I come from a land of snow and steel, a place whose culture is condensed to fried poultry by outsiders, and a place where football teams are elevated to symbols of regional virility.
I come from Buffalo, N.Y.
Being born to a small town near Buffalo in the late 1980s meant one thing—when Hank Williams Jr. asked if I was ready for some football I sure as hell better say yes. The Buffalo Bills were in their heyday—four consecutive Super Bowl appearances were just over the horizon—and the city was frenzied. Red, white and blue zubaz pants covered thousands of legs and crew neck sweatshirts emblazoned with cartoonish helmets flew off the racks of the Bon-Ton.
For a moment in the early ’90s, the city of Buffalo forgot it was still in decline.
Then the Bills lost. Then they lost again, and again, and again.
I think that’s when something broke in Buffalo. Whatever sort of regional sanity we still had a grasp on after losing our industry to outsourcing in the mid-1900s was shattered. In short, we all went nuts.
My youth was defined by a city that elevated sports stars to regional saviors. Pray to the altars of Jim Kelly, Thurman Thomas, Doug Flutie, Drew Bledsoe and Terrell Owens and we might wake up to find our population hasn’t halved since 1960 and our manufacturing jobs never cratered.
This belief is unspoken, irrational and, most of all, sad. So am I crazy for buying into it?
Reading an old magazine article about LeBron James leaving Cleveland recently left me fired up. The Whore of Akron. How could he? That city needed him. What else do they have?
Cleveland is Buffalo. Detroit is Buffalo. We’ll all figure out a way to reinvent ourselves sooner or later.
But in the meantime, we’ll keep clinging to our sports stars. It’s all we know.
rlaforme@mail.usf.edu
