhouse. With the city’s proximity to the power-producing Niagara Falls, it seemed an ideal choice for it. Frederick Law Olmstead, the famous designer for places like New York City’s Central and Prospect parks, designed a system for Buffalo that foresaw a lush and expansive network of interconnected green spaces. Olmstead himself declared Buffalo “the best designed city in the country, if not the world.”

           Future designers did not respect Olmstead’s vision. In the 1960’s, urban planners thought up a road system that would cripple the city for years to come. The Kensington and Scajaquada Expressways tore through and dissected Olmstead’s utopic vision, allowing instead for multi-lane, gray pavement in the place of public land. Not even Buffalo’s waterfront was safe from such projects. Over the years, Buffalo’s major industry began to sputter out.

           Politicians waver over how to proceed. A plan was later developed and dubbed the “Buffalo Billion”. This proposal would see a billion dollars invested into the area, with the most money ($750 million), going towards the construction of “SolarCity”. The project began to falter and was eventually purchased by Elon Musk. In a shocking twist, Musk failed to deliver on SolarCity. Despite $959 million in New York tax dollars, only 20 percent of the plant is used for solar construction today. 

         The remainder of the Buffalo Billion was not much better. Corruption plagued the proposal. Joe Percoco, former Governor Andrew Cuomo’s top aide, was convicted of bribery in 2018. Later that same year, four more men were convicted of rigging bids. A federal investigation followed, and the Buffalo Billion became a shell of its former self. Any plans that had been proposed to do away with some of the city’s most destructive roadways also suffered. Those plans were left up for discussion, forgotten, remembered again, and then tossed aside altogether after Cuomo resigned following allegations of sexual harassment in August of 2021. 

          But just as the Bills remain a beacon of light, the people of Western New York now look to Kathy Hochul. An area native, she became the hope for many who thought that having a leader with stronger connections to Buffalo would bring about positive change. Following the recent tragedies, the lettering across local signage began to share a message: “We are Buffalo Strong”. It’s a common phrase that will often be used following a horrific event in a community. Buffalo is interchangeable in this case. But that doesn’t make it any less meaningful. As the focus shifts away from the Buffalo Bills, fans flock to the Sabres. The city’s national hockey team is looking like they could be a force to be reckoned with, both now and for years to come.

         In the same month of Cuomo’s resignation, Buffalo announced its first population growth in 70 years, largely in part to immigrants. A plan to remove the Scajaquada Expressway, one of the major routes that cuts through the expertly designed park system, was recently proposed by a planning council. The plan would see the road reimagined as a pedestrian, bicyclist friendly, parkway. A burgeoning film industry and tech startups continue to provide new jobs to the region. Preservation projects and Buffalo’s historic architecture helps to bring in a significant amount of traveler’s from out of state.

And as for the Buffalo Bills, there’s always next year.