NO CITY EVER HAS DESERVED AMERICA’S CHEERS MORE THAN BUFFALO
The NFL carries on toward the playoffs, and with Damar Hamlin’s condition improving by the day, a region battered by tragedy and despair needs a long-elusive happy ending: a Super Bowl trophy
The one-liners never were funny. Now they’re in bad taste. If Buffalo was the last bathroom stop before Canada … the town that thinks chicken wings should win James Beard Awards … the place to get divorced after marrying in Niagara Falls — it has become America’s profound rooting interest. As it was, bomb cyclones had brought deadly blizzards that exacerbated intense racial and class divisions in one of the nation’s poorest cities.
Then Damar Hamlin collapsed on the second night of 2023, which came two days after a house fire killed five children and not long after 10 Black people were gunned down by an 18-year-old white supremacist at the Tops Friendly Market grocery store. “For the future of the White race,” the sick puppy wrote in a note. So here’s a directive to all amateur comics: Buffalo doesn’t need anyone’s weak humor. Buffalo needs our support.
And there’s an obvious way to help.
Embrace the Bills. Buy a No. 3 jersey — Hamlin’s jersey is the top-seller across the entire sports landscape over the last week — and cheer like hell for them to ransack the AFC and win the Super Bowl next month. That would be the event that has caused Buffalo even more anguish, recalling those four consecutive losses in the Big Game in the 1990s. Sure, you’re excused if your favorite team is alive in the NFL playoffs. You’re also excused if football has left a nauseous crater in your soul. Otherwise, this is a time to find a place in your heart, as a tribute to the player whose heart stopped twice and lived to tell about it, and as an ode to the team and region rallying around him.
The Bills Mafia is happy to have you, though they might make you follow tradition and stomp on folding tables in the stadium parking lot. Understand that western New York generally is more dependent on its football franchise for self-esteem and national identity purposes — a “warm hug,” as one fan put it — than other markets are reliant on their teams. Tragedy and despair only have intensified this bond. The Bills are all they have and pretty much what they are, in a town grasping for pride and underwhelmed by entertainment options. It isn’t an overstatement to suggest no U.S. city ever has needed a postseason run more than Buffalo needs it right now. As we celebrated the holidays, too many of those folks were trapped in homes without power and stuck inside vehicles. The death toll has passed 40.
The romance, the religion, the tears, the warm hugs, the necessity, the desperation, the No. 3 jerseys — all were on display Sunday at Highmark Stadium in suburban Orchard Park. The Bills whipped the nemesis they couldn’t overcome for decades, the New England Patriots, and as Hamlin remained hospitalized 430 miles away in Cincinnati, 72,000 fans saluted him and worshipped their heroes in a 32-degree love-in. Perfectly — “almost fate,” Tony Romo said on the CBS broadcast — it took 14 seconds for the Bills to gift-wrap a bouquet for their fallen teammate, in the stunning form of Nyheim Hines’ 96-yard kickoff return for a touchdown.
“OMFG!!!!!!!!!!!,” Hamlin tweeted while hooked to his IV drip feed. “FREE HINES.”
And free Hines, they did, as the Bills trailed in the third quarter. He busted another kickoff return for a touchdown, this one 101 yards.
“HINES FREE,” Hamlin tweeted with six lock emojis, one for every point.
Earlier, he had written this, with a superimposed video of him emerging from the tunnel and waving to the fans: “GameDay .. Nothing I Want More Than To Be Running Out That Tunnel With My Brothers. God Using Me In A Different Way Today. Tell Someone You Love Them Today!”
Whoa. Goosebumps. Naturally, Jim Nantz channeled Augusta National — “Emotionally, it’s a Sunday different than anything we’ve ever seen,” he said. But if he wanted to call it an experience “unlike any other,” he wouldn’t have been wrong. The team’s general manager, Brandon Beane, had promised a memorable day in America. “It's going to be a celebration of life and ongoing life," he said. “This is not only going to be a celebration in Buffalo but the whole country, and I'm sure people internationally will watch. The hair on the back of my neck is standing up right now just thinking about it.”
My neck hair went haywire, too, as fans waved heart-shaped signs and the public-address announcer said, “Today, we celebrate Damar’s recovery, our love for Damar and our gratitude.” The Bills wore “3” patches, fighting through their fatigue and emotion to reward their fallen teammate and the fans who fuel the cult. If they had no interest in playing last Monday night, as Hamlin fought for his life, they were inspired beyond belief six days later. It helped that he spoke to the team briefly on FaceTime, then posted his first Instagram message Saturday.
“When you put real love out into the world it comes back to you 3x’s as much,” Hamlin said. “The Love has been overwhelming, but I’m thankful for every single person that prayed for me and reached out. We brung the world back together behind this. If you know me you know this only gone make me stronger. On a long road keep praying for me!”
Hearing his words, reading them, the Bills weren’t going to lose. “Hamlin! Hamlin!” the crowd chanted in the final minutes.
“That first kickoff, you couldn’t have scripted it any better, man,” said the team leader, quarterback Josh Allen, who threw three scoring passes. “You want the truth? It was spiritual. It really was. Bone-chilling. It was special. I can’t remember a play that touched me like that in my life.”
“It was electric,” Hines said. “I felt like he was out there with us.”
Yet one 35-23 victory, rousing as it was, can’t erase their trauma. The players and coaches will carry it into the next game — and into the rest of their lives — as a case study in coping. “I’m human just like anybody else. There’s been moments that it overwhelms you,” said Sean McDermott, whose strength amid unprecedented adversity should make him the permanent Coach of the Year. “Like anybody else, I need to be able to have enough self-awareness to know when I need a break and to know when I need to seek out a counselor as well. I think it’s important to know that’s not a sign of weakness. If anything, that’s a sign of strength. People need to know that.”
People also need to know that he cried, often and openly.
Pro football returned, as you knew it would, with teams renewing combat and collisions in a hopelessly violent sport. The TV viewers returned, too, as Nielsen was releasing 2022 data: 82 of the 100 most-watched shows involved the NFL. But unlike any league moment since long before every active player was born — the death of Chuck Hughes, who suffered cardiac arrest on a field in 1971 — Hamlin’s scare gave players pause. It wasn’t a vicious hit, by football standards. Yet he almost died.
“I think collectively every single person that plays the game of football has thought about something like that happening — but at the same time thinking that it will never happen to you or anybody that you know,” Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow said. “I think it was a big wakeup call for everybody that it can happen and it’s part of the game, unfortunately. There’s nothing you can do about that hit. That hit happens on every play of every single game. That’s the scary part about it. … Now, I think everyone has taken a step back and (understands), really, the kind of game that we play and how dangerous it is.”
“I’ve had tears. I’ve been mad. I’ve been angry,” Packers receiver Randall Cobb said. “I’ve been asking why, how. It’s real. We’re real people. I know we put a helmet on and we take the field and we’re like present-day gladiators, but we go home to a family. I’ve got two kids at home who are expecting me to walk back in that door. I’ve got a wife. … We all understand what we do to put our bodies on the line, to go out there and play this game. But it is a game at the end of the day. You don’t expect you’re going to see or have someone go through what he’s going through.”
Said Broncos quarterback Russell Wilson, whose performance struggles this season are meaningless in the grand scope: “I think people always say that they’ll die for this game and everything else, but when it’s really life on the line like we saw, and somebody’s heart stops, it changes your perspective that much more. Life is so much bigger than this game.”
Fears be damned, the playoffs arrive coldly this weekend in a Next Man Up sport. In an ideal world, the victory would give Buffalo the conference’s No. 1 seed, a much-needed week off and the AFC’s easiest path to the Super Bowl. The NFL, alas, is a complicated beast that must be fair when it, too, might prefer sentimentality. Because Kansas City crushed Las Vegas and finished 14-3, the Chiefs will be the No. 1 seed as the Bills — without the canceled game — were finishing 13-3. The AFC championship game likely will be contested on a neutral field, maybe indoors, meaning a quintessential deep-freeze team will have to settle for two home playoff games at most. The first is next Sunday against Miami. The Mafia already is tailgating.
The second, eerily enough, could be against Cincinnati in the divisional round. Because of the cancellation, the Bengals finished 12-4. No one wants to hear their gripes, but executive vice president Katie Blackburn and coach Zac Taylor weren’t happy that their home-field fate next weekend could have been decided by a coin flip. Joe Mixon even staged a mock coin flip after a touchdown Sunday, which wasn’t cool. A victory over Baltimore avoided that scenario, but if they beat the Ravens again at home in the wild-card round, they’ll travel to Buffalo. It would be one of the most awaited games in NFL history, accompanied by the faint dream that Hamlin could be out of the hospital and watching from a stadium suite.
Looming as a potential foil, of course, is Patrick Mahomes. His season has remained under the radar amid the travails of Tom Brady and Aaron Rodgers, but in his first season without Tyreek Hill, he has thrived as the presumptive league MVP. He never has looked more magical as a dazzling playmaker, dialing up a spinning huddle Saturday before a trick play that would have produced a touchdown if not for a holding penalty. His Super Bowl road was made easier by the Bills-Bengals cancellation, and true to the good cheer seen in his heavy-rotation State Farm commercials, he reacted thoughtfully to Hamlin’s plight and the Chiefs’ playoff outlook.
“All I can do is come in here and give it everything I have in the building and then when I go home just appreciate my family,” Mahomes said. “I know there’s a job to do, and you have to go in there and do it. But at the end of the day, you just want to make sure (Hamlin) is all right because that’s what’s most important.
“I’ve never seen something where someone had been getting CPR and stuff like that on the field. I don’t know if any of us have seen it. It hadn’t happened in such a long time, and you don’t think about that stuff when you’re stepping on the field.”
The Chiefs won with no problem after the Allegiant Stadium scoreboard flashed “Hamlin Strong” and each 30-yard line featured a No. 3, part of a league-wide initiative including moments of “support and love for Damar.” Mahomes wore a “Love For Damar” shirt afterward, describing the afternoon as “definitely weird” but also acknowledging that Hamlin’s public words heartened the Chiefs’ locker room. “That gives you a little bit of that final thing that, all right, this is what we are supposed to be doing, let’s go out there and give joy not only to us, but the rest of the world watching us,” he said. They’ll heal bruises and bumps and await the winner of what could be the closest game of the wild-card round, the revived Jaguars hosting Justin Herbert and the Chargers.
In a less complex NFC, the battered Eagles clinched a much-needed bye week and will watch the drama unfold with the rest of us. Brady and the 8-9 Buccaneers get an undeserved home game against the Cowboys, who are loaded with skill but also burdened by a gagging postseason history and an unpredictable quarterback, Dak Prescott. If Brady loses, will he retire and head to the bachelor life for $375 million in the Fox booth … perhaps with one of two Seans, Payton or McVay? Imagine if Sean McVay, less than a year after winning a Super Bowl at 36, becomes a burnout victim. As for Rodgers, he played his usual mind games after a loss to the Detroit Lions — a team he derides at every opportunity — knocked the Packers out of the playoffs. Will he retire or demand a trade, his best days far behind him?
“At some point, the carousel comes to a stop and it's time to get off, and I think you kind of know when that is," Rodgers said. “And that's what needs to be contemplated. Is it time? Also, what's the organization doing? That's part of it, as well. But the competitive fire is always going to be there. I don't think that ever goes away. Sometimes it gets transferred, I think, to other things that might not ever fill that large void. But I feel good about what I've accomplished in this league and wouldn't have any regrets walking away. But I’ve got to see what it feels like once I get away from this.”
More theater than usual is ahead through Feb. 12 in Arizona. But make no mistake, all eyes are focused on the Bills and the miracle-maker who remains in intensive care. Nothing has been normal about their season, from the weather issues that required prolonged stays in other cities to the horrific scene in Cincinnati. “I don't know what's going to happen the rest of the season on the field, I really don't," Beane said. “This is a group of winners, and I will forever remember this team, this season, the moments of it. I'm still hopefully optimistic that we can make a run, but I don't know if there's ever a team I'll be more proud of than this, for all it's been dealt, and we're still sitting here with a chance to still do something. So we'll see what happens there, but I could talk for hours about how proud I am.”
“How do I know that we’ll be able to overcome?’’ McDermott said. “We have to, just like we’ve done many times before, and this city, and the people of western New York that have dealt with what they’ve dealt with. That’s what you do. This is what western New York and the fans of the Buffalo Bills … this is what we do.”
You’re not supposed to root for teams in my business. I’m rooting for the Bills, and for No. 3, and I urge America to join me with an ample supply of Buffalo wings. It shouldn’t be a hard sell.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.