On a Thursday afternoon earlier this fall, more than a hundred people lined up at a gate inside the Nashville International Airport to board a flight to Buffalo.
The Tennessee Titans were playing the Buffalo Bills three days later in Orchard Park, and it was clear that many of the passengers were heading to the game: Several were wearing Bills gear; one man paired his cream-colored cowboy hat with a Bills Mafia T-shirt. As they boarded the plane, the passengers spontaneously started singing the refrain of the Bills’ “Shout!” song: “Hey ey ey ey!!”
A couple of hours later, shortly before the plane started its descent into Buffalo, a flight attendant announced, “A passenger has something she’d like to share.” She handed the microphone to a woman sitting at the front of the plane, who stood tall, looked down the aisles and led a beck-and-call chant:
“Hey ey ey ey!… Let’s goooo Buffaloooo! … The Bills make me wanna SHOUT!”
Then as the plane finally started swooping toward the Buffalo Niagara International Airport runway, a passenger encouraged others to look out the window. “It says Bills!” He said, pointing toward the current Highmark Stadium, and the under-construction future Highmark Stadium that is located across the street.
There’s nothing unusual about any of this; it has become the normal behavior of a Buffalo Bills fan. People spontaneously sing “Hey ey ey ey!” – and you better respond. Someone sees you wearing Buffalo-themed gear and calls out, “Go Bills!” – and you’ve really got to respond. Or you have to find the kindest, most empathetic way to tell someone that you’re not attending their birthday party, or you’ll be late to their wedding, because they – gasp! – scheduled it during a Bills game.
Being a Bills fan is a culture, and it comes with a code: a sometimes unspoken – and other times, loudly shouted – awareness that we share an unshakable identity. Buffalo News file photo
Being a Bills fan is a culture, and it comes with a code: a sometimes unspoken – and other times, loudly shouted – awareness that we share an unshakable identity. And neither snow nor four consecutive Super Bowl losses nor taunting calls of “Wide right!” to remind fans of the heartbreaking missed field goal against the the New York Giants in Super Bowl XXV will change that.
We convened a panel of five influential Bills fans to decode that culture and articulate the rules: Buffalo natives turned Los Angeles filmmakers Addison Henderson and Kevin Polowy, who are shooting a docuseries on Bills fans called “Just One Before I Die”; Kristen Kimmick, founder and president of the nonprofit organization Bills Mafia Babes; Del Reid, the co-founder of Bills Mafia and owner of 26 Shirts; and Leslie Willie, a co-founder of Bills Mafia and treasurer of Bills Mafia Babes.
Filmmaker Kevin Polowy talks about showing his Buffalo pride with care and caution at home in Los Angeles.
The excerpts shared here are lightly edited for space and clarity:
Being a Bills fan isn’t just a choice. It’s an identity.
Reid: People might live in Seattle or they might live in Miami or any of the other 29 cities, but they don’t identify with the team as a part of who they are as a human being as much as Bills fans do. For better or worse, right?
Polowy: Bills fandom is like an extension of your civic pride. When you’re rooting for the Bills, you’re not necessarily just rooting for that football team; you’re rooting for our city and our region and everything we’ve been through. That underdog mentality – the fact that it was one of the biggest cities, and it went through the collapse of the steel industry, and it shrunk in size, and it gets bad weather, and it’s a national punchline … This team represents our potential to be like, “We can win something – maybe – someday.”
Bills Mafia founders Del Reid and Leslie Willie. Reid calls the team “the glue” holding the city together.
Willie points to a culture more in line with the rabid fan base one usually expects of a college program. Buffalo News file photo
Bills fans don’t just view players as athletes on a team. They feel like they’re friends, even family.
Willie: Buffalo definitely feels more like watching your local high school or college team, where the players are just people that you know.
Kimmick: A friend (from Detroit) who’s been living in Buffalo for six years told me, “Players are so much more accessible to us here. You’ll see one of them walking through Wegmans. They’re always in the community, doing the work.”
Henderson: It’s like the Bills are all just one of us, even though they’re multimillion-dollar players. Drafting a quarterback like Josh Allen – who represents the city, who’s become such a megastar – that kind of represents the blue-collar, working-man attitude.
Don’t say goodbye. Just say, “Go Bills!” And if someone says it to you, say it back.
Reid: I say “Go Bills!” at the end of almost every phone conversation.
Polowy: The biggest faux pas you can commit is not returning the “Go Bills!”
Kimmick: I’ve seen it as a hello when you’re passing somebody and you’re not in Buffalo and you’re not at a Bills road game. I was just in New York City, and I was walking off the Brooklyn Bridge and a younger kid, probably 25 or 26, was walking with a girl who I’m assuming was his girlfriend. As soon as he saw us wearing Bills gear, it was instant: “Go Bills!”
Buffalo natives Kevin Polowy, left, and Addison Henderson are co-directors on the feature film about the Buffalo Bills, "Just One Before I Die."
The two were among contributors on a panel given a burning, if complicated, question: what's it mean to be a Bills fan? Provided photo
Never, ever say “wide right.”
Polowy: It’s a trigger. I lived in New York and went to many Jets and Giants games. I don’t know if they know how much it hurts, but saying “wide right” is the most insulting thing you can say to me in that moment.
It’s OK to feel a little audacious. Like calling ourselves “America’s Team.”
Henderson: The “Go Bills!” is starting to become a universal thing, and I’m starting to believe that the Buffalo Bills are America’s Team, not the Dallas Cowboys.
Reid: People move away for 30 years. They graduate high school, graduate college. They’re gone and they take their Bills fandom with them. They literally are America’s team, just due to the Buffalo diaspora.
From Jim Kelly to Frank Reich to the 12th man in the stands, Zubaz were everywhere at Rich Stadium in the early 1990s.
Those zebra-striped Zubaz pants aren’t just a Gen X dad thing. They are fashionable.
Reid: (Zubaz first became popular in the 1990s), at the height of the four Super Bowls, so I think that print somehow got ingrained into Bills fanhood, Bills success … Those anachronistic, loud colors stick around because it was embedded into Bills fanhood during all that success. That’s my theory.
Kimmick: Back in the (17-year playoff) drought, that was where you had the best shot at collecting your vintage Bills gear. There were dozens of pieces at every Goodwill. That was associated with the Super Bowls, but now that we’re good again, the cool thing to have is that vintage.
Polowy: I think we’ve sort of staked a claim over the Zubaz. I was at the Kansas City game and I saw two Chiefs fans walking in Zubaz, and I was like, “How dare they? That’s ours. We’re the Zubaz team.” Even though I recognize in the ‘90s they did make them for every team.
Willie: This is like a little embarrassing to admit, but I didn’t even know it existed for other teams for a long, long time.
Kimmick: Same here.
Polowy: People will Zubaz-ify anything: grill tools, crosses on your necklace. There’s nothing that people won’t Zubaz-ify.
Don’t schedule anything during a Bills game. Truly. Don’t.
Willie: My kids are in the Cub Scouts and they were trying to schedule a fundraiser, and I’m going, “Oh no, no, no. That’s the wild-card round and the Bills might be playing. This weekend is divisional …” I’m going through all the potential dates and saying, “You can’t have it on any of those days.”
Reid: A couple of years ago, we had wedding at 4:30 or 5 p.m. on a Sunday. The Bills were playing Miami. I told my wife, “I’m going to wait in the car. As soon as the game is over, I’m in there.”
Henderson: One of my best friends got married on the Sunday of the Baltimore game. We have this whole big entrance, and I’ve got the earpiece in and my phone (out). There are some photos and somebody looked and said, “Addison, is that an earpiece?” I was like, “Yeah, I was watching the game.”
Kimmick: My cousin was pregnant and due in late October. The day before the home opener, she went into labor and had the baby. We were obviously worried, but she said, “I can be really proud of him, because he’s not going to miss the home opener. We brought him in right!”
Being disinterested in the Bills is OK. Just be low-key about it. And use game times for solitude.
Polowy: My mom just doesn’t like sports at all. She doesn’t like anything that’s remotely violent, so she does not like football. I went home recently and she has the Bills schedule on a magnet on the side of her fridge. I said, “Mom, you’re a fan now?” She said, “No, no. This is just so I know when not to bother people.”
Being a Bills fan means bringing others in.
Willie: When I’m out at a tailgate, I wander a lot. I visit people at tailgates all over. People I don’t know, we’re fast friends. Everybody is welcoming anyone into their tailgate. It’s a sense of belonging and sense of community that I haven’t found in other places I’ve traveled.
Kristen Kimmick, founder of the "Bills Mafia Babes" Facebook group. Provided photo
Being a Bills fan means acts of friendship and service.
Kimmick: The Mafia Babes have a locked Facebook community with thousands of women in it. We’ve seen the camaraderie between them, the instant friendships. We’ve seen women become lifelong friends. We’ve seen women get married in that group. People have reached out and said, “I’m not in Buffalo and I’d really like this item.” Somebody will go out and grab it and mail it to them.
Being a Bills fan means dropping your differences. Because what bonds us is stronger than what divides us — even if we haven’t won a Super Bowl.
Henderson: No matter the political divide, race, ethnicity and all that, Bills football and Bills Mafia brings people together. That’s what sticks out. And all with all these characters we’ve been meeting throughout this docuseries, people give accounts of Bills football saving their lives.
Reid: The Bills really are the glue that holds Buffalo together. There’s a lot of different perspectives and mindsets; people are so different from each other. But the Bills bring it all together.