After 24 years, Buffalo finally has a home playoff game — but Canada’s Bills Mafia are stuck in exile – Toronto Star

The snow is dancing and swirling and settling all around Paul Burdon. A freestyle murmuration of flakes that got more intense at some unmarked point a while ago and now is just constant, another part of this ever so slightly bizarre Sunday setting.

The two million-ish pixels of the TV in front of Burdon are working overtime to keep things HD in the middle of the January flurries. On the screen, the camera pans across barren sections of empty stadium seats and up to the Buffalo Bills Wall of Fame. It zooms in on a plaque dedicated to the 12th Man, the team’s army of fans.

“Bills Mafia is coming back,” Burdon says, to no one in particular … but the CBS commentary team for this NFL Week 17 meeting of Buffalo and Miami duly picks up the thread and discusses the Bills being granted permission to have a small battalion of their army back in the stadium the following week, just in time for Saturday’s wild-card showdown with the Indianapolis Colts.

“It’s crazy that Diggs hasn’t even heard the Mafia yet,” Rick Parnham replies. As if to double down on the impression that this TV is a two-way communication device, Stefon Diggs, the superstar wide receiver of these 2020-21 Buffalo Bills, makes a short catch for another first down. Fresh cheers erupt, not in the stadium but here in the backyard of Parnham’s home.

The Parnham family and its newest extended member, Burdon, are gathered around a 12-foot-tall, 12-foot-wide fibreglass Buffalo Bills helmet that has been transformed into an outdoor bar (more on that later). And while the Bills may indeed be reopening their home just in time for the NFL playoffs, this backyard in Keswick, Ont., fully 252 kilometres north of the stadium, will be as close as Burdon gets.

He is one of thousands of Canadians among the most diehard of Bills fans — season-ticket holders — who have stuck with a team that has spent the better part of the past quarter century as a sporting punchline. But now, just as their beloved Bills look good — like, really good — in securing a home playoff game for the first time in over 24 years, Burdon and the rest of the Canadian members of the Bills Mafia are in exile, stuck on the other side of a border closed because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The international nature of their devotion had never really hindered the Bills’ more northerly fans before the virus hit. Crossing the border was just another part of the weekend ritual, a pitstop before the real fun began on the windswept frigid tarmac lots at the tailgate. Later, usually after their Bills had succumbed to another defeat, the caravans would cross it once more and be back home in Canada.

The Bills spent so much of the social media age as an outfit better known for the off-field exploits of its fans — bodyslams through folding tables and all the rest — than anything that happened inside the white lines. Buffalo had just two winning seasons out of 17 from the turn of the century through to the 2017 season, when current coach Sean McDermott took over.

This season has been unlike any that has come before, though. Defeats have been very rare for one thing. But just as important, all of those rituals — fun, familiar, comforting even — were put indefinitely on hold. Put on hold at a time when fun, familiarity and comfort were needed a whole lot more than before.

“It’s been a big change for me,” says Burdon, a professional musician turned security consultant who has fit a whole lot into his 52 years. Most of all, he’s fit a lot of football in.

If one was to build an FBI-style org chart of the Bills Mafia, he’d be somewhere around consigliere. He’s been travelling south from Newmarket, Ont. since the late 1980s and has been a season ticket holder for almost 20 years. He’s a member of the Tailgating Hall of Fame and has the medal to prove it.

He is the travelling partner of the godfather of all Bills Mafia, Pinto Ron, and DJ at the Red Pinto Tailgate. And while he can’t match Pinto Ron’s staggering record of over 400 consecutive home and away Bills games, Burdon himself hadn’t missed a home game since 2002. Then came 2020.

“I lost a lot of work, I lost my music, I lost my travel. I’m very lucky that I met these guys and there’s that little bit of normality of being with Bills fans,” Burdon tells the Star. “And the thing is, this whole family, they know football. If I’d got here and it was just this pop-up tent of vacuous people who didn’t know anything about football, it wouldn’t be the same.”

Mere minutes spent in the Parnhams’ backyard is enough to rule out vacuity. There’s nothing pop-up about their passion either. The hulking, unique piece of paraphernalia that is testament to their fandom has been in the family longer than the Bills’ home playoff drought. The skies are sieving snow and turning the roof of the red helmet an icing sugar white as the family — father Rick, a teacher, mother Michelle, a florist, and sons Blake and Nick — all fill in gaps on how this came to be.

The helmet was born as the checkout counter of a sports store at Barrie’s Georgian Mall. After a renovation, it was put in storage on the mall’s roof from where, in 1995, all 500 pounds of it blew off and crashed to the car park below, almost killing a passer-by. That should have been the end of it but instead it was sent Rick’s direction, by one of his students’ parents who knew of his Bills devotion.

“I remember as clear as a bell. She said, ‘It’d make a hell of a bar if you had the right spot for it.’ That’s 25 years ago.”

It first served myriad uses: a sand box when the boys were young, backboards for street hockey, even a wood shed. But in this pandemic football season of new rituals it has finally found its moment. The Bills Helmet Bar has become a social media sensation. They even have merch. And it brought Burdon into the family.

“We didn’t know Paul until August. I was pouring out a coffee this morning at 9:15 a.m. and I looked out (the window) and I was like, ‘Hey, Paul’s here!’” laughs Rick, warming himself by a fire pit with the Bills logo carved into either side of it. “He just comes in, sits down and makes himself welcome. As he should.”

“If the Bills sucked as well, this year would be worse,” says Burdon. “But I have one joyous thing. Something to look forward to. Like I popped by yesterday, just to drop my beers off and it’s something you just have in front of you, that I can go for one day, for a few hours and don’t think about anything but Bills.”

Of course that’s not exactly the case. In this pandemic year, sports have indeed offered escape. But they’ve offered perspective too — on what really constitutes loss, for instance.

During a break in play, Michelle mentions that her mother is a resident of a long-term-care home. The sector has borne a tragic, shameful brunt of the pandemic toll in the province with over 60 per cent of Ontario’s 4,767 deaths coming in care homes. Mercifully, Michelle’s mother’s facility in Richmond Hill has avoided the worst so far. Yet concern is a constant.

Concern is also the reason why in spite of all of the historic pull of Saturday’s wild-card clash against the Colts — the Bills’ first playoff game on home turf since December 1996 — Burdon couldn’t countenance bending the rules to be there. New York state is allowing 6,700 fans to attend and while crossing a land border into the U.S. is not an option, flying in remains viable.

“I do have business clients in the States, and because I’m in the security industry I could go down there and I could get tickets for the game,” he says. “But it’s not worth it for me. My parents are 85 and they live with me. It’s not worth it to put them at any sort of risk.

“I live right around the corner from South Lake Hospital in Newmarket and I understand. We all gotta chip in and do what we gotta do. This is me playing my part.”

Other members of the estimated 3,000 Mafia season-ticket holders across the province are playing their part too — much as it pains them.

Down in Fort Erie, Leah Davidson grew up with the Bills. Her father Daryl Havill would have it no other way, packing up the RV and making the very short hop across the Niagara River back in the ’90s. Leah has had her own season tickets since 2008, and the family has upgraded to a full-sized bus that ferries anywhere from 20 to 30 people across.

The sense of community and the September reunions at home openers kept Davidson coming back, even when matters on-field would give her second thoughts.

“There were some years when there were questions,” she admits. “You look at the record and remember the bad games and you ask yourselves, ‘Do we go and get these season tickets again?’ And it’s always yes. I said, ‘I am not giving up these tickets until we get a home playoff game.’ And now … here we are. And I can’t get over there.”

Davidson, who owns a physiotherapy clinic in Fort Erie, had instead spent the early weeks of the season recreating some of the atmosphere with outdoor viewing parties, but as restrictions tightened in the second wave it was time for another new ritual.

“In 12 years or even more, we had never watched a Bills game on TV at home, just my husband and I. Until now,” she laughs. “You are so happy that they are doing so well, but then each time there’s a bit of you that just goes, ‘Arghhh, it’s so close.’”

Sparked by Diggs and irrepressible quarterback Josh Allen, the Bills’ explosive offence led to a 13-3 regular season, good for the second seed in the AFC. They won nine of their last 10 and scored a franchise record 501 points. As exhilarating as they’ve been to watch on TV, their red-hot form has made missing out on seeing them in the flesh all the more painful.

“If they were sh– you’d be like, ‘Oh well … can’t get there, that sucks,’” says Jason Tangorra, another Mafia member from Brantford, Ont. “But the irony of this team being the best in just such a long time has Bills fans thinking ‘go figure!’”

Tangorra is a real estate broker and has been a season-ticket holder for six of the last seven years.

“I took a break in 2018. The team disappointed us, after the (January) playoff loss in Jacksonville. It was my first playoff. I had actually driven down there, 21 hours straight, saw them score three points and then we drove right back.”

And yet that playoff experience didn’t put Tangorra off exploring another epic journey this weekend, before thinking the better of it.

“I was thinking, for the wild-card game, if we take the helicopter the snowbirds have been using over from the Canadian side of the border in Niagara. It was $1,200 for three people,” he laughs. “When you’re a fan of something as wildly as we are about the Bills, you’re willing to go to extremes.”

Back in Keswick, it feels as though extremes have long since been taken for granted. Six grown adults are huddled outdoors in the Canadian winter around a giant red helmet for crying out loud.

But perhaps not everything is taken for granted.

As the snow piles up on the backs of chairs and in the little folds of hoodies and toques, eyes rarely shift from the screen. Allen fires another arrow to wide receiver John Brown and the Bills, those same longtime punchline Buffalo Bills, are 28-6 up on the Dolphins before halftime.

“This is … not normal?” ponders Blake Parnham.

“None of this …” says Burdon in a knowing tone — that of, well, a consigliere. “None of this is normal.”

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