The Buffalo Bills
From 1991 to 1994 the Buffalo Bills played in four straight Super Bowls, a feat no other team has matched in the fifty-six year history of the event. They lost every one of them.
The first was the closest, With eight seconds left in the game and down 20-19 against the New York Giants, the Bills made a first down in Giants territory. They had time for one more play and went for a field goal. A successful kick would put them ahead 22-20, and a few more seconds would have ticked off the clock. The Giants would then get the ball with time for one play to make a touchdown starting from deep in their own territory. Not impossible, but highly unlikely.
The Bills’ field goal kicker, Scott Norwood, kicked the ball far and high enough, but it skewed right of the goal post, and that was that. The Bills haven’t been back to the Super Bowl since 1994.
Grief rubs shoulders with other experiences, including failure, for individuals, communities, and beyond. The Bills and their Super Bowl losses, especially 1991, might not rank high on a list of types of grief events but grief is there, linked with failure. My modest sorrow for Norwood, Bills’ fans, and Buffalo is spiced by my conviction that failure is a richer experience than success. It sticks deeper. It links us to the rest of the losers, most of us at different points in our lives. It forces us to confront who and what we are and can make us better, stronger, if it doesn’t beat us up so badly we give up.
There’s something else, too, not particular to grief but often associated with it, and that is the story behind the story. I didn’t watch the 1991 Super Bowl but my impression, based on what I heard and a quick read of the sports pages, was that a successful field goal attempt was pretty much a done deal, and Norwood choked. I needed to check that out, though.
I went to YouTube and was shocked by what I saw. Norwood was kicking from almost half the length of the football field, a distance at the upper limit of his reach. A field goal here was anything but a gimme.
His teammates and Bills fans, especially Buffalonians, were gracious, but all you need to be is a human being to know that their sense of failure and grief fell heavily on Norwood’s shoulders. At the 1992, 1993, and 1994 Super Bowls, which the Bills lost by wide margins, they and their fans must have sensed the hand of fate moving across the field in the form of a football heading straight and true for the goalpost, and skewing right at the last moment.
Last year it looked as though the Bills might finally make it back to the Super Bowl, twenty-eight years after their last appearance. They didn’t. But if they ever do, I’ll watch the game from start to finish, and at the end I’ll raise a glass to the Bills, to Buffalo city of my birth, and to Scott Norwood, win or lose.
Nice, and sports are a safe place for vicarious experience, but I’d feel only a passing sympathy and fellow-feeling for Norwood if he weren’t me. The Bills were Jesse’s team. I thought I could get away without bringing him into this post, as he’s been anything but a stranger to this blog. I failed him. I took him to a place that was to be his way back home, and came back without him. Jesse knew we loved him, and that means a lot. But we failed him, and we grieve as we go on. Scratch the surface of a life’s work and you’ll find a back story. And a desire to make things better.
