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Traveling #Billsmafia Have Become A Scourge – Week 1 @ Jets

An odd little cultural phenomenon.

Buffalo Bills famous bowling ball
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ASTORIA, New York- I made a list recently stating the five reasons why I set up a base of operations in New York City. I tried not to mention a certain sixth reason but a reader quickly called me out:

Me thinks thar be 6 reasons ……. and the 6th. reason is a vary important one….

Buffalo BILLS…….

He was right. Here’s the thing: when I was making my decision of where to go next I was well aware of the fact that the Bills play back-to-back games in New York City New Jersey to open the season. So that meant I could easily make at least two away games … plus being only 400 miles from Orchard Park meant that I could easily go to all the home games … plus having easy access to two major airports meant that I could easily get to even more away games … You see where this is going.

I’ve debated whether I will write about football this year. These posts seem oddly placed in a publication about travel. I initially found this topic relevant to this blog because if you’re talking about travel you’re inherently also talking about culture, and the culture of the place where I grew up and how I interact with it is a fundamental a part of this story. To put it simply, there are not many other segues into WNY culture.

It’s not often in travel when you have the opportunity to deeply connect with your roots — almost by definition. But, to be honest, it’s not often when you have the opportunity deeply connect with groups of people at all. Sure, you make a lot of friends and ask a lot of questions, but the depth of these engagements are often conspicuously superficial. But spending time with YOUR people in situations where you are, for once, not the Other, where the culture is your culture is really something special after you’ve been wandering around the planet for decades. When you’re in your own realm you can watch someone jump off the back of a pickup truck, slamming their body through a folding table and you don’t have to ask why.

I’ve written about the past few football seasons, but have started feeling as if I may have used up my equity with this topic. These posts don’t perform well and they kind of bugger the “image” of the site — and I think they bore people. They’re not really good for business. Shouldn’t I be off in no-mans-land writing about Kazakhs or something? Yes. But for three months a year I do something a little different. And this is what the traveling life is ultimately all about: doing what you want, going where you want, when you want to. Anyone who governs themselves by outside rules and expectations doesn’t truly understand the fundamental premise of the profession.

Read our Buffalo Bills archive here.

However, something has begun happening over the years that I have been more acutely complying with my childhood psychosis: following this football team has become a weird sort of a communal travel experience… dare I say, sort of Grateful Dead like. Each away game thousands of people get together and migrate out to wherever it’s being played. They party for two days straight and return home and tell tales of the good times … as the word spreads. The next game, the next season more people travel out and the movement grows. Then big media reacts and we get all proud of ourselves:

Or this:

The object is, to put it bluntly, to take over their stadium. We want every game to be like a home game. What’s amazing is that the players respond. They jump around and pump up the crowd in another team’s stadium, which is probably the ultimate F-you.

But let’s put this in perspective:

There’s only 256,000 people in Buffalo, 208,000 people in Rochester, and a meager 2.8 million people in the entire Western New York region … but somehow this swath of the country produces enough people who find it worth it to travel hundreds of miles to football games that they come close to matching the local fans. There’s 23.6 million people in the NYC metropolitan area.

It’s just a different culture surrounding the game between Buffalo and NYC. In NYC football is just another form of entertainment, on par with other sports or going to the theater or going to see a movie. You show up, experience the event, and go home. In Western New York, the allegiance to football isn’t really about football — the game itself is more or less just an excuse for something far bigger and more important:

It’s something highly ritualistic, completely unique, and … totally, absolutely off the hook. The space has it’s own culture, it’s own codes of behavior, it’s own mentality. People from the outside only see people cooking food on saws and rakes on the hood of an old car and morons taking ritualistic shots out of the holes of a bowling ball, but there is truly something special happening here. It’s the building blocks of cultural cohesion that American life is conspicuously devoid of.

For most other cities, tailgating means drinking a couple beers with a few of your friends for an hour or two before the game. In WNY, the party starts the day before game time. People go out to the stadium in Orchard Park and camp out for the night before home games, we start drinking in bars on Saturday for road games… and keep it going until late Sunday night.

It’s a little absurd if you just look at it superficially: grown men and women investing so much time and money into a recreational event that ultimately has little to do with them. But if you look at most cultural practices of identity, they all seem kind of dumb on the surface. I’m not going to go as far as to say that the Buffalo Bills are a way of life, but they definitely represent a way of life. WNY is a former industrial epicenter that economically collapsed in the 90s when the factories moved away. The winters are long and harsh. The people are heavily blue collar. It’s a culture of underdogs and misfits. People who come from places like this tend to be proud of it, and there is just something about watching people smash into each other on the football field, playing for a team that is a perpetually underestimated (that recently missed the playoffs for 17 straight years) that we simply identify with.

But the real essence isn’t really about the game itself, it’s about the culture that’s been built up around it. There’s kind of this familial, tribal feel to it all. You go out and spend a couple of days for few months with people who grew up near you who faced the same struggles, who like the same food and drink the same beer, who are wearing the same colors, who similarly identify with something as frivolous as a football team, and it makes you feel as if you have “a people” — a rare thing in this age of geographic and cultural disorientation.

It’s also just fun. I mean, where else can thousands of grown men and women go out and do shit like this and have it be 100% culturally accepted, normal, and encouraged. Take time off of work to travel to see a Bills game and your a hero here … everywhere else you’re an irresponsible jackass.

***
My best friend from home came out for the game in New Jersey this past weekend. He showed up on Thursday morning and we just went around the city having a good time, talking about things from the past, making new memories, sharing experience. The game was the reason but not the purpose.

Filed under: Buffalo Bills, New York City, Sports

About the Author:

I am the founder and editor of Vagabond Journey. I’ve been traveling the world since 1999, through 91 countries. I am the author of the book, Ghost Cities of China and have written for The Guardian, Forbes, Bloomberg, The Diplomat, the South China Morning Post, and other publications. has written 3694 posts on Vagabond Journey. Contact the author.

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VBJ is currently in: New York City

8 comments… add one

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  • Trevor September 13, 2019, 9:46 am

    Hey dude i like reading ur Bills stories even if i have no interest in football (soccer or footie) per se

    Its reading about what u do and think!!

    Bought a proper camera. Lol a TZ 70 lumix. Lots of stuff to learn.. after 4 years of using only a smart phone it sure feels weird.

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    • Wade Shepard September 13, 2019, 2:09 pm

      Thanks man!

      Excellent call on the camera: low cost, high quality, and small. Now make sure you shoot manually with it 🙂

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  • Michael Cummiskey September 13, 2019, 10:54 am

    Wade, please don’t stop writing about the football games. I for one, enjoy them not because i’m a big football fan, but because i get to experience a bit of the Bills Mafia 🙂 And i have to admit, when i check the scores on Monday morning, I’m always looking for the Bills game first and that never used to happen before your blogs. I also have to admit when i saw they won against the Jets last weekend I had a feeling i knew what you were doing at that moment.. keep the commentary coming when you feel the urge.

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    • Wade Shepard September 13, 2019, 2:22 pm

      That’s cool! You should come up for a game sometime. It’s really something incredible.

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  • Lawrence September 14, 2019, 1:48 am

    Wow, if I knew NFL fans went around the country chomping LSD, I would have been a fan a long time ago.

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    • Wade Shepard September 14, 2019, 10:26 am

      Only if LSD stands for Labatts Super Drunk haha…

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  • Jack September 16, 2019, 12:19 am

    If I could just dig down deep enough, maybe I could find a way to friggin care less about football. I read the article for the insight into the culture, but I find American football to be the most boringly ridiculous sport out there. I really can’t understand why Americans like it so much, but after reading your insight, maybe I can understand why.

    Anyways this is your site so you can right about anything you want to and if anyone has a problem they can bugger off.

    The only joy I get from football when I am in the US is when the home team in the area loses. I happen to be in Minneapolis area now so I had fun telling people tonight : How about them Vikings? They found another way to lose!

    After checking the scores of the Bills vs Giants tonight, I will just not broach that subject. 🙂 There will be time in the future for them to disappoint. Lol

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    • Wade Shepard September 16, 2019, 10:25 am

      Football is a lot like watching chess. You have to really understand the nuances of it to get the most out of it. If I watched chess I would be like, “Man, this is some boring crap,” but yet you see thousands of people going to watch chess matches and in some places there are big crowds around chess being played in parks or in the streets. It’s a super-cerebral game: formations, players, one group of coaches trying to outsmart another group with live game pieces on the field, players applying massive amounts of research to what’s happening in front of them and coordinating with ten other dudes at hyper speed. It’s a unique game because each play is a separate occurrence. The line up differently with different players and you can try to figure out what they are going to do and how the other team is going to try to stop them. Even what the big linemen up front do is super complex. There is just so much information being delivered on the field in front of you at all times that’s it’s a pretty enthralling experience. But I can understand why someone wouldn’t want to go this deep into it. It takes a lot of work to get the most out of it.

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