Erik Brady: Mack Hollins gets in touch with his inner Fred Flintstone and a Bills superfan rejoices
How the Bills' wide receiver happened to come to Sunday's playoff game dressed as a cartoon caveman.
Mack Hollins dressed as Fred Flintstone when he arrived at Highmark Stadium for the wild-card playoff game Sunday. What better garb could there be for a guy who goes barefoot?
Is that Mack Hollins or Bedrock's favorite son? Harry Scull Jr./Buffalo News
The Buffalo Bills wide receiver famously likes to use the tunnel at Highmark Stadium as a sort of fashion runway. Photographers are at the ready on game days to see what eccentric outfit he will wear next. He showed up at one game this season as a shoeless mad scientist. And last Sunday, his Flintstones getup made a national splash – People magazine, Yahoo Sports, Sports Illustrated.
What the national media didn't know, though, was how Hollins happened to come to Sunday's playoff game dressed as a cartoon caveman. The idea was actually hatched by Bills superfan Therese Forton-Barnes.
Tee, as she’s known, loved "The Flintstones" as a child growing up in Buffalo. The animated show made its debut on ABC in September 1960. That's the same month the Bills played their first regular-season games in the fledgling American Football League. (Its games also aired on ABC back then.)
"The Flintstones" ran on the network until April 1966. Thanks to the ubiquity of reruns, its main characters remain widely known all these years later. Fred and Wilma Flintstone are “the modern Stone Age fam-a-lee.” And their best friends, of course, are Barney and Betty Rubble.
Dinner with the Flintstones. Hanna-Barbera Productions
Fred and Barney, as you may recall, are members of the Loyal Order of Water Buffaloes. The club is for men only – talk about the Stone Age – though in one episode Wilma and Betty sneak into the Water Buffalo Lodge wearing fake mustaches.
Fast-forward from prehistoric Bedrock to Covid-era Buffalo. The Bills played the Indianapolis Colts in a home playoff game in 2021, when only 6,700 socially distanced fans could attend. That night, Tee and her friend Cathleen Hart-Frantz wore water-buffalo hats. Other fans asked to have their photos taken with the women in the fuzzy blue hats with the red buffalo on the front.
That's when Tee knew she was onto something. By the next season she had founded Water Buffalo Club 716. It even has its own lodge – the Big Tree Inn, where members gather for game day tailgating.
ESPN personality and former player Jason Kelce dons a Fred Flintstone costume before the Bills-Jets game at MetLife Stadium
in East Rutherford, N.J. on Oct. 14, 2024. Harry Scull Jr./Buffalo News
Tee and Cathleen wore the club’s first water-buffalo hats; now there are roughly 5,000 of them out there, by Tee's count. They are made by Stitch Buffalo, the textile-art center that empowers local women who are refugees and immigrants. (Buffalo News reporter Mike Petro has that story here.)
Tee and some other lodge members often travel to Bills road games. This season, when the Bills played at the New York Jets on a Monday night, she made a hatted appearance on ABC's "Good Morning America." That night, per her suggestion to an ESPN producer, Jason Kelce wore a Flintstone outfit with a water-buffalo hat on the pregame show. (His brand is convivial caveman, after all.)
Which brings us to last week, when Tee had a thunderbolt of an idea. (We would say it was eureka moment, except this one was more yabba dabba doo.) What if Hollins, who would be coming barefoot in the bitter cold anyway, arrived dressed as Fred Flintstone?
Some Bills, including James Cook and Damar Hamlin, are members of Water Buffalo Club 716. She didn't know Hollins, so she left something for him at the team offices: orange tunic, light-blue tie – and, of course, a water-buffalo hat. She didn't know if Hollins would even receive the ensemble, let alone wear it.
"I was at the tailgate before the game when my phone started to blow up," Tee says. "That's when I knew."
Former Bill Eric Wood poses with members of Water Buffalo Club 716, including superfan founder Therese Forton-Barnes, holding the "Dabba" sign.
People magazine quickly took note. And the Bills themselves, on their X account, ran a side-by-side of Hollins and Kelce in their Fred finery. It harked back to that longstanding People mag feature: Who wore it better?
Therese Forton-Barnes has the answer.
"Mack, by far," she says. "Jason wore it over a suit with his shoes on. But Mack, he wore it better than Fred Flintstone himself."