Field Notes

We never knew his name, or his quest, or even his exact port of origin. “I am from Holland,” he said, bringing a cliché to life by sitting on the tailgate of a pickup truck in a parking lot outside Ralph Wilson Stadium early Sunday afternoon, a brown bottle of beer in his right hand, his full beard seemingly extending from one of the more spectacular pieces of headgear you will ever see.

“Buffalo haaat,” he said confidingly in an accent of indeterminate European origin—which may well have been Dutch—as he patted an immense, furry, horned lid that recalled those worn by Fred and Barney on their visits to the Loyal Order of Water Buffalo lodge. “Grand Poobah, my friend.”

He did not say whether he was talking about the Holland that gave the world Hans Brinker, tulip-surrounded windmills, and legal hash cafes or the more local version, the Town of Holland, home to Erie County’s premier short-track NASCAR speedway.

Whichever the case, our suspiciously European, big-hatted friend was as close as Season Ticket’s team of investigators came to finding trouble before, during or after Buffalo’s 23-14 win over San Diego on Sunday.

Our mission was inspired by a report in the October 14 Wall Street Journal that described high-tech stadium security measures employed at National Football League facilities like Lincoln Financial Field, where the Philadelphia Eagles play their home games.

After discussing the text-messaging and paging systems that allow fans and ushers to report unruly behavior by patrons at newer stadiums throughout the league, reporter Mark Yost turned to Buffalo for the requisite counterpoint.

“One self-admitted laggard is the Buffalo Bills, a team that has struggled to control some of the worst-behaving fans in all of sports,” Yost proclaimed.

He backed up that analysis not with numbers or, heaven forfend, actual on-the-scene reporting, but with a single story told by the team’s head of security, in which a Canadian fan gets arrested after arriving on a bus at 7am and drinking so much that he did not remember being in the stadium.

Yost did make it to Buffalo a year earlier for the Monday night game against Dallas.

“It was, without a doubt, the drunkest crowd I’ve ever seen at any sporting event,” he wrote in an October 16, 2007 piece illustrated by, appropriately enough, a cartoon of a security guard tackling a face-painted, cursing, beer-brandishing Buffalonian. “Many fans stumbling to their seats just before kickoff were absolutely plastered.”

Another passage was even more shocking.

“Walking through the parking lot before the game, I witnessed a scene all too common at NFL tailgates: home fans taunting the visitors with four-letter expletives,” he wrote. “What made the scene here particularly appalling was the target—a family of Cowboys fans with two small children. And the taunt, repeated throughout the stadium by Bills fans, questioned Dallas quarterback Tony Romo’s sexual orientation (think of what rhymes with ‘Romo’). I wonder how the parents explained that one.”

Drunk people at a football game? In Buffalo? Now, that’s news.

Just imagine if a nationally circulated newspaper were able to provide such insight on, say, the catastrophic collapse of a financial institution after which it is named. That would be an awful lot to ask, though. Fortunately, the Wall Street Journal did have room to run two versions of what amounts to the same story about rowdiness at Buffalo football games within one year, rather than wasting resources by foreshadowing the stock market’s most injurious fall in eight decades.

Intrigued by Mr. Yost’s findings, we decided to conduct some research of our own.

Marty, whose years in the service industry have provided him with an innate ability to ferret out such unruliness, and I started at a weekly gathering in a motel parking lot near the stadium, where people were cooking food, drinking beer, and tossing footballs.

Then we ventured over to the Erie Community College lot, where people were cooking food, drinking beer, and tossing footballs. One fan walked through wearing San Diego running back LaDainian Tomlinson’s No. 21, which elicited, gasp, a chorus of light booing from a group of ruffians wearing Bills jerseys.

Thankfully, Mr. Yost wasn’t around to see that travesty.

We were disappointed at our inability to find truly horrific conduct, but Marty had a plan.

“The bus lot is the worst,” he said. “They come off some of those buses loaded—especially the ones from Canada.”

No such luck. We saw no mob attacks on fans of Chargers quarterback Phillip Rivers, no children being doused in beer or elderly women being obscenely harangued.

Just Hans, the Grand Poobah of Holland.

Of course, there were more than 70,000 people in and around the stadium, of whom 16 ended up in police custody, with dozens, probably hundreds, more assuredly conducting themselves like cretins.

We didn’t see them, though, so for the purposes of this column, they simply do not exist—much as the tens of thousands of ticket-holders who cause no problems whatever do not count when the predetermined storyline is how out of control they are.

Instead, using the Wall Street Journal’s methodology, we arrived at the following conclusions:

• The Bills have some of the most Dutch-sounding fans in all of sports;

• those same fans have an unhealthy obsession with Will Ferrell (Hans was wearing a T-shirt promoting the actor-comedian’s 2004 tour de force Anchorman);

• they favor very big hats.

We are not easily discouraged, however. Season Ticket will continue to seek out “some of the worst-behaving fans in all of sports” and report back with our findings.

After all, the Wall Street Journal printed it, so it must be true.